For Katie Granju

A commenter asked me the other day why I was dreading the age of twelve. I wasn't really sure how to articulate my fears until later that day, when I read the news: Katie Allison Granju, author and renowned blogger, lost her eldest son, Henry, after a drug deal gone awry left him in the hospital for over a month with brain swellings.

When Henry was thirteen, Katie wrote a piece for Andrea Buchanan's collection of essays entitled It's a Boy: Women Writers on Raising Sons. In that piece, she wrote:

I hope that the years we spent together in the warm cocoon of his early childhood offered him some immunization against the slings and arrows of adolescence. I hope that the slips of the hand that I’ve made in unearthing the man he is becoming haven’t banged him up or scarred him too terribly. Mostly, I hope he will continue to talk to me and tell me or show me what I can do—or not do—to support and guide him in finding his own way. Really, I think that’s increasingly all that’s left for a mother of a teenage boy to do.

It's exactly the words I might use to write about my own Firstborn when he reaches thirteen. It is, as she notes, kind of all any mother of a teenage boy can do, right?

Just a short year later, Henry came to Katie and told her, through tears, that he had smoked pot. Though shell-shocked, she decided not to make a big deal of it, considering it the normal experimentation of a teenager. Unfortunately, that is not the way things went for Henry. He went on to try harder drugs and ended up an addict as a teenager, and though he completed rehab, he was using again just months afterward.

A month ago, he was found unconscious and beaten, a victim of a physical assault and an overdose. And now he is gone.

If you visit Katie's site, your heart will break open in two. It's impossible for it to remain intact. Because Katie has posted pictures of a beautiful, beautiful boy on the verge of manhood and tons of pictures documenting his life, his childhood, and his relationship with his siblings. As I have written before, anytime a child dies, I think mothers grieve in unison. That mother's child is my child. Because that mother -- a mother who wrote a book on attachment parenting, for crying out loud! A mother who so obviously tried to do the right things, who loved her child fiercely! -- she couldn't save her son. We are reminded of how very, very, very powerless we are. It scares the living daylights out of me.

So tonight, I write for Katie Allison Granju, and I say: Katie, I grieve with you. I grieve the loss of your beautiful boy. I grieve the loss of naive ignorance that made me think, at some point, that if I breastfed on demand or read enough picture books or tucked them in every night or worked as Room Mom I could somehow vaccinate myself or my child from this kind of terrible turn of events. We're all vulnerable. Terribly, horribly, mortifyingly vulnerable.

And that is why I dread the age of twelve.