"I Was Her Favorite"

 Brendan sat in his daughter’s kitchen, a cup of tea warming his calloused hands. Far from home, he had come to visit his daughter and grandchildren, and the conversation drifted back to his own childhood. The old man began to tell the story of his little sister, Sheila, who died in infancy in their Irish farmhouse in 1947.

 “What was that like for you, Dad? Do you remember it at all?” his daughter asked softly. “I do indeed, like it was yesterday,” Brendan said, gazing into the distance. “She was only two when she died. I was her favorite,  ten years old; she followed me everywhere, and I loved to tickle her just to hear her baby giggles. One Saturday afternoon we were all called into my parents’ bedroom, to pray the rosary, as Sheila passed away. We watched her die on Saturday,” Brendan whispered, tears welling in his eyes. ”We buried her on Monday....and then ....never spoke of her again.”

 Sheila’s life was stolen by a fierce bacterial meningitis infection that overtook her tiny body in just forty-eight hours. She was the second daughter the family lost—Sheila’s older sister, Bridget, had died of pneumonia as an infant before he was born. In the early twentieth century, childhood death shadowed nearly every household; losing a child was heartbreakingly common. Parents of that generation learned to seal their grief tightly just to keep going, carrying both the sorrow of the children they had buried and the constant fear of losing another.

Brendan’s daughter watched, stunned as her father’s storytelling cracked open seventy years of locked away sorrow and he openly wept for the loss of little Sheila. She saw the young boy he once was rise from the man he had become; a child who saw too much, understood too little, and bore it all in silence. She thought of the red-haired aunts whom she never knew - “Did she look like them?” she wondered, lost in the grief of what could have been.

 All seven of Brendan’s children (including his daughter named after his baby sister) lived to adulthood, and that fear of losing a small one became a distant memory for most families including his own. This happened because of the development and implementation of the childhood vaccine program, a miracle brought about by the suffering of families that buried their dreams one day, and returned to their chores the next.

Vaccines save lives.

Let’s not forget the lost babies.