Why Children Die

This is my re-telling of a story I read once. It doesn't actually explain why children die, but it sets it in the wider context of the inevitabilities of life. 

An elderly man lived alone in a small frame house in the woods. One spring day, with the sun aloft through the branches, he went to visit his friend. He paused outside the door before setting off, looking up and around. 

It was April. The days were getting noticeably longer; the air was palpably warmer. Brown leaves from the previous season still clung to the trees. Through them and around them, buds had unfolded into small, green leaves. 

His friend was a young woman of thirty-five. She had had a nine year-old son. The son had passed away one month before from cancer. This was the elderly man's first visit since the funeral. 

She sat on the sofa. Next to the coffee table, on the floor, there was an electronic medical device. It had a black tube, a black cord, and a red front panel with buttons under a rectangular screen. Next to a magazine rack, a stuffed animal lay on its side, one front foot and one back foot pointing up into the air. The atmosphere was a brittle hollowness carrying a heaviness that came and went. During the intermittent conversation, she made an expression that, when he was a teen-ager, he thought for sure he would have mistaken as pleading for an answer. He would have felt then that there was a satisfactory answer, out there, somewhere, one but for lack of experience or education he just didn't know. Now, even explaining that there were no words felt incomparably rote and shabby. Silence, too, had become inadequate. It was hard to breathe, but it caught you at odd moments. Not when standing or sitting there; not in the living room. Eventually, you stopped accusing yourself of not having the correct emotion just because your subconscious failed to have theatrical timing. 

A few nights later, back home again, the evening brought a spring storm that grew with intensity as night came on. At nine o'clock, the power went out. At ten o'clock, the wind was blowing so hard, the elderly man began to regret not having listened to the weather forecast and boarded the windows. Somewhere off behind the house, a tree could be heard crashing to the ground in the wind and rain. An hour later, another. Through the night, at least two more. No trees significantly large enough were within range to destroy the frame house and its sole occupant, but in all the violence of the weather, if the likelihood of being crushed to death could be rationalized away, the unease of some other calamity coming about could not.

In any event, morning came without incident. The sun was out; the storm had passed by to the northeast. When the man stepped outside, the ground was covered in every direction with twigs and small branches of all different sizes. Littered throughout were the brown leaves of last year that just previously had been clinging to the branches, and scattered through these was something of a bright green color that caught his eye: The recently-unfolded buds. Detached from their trees and sprinkled on the ground along with the ancient leaves. 

It was looking at the still so new, still-unmarred green leaves so discordantly scattered through the year-old raggedy brown leaves that the elderly man had an epiphany, not one of new ideas, but one of visceral understanding. Usually, in the seasons of life, brown leaves fall in autumn; some cling even as late as the following spring. But there are storms in life, and these sometimes carry away even the youngest leaves, those with the full spring and summer still ahead of them. This is how things are.