No one knows how to react when their child dies suddenly.  You don’t prepare for it…because you never expect it to happen to you.  You don’t think about it and plan out the details…your mind never wants to go there…to that place…because it is too horrific to even imagine.  I wasn’t prepared…I didn’t know what to do…how to act…what to feel.  But several days after she was gone…when I came out of the immediate shock of it…I had a regret…of what I didn’t do.  I can’t go back and fix it…I wish I could turn back time.  Of course I wish it never happened and I could change it… that she was still here, laughing and smiling.  But my regret is I didn’t hold her in my arms after she passed from this life.

Oh I hugged her in the hospital bed…but I didn’t hold her because of all the machines and tubes…I didn’t want to accidentally disconnect anything.  I did rub her arms, hands, legs and feet…trying to stimulate her and just to touch her.  I talked to her…cried to her…begged her to wake up.  I kissed her hands…her arms…her face…and her lips.

After she was gone the nurse asked us to step out of the room for just a bit.   They unhooked her from the medicine…the heart monitor…the respirator…pulled the tube from her punctured lung and wiped the little amount of blood from her ears…and her mouth…where she had bitten her tongue in the wreck.  Then they let us all back in…they had covered her up with the sheet.  We uncovered her…to look at her face…to touch her and kiss her one last time….to try to get a grasp on the fact she was gone…it looked like she was just sleeping.  As the rest of the family left the room and it was just Bryan and I waiting on the funeral home to come and get her…we covered her face again…it was as if we did, then it wouldn’t be her under there…then uncovered her…back and forth several times…in our state of shock…trying to soak it in…to understand what was happening…it just didn’t seem real.  We did kiss her and touch her…but my regret is I didn’t hold her in my arms…one last time…like I held her when she come into this world.  It still bothers me…4 years later…I still cry and wish I would have thought to hold her…but you never plan for your child’s death.