Say a little prayer

a post from Thursday, Oct 4 at 10pm

Tuesday Jensen, the jman , was two months old. Can you believe it? This requires a celebratory post, with lots of pics.

But tonight, as I look down at our son in my arms, my mind is elsewhere. My mind is with my big brother, who once held his youngest son Simon like this, and paced the floor, and rocked him to sleep, and counted his lucky stars that his little boy had made it. (Just like we do, every single day).

Because Simon was born at 26 weeks, and after surgery and months in NICU, Simon survived, and was 22 years old last Sunday. Simon, my nephew, was the first miracle baby in our family. Simons’ example gave me hope at twenty something weeks pregnant, that this was possible, that our gumby might just make it, and with that hope helping us, the Jman became our second family miracle. Simon’s miraculous existence was one of the milestones that gave me a lot of inspiration to keep going this year.

Today, Simon took his own life.

We don’t know why. Just a week after being groomsman at his big brother’s wedding. And my heart goes out to my big bro, who is driving back, alone, from the wedding, several thousand kilometres to the far north, my bro who once reached a big hand into a humidicrib to comfort his barely formed son and to encourage him to hang on.

This time, no one got him to hang on. We didn’t even know he was struggling. He was a young man who was hard to know sometimes, and hard to get a word out of, but he was a nice kid. He was my youngest nephew. I wish we’d done more. I wish I’d done more.

Simon’s big bro, who is overseas on his honeymoon, was unaware of this horrible tragedy awaiting him.

So please say a little prayer for my brother and his two other twenty something kids, and for my mum, who will find out in the morning when we all descend on her in one big group hug to break this horrible news.

Pray the jman has his A game on and brings his big gummy smiles, to remind everyone that life does have a point to it. Because right now, it seems pretty bloody pointless.

If you do anything, do this:
1. Send a prayer to my bro and his kids
2. Do a bit of an audit of people you know. And turn the ‘I should call’ into an actual call or visit or invitation to catch up.. Reach out to those in your life who are a bit disconnected. Find them, and keep them close.

There’s very little I can say about this tragedy that would carry the gravitas it deserves, and at present it is just words on a page, it’s not even remotely real. I reckon we all have some hard days ahead of us, but at the moment it seems pretend, unreal, ridiculous even. I’ve had horrible depression years ago, so I understand how dark things can get, and how these dark ideas can take hold and seem right, but I can’t reconcile this with living, breathing, whole-life-ahead-of-him Simon. We were all here for you, but I guess you didn’t know it.

We wish you were still here, and I wish you hadn’t cancelled on your dad and had come to the hospital to meet the jman. He would’ve liked his cousin.

I hope you found peace, mate.