Some have asked me if I am happy that Poisoning Our Children is being published by my first-choice publisher in the whole world – Johns Hopkins University Press, the university that was my furthest dream for medical school. It is a difficult question.
Having lost Katherine, there is a very low ceiling on happiness or even enjoyment. I have purpose, and that purpose, including my surviving children, propels a certain amount of prudential self-care. But there can never be actual happiness, which I have certainly known. The moment I think the question, the crushing weight of grief descends.
There is a book by CS Lewis, the only one that was ever any comfort to me, and a poem by Wordsworth by the same title that captures this perfectly:
Surprised by Joy
Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind
I turned to share the transport—Oh! with whom
But Thee, long buried in the silent Tomb,
That spot which no vicissitude can find?
Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind—
But how could I forget thee?—Through what power,
Even for the least division of an hour,
Have I been so beguiled as to be blind
To my most grievous loss!—That thought’s return
Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore,
Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn,
Knowing my heart’s best treasure was no more;
That neither present time, nor years unborn
Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.
Wordsworth wrote this sonnet for his daughter Catherine, lost at just age three.
Katherine was diagnosed with leukemia at four and died at eight. And knowing how brilliant and full a person Katherine was, I cannot help but think that the daughter of William Wordsworth may have been equally brilliant, equally singular. Katherine had memorized every poem, every book she had read a few times over. Who knows who Catherine Wordsworth might have been?
These are private, hidden sorrows. It was a shattering addition of grief to me that Katherine was known to such a small circle, genius as she was. I cannot hope to reach as many readers as Wordsworth.
What I do hope to convey is the message that children are infinitely precious, absolutely irreplaceable, and that it is wrong to squander their individual radiance and all their familial hopes and dreams for decrepit, corrupt corporate profit.
