Admin Note: This post contains sensitive content, including discussion of suicide. Please respond with compassion, wisdom, and respect.
If you or someone you know is considering suicide or is in immediate danger, please seek help from a trusted person, pastor, mental health professional, or crisis service in your area.
Weeping
On January 24, 2023, an unthinkable tragedy happened. A five-year-old girl, a three-year-old boy, and an eight-month-old baby boy were strangled to death. Stop. Think about that for a moment. Three innocent children died. Consider this: Who is the most important person in a child’s life, the one they run to when hurting, scared, or in need? Mommy, Mama, Mom, Ma, Mother.
The person a child trusts to nurture, feed, help, and comfort is their mother. Yet this is the very person who took life from them, not in a quick, easy way, but slowly choking the breath from them. The breath of life left these three children, taken by the one who had brought them into this world, whom they loved, trusted, and admired more than anyone.
I love children. I’ve volunteered for decades, helping, teaching, and playing with children. Now I’m a father of two wonderful girls. Since they were babies, I’ve held them in my arms, read to them, played with them, fed them, and protected them. I cannot imagine ever being deprived of them. I would do anything, including sacrificing my own life, to protect my kids.
Nothing grieves me more, nothing breaks my heart more than children being harmed. I cannot comprehend how anyone could purposely murder a child.
Media
I’ve seen bits and pieces of the news, the social media posts, and the arguments. This country is mad with protests. People are fighting over a trial. I cannot comprehend the focus. Three beautiful, innocent children left this world. Yet people are fighting. Where is the grief, the lament, the sadness, the hurt? My eyes are full of tears as I write this. Three children died. I weep.
Is anyone else weeping?
A Father’s Loss
I’m a dad. I love my kids. That doesn’t just mean I feel warmth and affection. It means I sacrifice my time, my money, my attention, my very life for them. They are more precious to me than anything else in this world. I could not imagine life without my kids. Should anything happen to my children, I would be devastated.
When my nephew was eighteen months old, he stopped breathing. He was resuscitated and helicoptered to a hospital in Chicago, 60 miles away. My mom called me at work. I dropped everything and drove to the hospital, my heart breaking for my first nephew.
My cousin had an eighteen-month-old baby boy, Shawn. His babysitter did something you never ever do to a baby. In a fit of rage, she shook and threw him. He died a week later, on February 24, 1994. Though I had only met Shawn once, I had held him in my arms with only warmth and love in my heart. His death was painful.
On January 24, 2023, a father lost three children. I feel his pain. I would be devastated beyond comprehension.
Does anyone grieve for the Daddy?
The Mommy
This mother tried to commit suicide. She was in such pain that she thought it better not to live. She was afraid to raise her kids and thought it better they should not live than be raised wrong. You can debate her sanity. For myself, I don’t understand how a mother could do such a thing to her kids and herself. I grieve.
My dearest friend committed suicide in my house. He had not properly grieved the loss of his own mother. He was delusional and paranoid. I had gotten him to agree to attend a day program for counseling, but then he wrecked his car. In the hospital, doctors convinced him to admit himself for psychological treatment. He left with a plan: live in my spare room and attend the day program.
I went to work. A mutual friend checked on him and found him unconscious. He had taken all his prescription pills. Doctors pronounced him dead on arrival.
That was over twenty years ago. Still, I can’t understand why my friend was in so much pain that he would end his own life.
Why would a mother kill her own children? Why would she try to commit suicide? I don’t understand. I grieve.
Fighting
Our country is so divided. We were the greatest country in the world. We were the UNITED States of America.
Although we were divided over slavery, the war and its aftermath created a new sense of unity. Before the Civil War, people often said, “The United States are…,” treating the nation as a collection of states. Afterward, the phrasing shifted to “The United States is…,” signaling a single, indivisible nation. It wasn’t easy. Decades of political, social, and racial struggle followed as the nation figured out how to live out that unity.
I fear that is all ending. We seem more divided than ever, perhaps heading toward a new civil war. This trial is a further demonstration. No one is listening. People comment without knowledge. Instead of researching the truth, we react. We let the media tell us how to think. We already have our preconceived notions of what is right and respond accordingly.
It breaks my heart that when children die, we don’t pause as a nation to grieve. Instead, we fight.
We mask the pain by blaming:
We blame the mother.
We blame the father.
We blame the medical profession.
We blame the justice system.
We do anything to avoid looking at our own hearts.
Are our consciences so seared that we would rather fight than grieve? What is wrong with our nation? We should have stopped, lowered our flags, and declared a day of mourning and fasting. We should bend our knees to our Creator and beg forgiveness that our country has strayed so far from our God-given purpose that a mother would kill her babies.
When will we weep over our country? When will we look inside and repent of the evil within our own hearts?
I grieve for our country, and I pray. Will you join me, or will you continue striving and fighting, further dividing our nation?