There are many more of us out here who respect and admire what you do - and understand how very dearly you are NEEDED by all those who don’t appreciate the sacrifices you make and the strength you have and the incredible gifts you all are - not only the community at large, but to the families who love you dearly and who wouldn’t trade being your children for the world.

This tragedy happened very close to me, to people I look up to as role models. When I read what had happened, at that moment I couldn’t imagine anything worse. When I read the comments on the P-D page… I literally cried. I, like you, expected a few crazy comments, but hundreds of hurtful cruel accusations…? Comments that people that busy shouldn’t have children? That they should have their son taken away “in case they do it again”, and then be jailed? That this is what happens when mothers try to have a career? That clearly, they were only working so hard because they are selfish ruthless brutes who value money and prestige over their kids - and that they deserve far worse than they’re getting?

Intellectually, I know that it’s a defense mechanism - and that the closer parents are to the edge themselves, the more desperate they are to draw a line between themselves and a real tragedy. But right now, I look at the hours that people in my field spend in the hospital trying to meet the health care needs of this community… at the sacrifices we make and how hard we push ourselves for the sake of our patients… and I hear the comments from the article echoing in my head… and I just don’t want to do it anymore.

I cringed at many of the comments to the post. Maybe this wouldn’t happen to any parent, but SOMETHING LIKE THIS could happen to any parent. You might forget to hold your child’s hand while walking through a parking lot, and someone backs over your child. Or maybe you left the stairs door open and your child, using one of those rolling walker-trainers, goes over the edge (this happened to a friend of mine). Or maybe, while you were in the bathroom, your child choked to death on a grape. There’s a thousand other ways that parents can get distracted such that they fail to protect their children. And I’m talking about conscientious parents.

The barrage of harsh judgment in the comments makes me wonder whether the people who were the harshest even had children. Some of them stated whether they had children, but many didn’t. Until people find themselves raising children in this crazy, frenzied world that requires many of us to attend to employment duties FAR more than we’d like, taking us away from our kids, they’d be wise to temper their judgment.

Until this accident happened (and it, indeed, was an accident), these two parents would never ever have been accused of being a danger to their children. The anger and the accusations are all based on hindsight.