How do we go to the annual Easter family get-together this year? You were our contribution to the parent’s grandchildren collection. Remember how all the children flocked to you.

The very essence of Easter. An innocent taken, but who is saved, whose point made?

Is the message I’ve since gleamed tainted by its cost? Am I just making good of a bad situation, or indulging myself that your demise purchased my clarity.

Your life, your happiness was worth so much more than my understanding of mortality and love. I failed you; you who lived for me.

Your smiling face, your watchful eyes – always looking to please. You trusted me, yet I was fallible. And because of my mistakes you no longer live.

That night, if only I’d been outside with Daddy, I would have caught you slipping out the backdoor. If only the backdoor wouldn’t have locked behind you, leaving Daddy on the outside, and me on the inside unable to hear his calls for you. If only, upon finally hearing his calls for help, I wouldn’t have screamed out before thinking.

Probably you came running back when you heard my calls. That’s when the truck hit you.

My caregivers made mistakes, glossed over them (sometimes blaming me), and moved on to better places, new families. I promised never to do the same. Yet here I am, and you are gone.

What dignity I now have comes from what you taught me. I will not succumb to the platitude, too often muttered in the worst situations, that Everything is Okay. It is not. I will not look upon a young life wasted and simply shrug my shoulders. I will not excuse my responsibility to care for that which I have brought about by dismissing it as Something which will take care of itself.