Holding our baby tight

A couple of days ago I noticed a friend of mine on Facebook had posted a link to a blog and commented that she was praying for the family of Layla Grace, "an angel being called home too soon". For those of you not familiar with Facebook, people regularly write "status updates" that may say anything from something about their family to what they ate for dinner. If you are friends with that person, their update will appear in a list that you see when you log into your account.

Anyways, for some reason I remembered seeing that link and yesterday while Emmy and Charles took a nap I went back to my friend's page and clicked on it. Then I sat there and read Layla Grace's story and cried my eyes out. She is two years old and has sage four neuroblastoma, an aggressive "monster" of a cancer, her family calls it. In late January her parents found out that the tumors were not better following months of massive chemo and a bone marrow transplant, but in fact there were more tumors. The doctors gave Layla Grace two months, but months turned into weeks.

I know people who have lost babies and children. I know people who have suffered other terrible tragedies. Just a few days ago two of our friends mourned with friends of theirs the sudden and tragic loss of their eight year old daughter (named Emmie) in a car accident. I read with pain about Haiti and the recent quake in Chile, not to mention the terrible suffering people here in our own country endure on a daily basis. All this to say, I hear about those things and I pray and cry and I wonder why. But for some reason, this story of Layla Grace has stayed with me long after I've closed the computer.

I cannot stop thinking about her parents, who are as I write this are sitting beside her bed at home in Texas watching her die. She is hours, if not minutes, away from leaving them. I cannot even imagine, especially after watching her suffer through painful treatments for nine months. Yet their strength and their faith they write about utterly amazes me.

I don't know, maybe it's because there's something about the shape of Layla Grace's face I saw in photos on the blog that reminds me of Emmy. There are a couple of faces I see her making that I thought "So cute, Emmy makes a face like that!" Maybe it's the way her parents have shared her story and the honesty with which they write about their precious daughter's struggle, I don't know, but I cannot stop thinking about this family.

Social media continues to amaze me. I don't know this family, I seriously doubt I would ever meet them in the future, but I have been thinking of them and saying a prayer for them since yesterday, not to mention following their story on Twitter. I don't "tweet" but it's possible to read people's Twitter comments (sort of like perpetual Facebook status updates!) and so I know what they have most recently said is happening. They mentioned on their blog that they first started the blog and the twitter page as a way to keep their friends and family regularly updated. They said returning all the calls and text messages they were receiving was draining, and I can imagine! But the one person shares the site with another person and soon they have over 25,000 people following their story on Twitter. That's a lot of prayers and caring people, for sure!

So, in this age of "newfangled" technology, I am moved in ways I couldn't imagine, hurting for these people I've never met. And I'm watching my healthy nine month old baby girl happily playing on the floor and I'm hugging her a little tighter.