Stop! by Leanne Herrera

I am the child's face in a world full of adults, that want answers to a test they know I can't pass.

I sit with emotions locked in a race to see the end of my pain, like a child in school waiting for the last bell to ring before summer vacation.

I am the dreamer that lives in a nightmare, where everything is going wrong and that only when I sleep do I feel the love and peace I long for.

In a world filled to the brim with people celebrating and happy, all I want to do is stand on top of the tallest building with the biggest megaphone and scream STOP!

I want them to know the pain I am in and to see who she was and how important she has been to our lives.

I watch my children crumble around me in pain and I can do nothing, because I am stuck in that same hurricane force tunnel of sadness.

You reap what you sow, is an old saying but I would like to know what I sowed in my life to deserve to reap the loss of two children in less than a months time.

I want to know what I sowed to have my car stolen, to lose benefits, to lose everything.

I want to know what I sowed to have someone siphon our gas while we are in the emergency room.

I want to know what I sowed to feel this pain.

The unfairness is killing me and I search my children's faces and know that I have no answer.

That I cannot wipe away their tears because I have not figured out how to wipe my own.

I feel useless and meaningless, unimportant and weak.

I want to scream and cry and bash my head into the brick facade of this house.

I want to burn it down and start over somewhere else.

Instead I am sorting through belongings and deciding which memories can't be saved.

I am sorting through little socks and shoes from a child that never got to walk in them.

Smelling stuffed animals and blankets daily to save her smell.

I do it all day every day for fear that I will forget what she smelled like and it is a memory I cannot get again.

That smell is in ashes now, in a plain white paupers box, because we are to poor to afford the lavish ceramic and metal urns the funeral home provided.

They were so cold to us, they cared nothing about the fact that we lost a child, only that their dime be paid.

There was no discussion, like we were not worthy of a discussion or of the compassion that one needs to show to a grieving family.

I want to yell that I am in my own private hell, that the sun should not shine, the world should not go on every day as if she did not matter.

I want her to matter.

I want her story told.

I am going to tell it.

Hell I am going to do one better than that, I am going to tell the story, push it, publicize it, even if I have to give it away, people will know who she was and how she was treated.

No one deserves what she got or how we all still have to live with it.