Bevan and the girls are here.  Holly is somewhere over the Pacific on her way to Tahiti.  She called me from LA while waiting to board an Air Tahiti plane.
Today I have been thinking about when Holly was four months old and had meningitis.  She had 107 degree temperature when we got her to the hospital.  
Her fever went even higher but the nurse would not tell me what it was. When I asked her,  she would only say, "It's high!"
"Is it higher than it was when we got here?"
"Yes," she replied.
I have never known such despair as I did that day and through that night.  Sometime during the middle of the night, I got on my knees and I gave her back to her heavenly Father.
I knew it was going to take more than the doctors to save her.  "I just asked God to to give me the strength to accept whatever was to be.
At some point later, she passed the crisis.  The next morning her temperature had dropped to 101.
That taught me the best lesson I ever learned, and I have never forgotten it.
First, I experienced a bit of that horrible pain a parent feels when he loses a child because I truly thought she would not live through the night.
I was shaking so badly that I could barely stand.  I was sobbing.  I was sick to my stomach.  
So, I can say to someone when he loses a child that I have felt some of what he feels, and it is horrible.
Secondly, I realized that our children are only on loan to us; they are their father's children.  We are but their caretakers. 
Twice in my lifetime close friends have lost a child.  The first was my cousin and best friend's daughter, who died suddenly from leukemia at Age 16.  That was so traumatic for us all because we took vacations together, spent holidays together, and visited every day.  Her daughter was also Kenna's best friend.  
The second was one of my friends whose' son who was found dead one morning.  He was 21 and died of a congenital heart defect.
I don't try to give people advice.  I just hold them and cry with them; but if they need someone to listen to them,  I'm an empathetic listener. If they need a laugh or a distraction, I can do that too.
I'm a good person, and I care.  I've always cared.