For Will...

Today I am so very sad. I learned this morning that a young neighbor boy (nearly 13 years old) who had been a classmate of my 12 year son passed away in the pre-dawn hours on Sunday morning. I actually saw and heard an ambulance arrive on their street, but hoped and prayed it wasn’t for him. Sadly…it was.

His mother shared so eloquently in their online journal this morning… “It is raining here today. It must be the whole universe crying with us as we write to tell you that Will died yesterday morning.” Yes…indeed we are all crying for Will...and for his family.

Will had been diagnosed in early December with lymphoblastic lymphoma. He had not been feeling well for a few weeks in November but his Doctors thought he had a viral infection and then the flu…it was a shock to everyone when he was diagnosed with cancer.

Will was one of those tremendously nice and likeable kids…always smiling, always polite and with a wonderful outlook on life. He was sweet and gentle and never seemed grumpy. He was an avid baseball player and fan. You just knew he would grow up to be a nice adult and a good person.

It seems impossible that this boy, whom we first met in Kindergarten, is now gone. I cannot even begin to fathom how his mom and dad must feel, because even though we weren’t close friends or neighbors, I feel as if we too have lost a member of our own family. There’s heaviness and emptiness in my heart.

Will was initially in my son’s grade when they started Kindergarten, but we decided to have our son repeat a grade because of dyslexia and as he was nearly a year younger than most of the boys in his class. But we would chat whenever we saw each other at school, at the bus stop or in the neighborhood and his mom and I volunteered for some of the same school functions and always exchanged information on how our kids were doing. I can’t even imagine…

So this post is for Will. In honor and memory of his short lived life, and for his parents and his brother, his aunts and his uncles and his grandparents and his friends, who loved him and will now miss him. I hope his parents find some solace in knowing that their young man touched so many lives and so many of us share a piece (albeit tiny in comparison) of their heartache.

So after school today, I hung on to my young boy for so many extra minutes and told him (again) just how very much I love him, and how very much he means to me.

Thank you for letting me share my sadness…