I was looking through some piles of papers looking for an itemized bill from the an optometrist visit last year and I found this notebook that Kraven left at our house two years ago in Lynchburg. Finding things like that feels like opening a portal to the next world. I searched the pages hoping to find some thoughts Kraven might have had. I had to laugh when the only page with writing on it were words of frustration. “I wish mye mom was nis” I know she must have been frustrated when she wrote that because the red colored pencil marks are deeply embedded in the page. Had she known I was looking for her true thoughts of her mother when she wrote in that notebook I know she would have been able to fill the pages with all the things she loved about her life, her family, her friends. And maybe she did journal. But all I have is a notebook I should have returned years ago. A tiny little snapshot of a momentary frustration. That brings me to a thought that I’ve heard expressed many times over which seems very insensitive. I’m an emotional writer. I only write when something strikes me. When I wrote about Kraven’s death, I was obviously emotional and I never clarified some things. First of all Kraven did not drown. When I first heard the awful news, that is what I heard. But not long after it became apparent that something else caused Kraven’s premature death. People have said (indirectly) “Why didn’t they watch her in the bathtub.” Which is absurd if you think for one second about how you bathe your children. I don’t watch my 6 year old in the tub. I check on him, and that is exactly what Paige did when she found Kraven unconcious. If a parent were to sit in the bathroom with a child who is nearly 10 years old bathing–people would say there was something wrong with that. I know that adults know better than to say something like that to anyone connected to Kraven’s family, but they apparantly don’t know better than to say stuff like that in front of their kids. And kids are honest, they just say what they hear. And guess what? Children at school repeat it and Kraven’s cousins and sisters hear it. So to answer the question that people are asking in their own homes, to friends, within earshot of their children. Nobody told Kraven’s parents that thier daughter was going to die that day. If they had known, they would have taken an axe to the bathtub that very morning. They would have put her somewhere safe, had all the bathtubs in the kingdom destroyed. They would have done everything humanly possible to protect their child. Just like you would, or I would. I think its hard to process a child dying like that with no explanation. And I think it scares us as parents to think that we can’t protect our children from dying. Not having control over their lives is a hard thing to get a grip on. If we can blame something, someone for what happened then we feel less vulnerable because we wouldn’t make that mistake. But tragedies are tragedies because we have no control over the overpowering force. It was just her time to go. All the futile “what ifs”, if they were played out I believe would come to the same conclusion. Not what we wanted, but what was supposed to happen.