This week, horror has made my blood curdle and run a chill down my spine.  Horror has made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.  And horror has made my heart ache. 

I am horrified that an innocent child, Leiby Kletzky, met such an awful, frightening, unspeakable fate.  I am horrified that one individual could be so depraved as to do such a thing to another human being.  And I am horrified at the thought that yet another mother has to carry that wrenching, knock-the-wind-out-of-you kind of pain at the core of her being for the rest of her life.  The rest of her life.  The pain might ebb, and it might flow, but its existence will never go away.  It is like a tattoo on her soul. 

Today I am fortunate.  My children are alive and well.  But I realize that all that separates me from these women for whom my heart aches is the randomness of the universe.  A razor-thin, split-second margin of good fortune versus bad.  And it is just too staggering to comprehend that sometimes life comes down to being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Or that sometimes, regardless that you have raised and taught your children well, a danger they were simply too young or too innocent to understand rears up and grabs them and pulls them into its depths forever before you even know what happened.  And the fact that you never know when and where tragedy will strike again makes me want to gather up all the children of the world into the safety of my arms. 

The loss - whether sadly expected or completely unanticipated - turns a world upside down, just like an upended hourglass.  The sand can’t defy the laws of gravity and so it must sift again to the bottom, just as these families have no choice but to go on with their existence while every fiber of their beings resists any sort of forward motion.

How do you live without your child?  How do you live without your child?

I might be more attuned to this than the average parent who has never experienced such a loss, because of my secondhand experience with it.  I know that accidents and tragedy don’t just happen to other people.  I know the stunned shock when a son, a brother, a nephew, a grandson is here one minute and gone the next.  And I know that the gaping, jagged-edged hole it creates never fully closes.  It scabs over and it scars after years and years and years, but it is always there.  And sometimes all it takes is a memory or a reminder to drift in on the gentle breeze and tear it back open again. 

The boys have seen the news accounts of Leiby Kletzky’s disappearance.  I wanted to shelter them from it but I didn’t, because I knew it set the stage for a more effective lesson than any lecture I could ever give them.  I feel awful to use the Kletzky family’s personal tragedy in such a way, and I don’t mean any disrespect to them or their beloved son; I hope he may rest in peace forever.  But we talked about stranger danger at bedtime last night as I admonished them to never, ever, get in a car with a stranger, and that if they ever got lost the only person they should ever go to/with is a police officer in a real police car.  I rehearsed with them different scenarios:  What if a stranger asks you to come help him find his lost puppy?  What if a stranger tells you he will give you candy?  Just having the conversation prickled my skin as if danger was right there in the room with us, lurking in the corner and waiting to pounce.  I would have loved to just avoid the conversation altogether but I forced myself, because this degree of discomfort is nothing compared to the alternative. 

I’m not a tiger mom, and I’m not a let-your-9-year-old-ride-the-subway-alone mom (no judgment here on either of those moms even though I don’t personally agree with their choices).  I’m a mom who falls somewhere between those poles.  But in the end, I’m still MOM:  the person whose job it is to try to counterprogram against all the evils of the world, known and unknown.  And I know that all the mothers of all the lost children (Casey Anthonys of the world notwithstanding) feel that way and do their level best at this most important job.  So, somewhere along the concentric rings of this sorority of motherhood we feel that ripple of sadness when a child is taken. 

I will never know how much last night’s discussion with the boys imparted on them.  And it’s something that has to be part of a bigger, continuing dialogue, not just a one-off conversation.  But beyond that, all I can do is hope and pray that they somehow manage to walk between the raindrops and dodge the randomness of the universe.  That, and hold them as tightly as I can for as long as I can.