Tragedy Next Door

There is a tragedy going on next door. At the New Year the little girl next door fell into their swimming pool. She was pulled out by her father, quite blue, rushed to hospital, and resuscitated. She is not quite three years old.

Now, after lying in a coma in hospital for some three weeks or so, she is at home, but non responsive. She is no longer comatose but vegetative. This distressing situation was compounded by the arrival of their next baby, who is now about a week old. The little girl who fell in the pool is brain damaged and seemingly hopeless. This poor family is undergoing the limits of torture, seeing their precious child damaged but alive, non responsive, non comprehending, helpless. She can neither see nor communicate, her life has been curtailed, they are enmeshed in a situation that must be unbearable and they have a new infant to deal with. One cannot imagine their unhappiness; it must be despair beyond bearing.

Yesterday was very hot. I could hear, from my veranda to theirs, that little girl crying. She is being nursed fulltime by a qualified carer, as the mother quite rightly has to care for her new baby and cannot cope with both.

I do not know the family well but we have chatted from time to time. My heart goes out to them. This is worse, I think, than losing a beloved partner who did after all live out more than his three score years and ten. F was denied more of his life but this child, this little soul, is at the beginning of hers and she is condemned now to exist in a blighted state that will be a life sentence for her and her parents.

Her crying was an unnerving kind of roar; I could not bear to listen to it but retreated indoors. And thought, at least F and I were spared the tortuous rigours of his being a helpless invalid; we have something to be thankful for. The old cliche of counting blessings ...

It is hard to imagine that there are any blessings going on next door, apart from a new and perfect baby girl, but this in itself must be anguish; a change of circumstances in their previously happy family life so bizarre, so sudden, and so cruel it is hard not to question where God is coming from. Why should they be so punished? And what logic is there in the bringing back to life a child so damaged that from now on she cannot comprehend anything at all?