More on Loss

I keep remembering more things about that last day of normal. After school, my son handed me his papers, and on one of them (a handwriting sheet) he had written: "I am sad."

I asked him more about this, and it turned out that he had lost a tooth. It had fallen on the ground and nobody could find it. He was sad that his tooth was gone and that the Tooth Fairy might not give him what was rightfully his.

At the time, this was a loss that mattered to him, and so it mattered to me.

This morning I have been translating adoption documents, and in my current frame of mind what stands out to me is how much loss these children have suffered. Death certificates of parents, certificates of abandonment...it feels too much to bear in the context of so many children in Haiti who have now lost everything and everyone. These children, named in these documents, are so blessed to be being adopted by some of the finest people I know. What will happen to all the others?

These are losses that matter. Every life lost, every child left without parents, every dream that has died, buried under the rubble of an earthquake.

These losses matter to me. I believe they matter to God. I believe his heart is filled with pain, just as our hearts are, the hearts of all of us who love Haiti.