[disillusioned]

My wife had been pushing me to try for kids for, well, a couple of years, and I was finally getting there. I always knew I wanted kids, or figured I did, but then reality comes: can we afford it, shouldn't we enjoy what we have a little bit longer, are we sure we want to do this, etc.

Then, my friend messaged me one night and asked me to join him at the children's hospital to take a few photos as they were saying "goodbye." His 18 month old had been fighting cancer, and it was 1 in the morning and my melatonin-addled brain thought "oh, they must be taking him home."

It wasn't until I walked into the room with my DSLR that I realized what he meant. In fairness, he had prefaced the request with, "do you mind if I ruin your night?"

I am not even close to a professional photographer. But I tried to take as many pictures as respectfully as I could of the literal hardest moment any parents could ever hope not to have to go through. At a certain moment, it became time, and I found myself... stuck, in a sense. I was the only other one in the room aside from the parents, but I didn't feel like I could abandon them, and so I sat there as they disconnected the machines keeping their son alive. It was the most awful two minutes as the attending sat there with a stethoscope against this tiny chest.

I waited until an opportune moment, and then hugged them, quietly took my leave, went home, edited the photos as quickly as possible, uploaded and sent them, and then bawled for an hour or so.

Needless to say, this set back our efforts at even _trying_ for kids by about 2-3 years. Because I just was stuck by this all-encompassing thought: you can't lose what you don't have. You simply aren't open to that sort of vulnerability if you don't have children. It doesn't exist, until you form it into being. And that thought haunted me. Just like it haunts, well, every parent on some level.

And to clarify: this didn't even _happen to me_. It happened to _them_, and their son. But it was a defining moment for me that made it really tough to overcome.

Eventually, we did have two kids (after a miscarriage, of course, because isn't that how it goes), and they're sitting behind me watching a movie as I type this. But these sort of thoughts are always there in the background. And yeah, reading a story like this one about the flood just spears you in the soul.

[GarnetFloride]

Being there is a powerful and supportive thing. Yes, it is incredibly hard to deal with the loss of a child, we lost one, too. Having someone there is a help and a support, we didn't really get from others.

[disillusioned]

I'm truly sorry for your loss.

[lordnacho]

There were three deaths in my family over a 10 month period. Both my parents and my cousin.

I still felt like it was worse when, prior to this, I attended the funeral of a little girl from my kid's school. Tiny coffin, painted with horses. All the kids having their first experience with death. The impossibility of saying anything useful to the parents at the reception afterwards.

[sgt]

Miscarriages are more common than people think!

[jajko]

Sorry to hear that, no parent is unmoved deeply with such stories which just shouldn't be happening, but life is... life.

Its a mistake in general in life to get swayed and stunned by the negative aspects of it and be blocked to experience the positive aspects, even if some risk of harm is involved. Although some healing and reconciliation is required, no doubt there. You did allright based on your description. Trying to play the game of life as safe as possible ultimately means losing the game.

Life doesn't have to be always a positive experience, rather an intense one compared to keeping it always safe and ending up with meh story (and usually tons of regrets before dying). My philosophy only, but I really think it should be pretty much universal.

Also yes miscarriages are very common, we had one, and so did basically all couples in our circle in various phases. I take it as a defense mechanism of woman's body, figuring out it wouldn't work out later so aborting the mission (at least under normal circumstances). One was very brutal (in 37th week, basically a stillbirth and woman still had to go through whole birth process), a proper traumatic experience that leaves permanent scars on souls of parents. But still, after mourning one has to get up and keep moving even if feeling empty and powerless, thats life.

[binary132]

“Well sometimes your kids just die, that’s life” isn’t really the most uplifting response to that.

[jajko]

You want to hear empty phrases like typical 'thoughts and prayers' that help absolutely nothing and are overused to the point of losing any value, just so that writer feels for 5s better about themselves? Internet is chock full of those from all those me-participating-too people.

What I wrote is unfortunately true, and brutal. Don't think I didn't cry for those babies who never stood the chance, both ours and other's. But eventually you have to get up, the only other alternative to this is far worse. So I did, and so did my wife, and all the other parents affected. Life goes on and doesn't care about your personal woes.

We live in extremely safe times compared to how things looked even 150 years ago, 40-50% of kids didn't survive to age 5 and deaths during even normal pregnancies were very common. Go read a bit about that if you feel like I talk extreme or are an outlier.

[foobarian]

> We live in extremely safe times compared to

This sentence in a HN article from a day ago caught my eye [1][2].

> Second, between the mid-1930s and mid-1950s, the US maternal death rate fell by 94 percent, according to Sarygulov and Arslanagic-Wakefield. Early antibiotics in the 1930s, followed by the mass production of penicillin in the 1940s, “drove down incidences of sepsis, [which were] responsible for 40 percent of maternal deaths at the time, and made caesarean sections safer,” they write.

94 percent!

[1] https://www.derekthompson.org/p/what-caused-the-baby-boom-wh...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44572527

[binary132]

No, I merely want people not to be unnecessarily and unhelpfully “brutal” (crass). The fact that vapid aphorisms don’t add utility to the commons doesn’t mean that their mirror image does.

[throwway120385]

That's one of those things that's just hard to be uplifting about.