Once more, with feeling

I’m afraid that you’re either going to have to skip this entry or endure another very personal entry from me.

The other day, I marked the anniversary of the birth of our first granddaughter.  (See “It’s been eight years now.”)  She was our first grandchild, altogether, and she spent the entirety of her short mortal life in a hospital in Orlando, Florida.

We knew her so very briefly that, to my shame and horror, before her sister arrived I sometimes found myself forgetting that I was a grandfather, and that I had a granddaughter.  We knew her so little, and for such a painfully short time.

At least once a year about this time, I listen to a song that Greg Smith (I believe) kindly told me about during that horrible week, and that invariably brings tears to my eyes:

Craig Cardiff, “Smallest Wingless”

I’ve just listened to it again, and, yet again, it has had the same effect.

Every year until I no longer can, I will also post a link to the Deseret News column that I wrote, literally while sobbing — a response that I, for years a deeply unemotional northern European type, found quite a surprise:

“‘Through cloud and sunshine, Lord’”

When I published that column, I was amused — in a grimly unamused sort of way — by a couple of the responses to it.  My Deseret News columns almost always drew letters to the editor that attacked my religious beliefs, mocked my silly superstition and irrationality, criticized my church, and the like.  This one was no exception: Belief in life after death is foolish and stupid, religious people are idiots, Joseph Smith was an obvious fraud, faith is a crutch for weak minds, atheism is honest and heroic, and yada yada yada.  Finally, to his credit, one of The Usual Suspects wrote a letter to the editor in which he addressed his fellow critics:  “The man has just lost his granddaughter,” he said, in my paraphrase.  “Can’t you take a break from these attacks for at least a week?”  “Oh,” responded one of the more aggressive letter-writers.  “I had read only the first few lines; I didn’t see the note at the end.”  I was struck by that.  I thought it a very interesting admission, and I suspect that more than a few such critics very commonly do exactly the same thing.

Posted from Buching, Halblech, Bavaria, Germany