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5:15 pm, Sunday June 22nd

So. Right now I am fairly inebriated, and in about two hours I must sober up to have the most difficult discussion with my child that I can imagine. No, scratch that, I most certainly can imagine one more difficult, but we’ll get to that soon enough.

Terse recitation of facts has worked well for me so far, so here goes: A close friend of mine had a daughter, Chloe, about a year ago. Chloe was born with several massive heart defects, but was plugging along as best she could. Chloe and my daughter Penny were very close, despite the age difference.

This past week Chloe underwent open-heart surgery at Children’s Mercy to correct said defects. She and her family were staying with me and mine when they weren’t at the hospital. Chloe came out of surgery perfectly fine; ten hours later she suffered a massive stroke. About thirty-six excruciating hours after that, she was declared brain dead. Very soon thereafter, she was placed in her parents’ arms and the respirator was removed. Watching that was the hardest thing I’ve ever experienced, and she wasn’t even my baby.

Here’s another terse recitation of facts for you: The universe is not fair. The universe, in fact, can suck my balls. There is no fucking sense to anything at all. Be careful when you pray, because if you ask to take a measure of someone’s pain on yourself just to spare them, then G-d might decide to take your melodramatic ass up on that offer. And finally, if G-d exists, He is one inscrutable, fucked-up bastard, and there’s not much He can do to me that would be worse than living as a human on this earth truly believing that He’s petty enough to both create pain like this AND hold all the names I've been calling Him lately against me. Cocksucking sonofabitch.

All of that aside, this is what I found when I logged onto PostSecret this morning, the first Chloe-free morning that’s been since she was born:

My second-fondest wish in the world, right now, is for that to be true.