My 4-Year-Old's Death Is A Mystery. There's 1 Question I Wish People Would Stop Asking

"I don’t know why Jake first got sick. I don’t know why he didn’t recover. And I don’t know why he died."

My son Jake died when he was four. Fifteen years after his death, I struggle with how to answer the question everyone asks: What happened?

It’s seemingly such a simple question, one I might even ask when I hear about a child’s death. And yet, it leaves me tongue-tied every time and instantly makes even the best of conversations feel awkward.

Why? Because I still don’t know what happened.

I don’t know why Jake first got sick. I don’t know why he didn’t recover. And I don’t know why he died.

Jake was born healthy and remained that way for the first eight months of his life. He wasn’t just healthy, he was thriving – high APGAR scores, no weight drops and meeting all the early milestones ahead of schedule.

That’s why what happened didn’t make sense to me. It didn’t even make sense to some of the world’s best doctors. So why should I expect it to make sense to the people who unknowingly step into a minefield by asking that question?

That’s why it makes me so uncomfortable: I know where the conversation is going, and it isn’t good for anyone involved.

Should I just tell them my life changed in a split second? Should I walk them through all the details from the early morning of Jan. 21, 2007, when I first saw the twitch of Jake’s hand when he was 8 months old? Should I say that my husband, Brian, thought it might be a muscle spasm, but my gut told me it was more? How much time does this person have, and do they really want to hear it all?

I could say that we went to the ER, and much to our surprise, the twitch was quickly identified as a seizure. Back then, Brian and I thought seizures looked like they did on TV: a big, dramatic drop to the ground, full-body convulsions, maybe even foaming at the mouth. We never thought it could be a small, albeit rhythmic, movement of the hand.

At the beginning of that awful........

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