The Grief of Loss

My daughter has had a thing with loss for some time.   Things are gone forevermore all the time.  When you eat the ice cream, there is no more and it's okay.   When the toilet paper has run out, well, that's not as okay, but it can be replaced.   And yet for some reason when things are gone or lost that might have been able to still be an entity in my daughter's life, she can become overwhelmed with grief. 

The first time we saw this happen was with a rock in Hawaii that she bonded quickly with.  My husband threw it over the railing and back to the river when she suddenly said she had to say goodbye.  She couldn't part with it.   Only it was gone.   The grief from that lost rock was intense and went on and on.  To this day, she still remembers that rock she held for thirty minutes.  Maybe less, because it was set aside while she was playing in the water. 

We can take pictures and have memories retained in a way that my daughter can't.   That's not to say she doesn't have memories that are just as rich from her other senses.   But she's also dealing with the loss of her vision as a whole.   And there is some connection with the two, Dhruti has said. 

My daughter had asked for a very large 3D printed egg.   I think she'd forgotten, but I'd been working on it.   Large models take a long time to print but I'd gotten the first half completed.   The top failed about thirty percent in, finishing up with a stringy mess of filament until I came in and stopped the print.  

When my daughter asked tonight about the egg she was happy to feel the lower half and then intrigued with the failed upper half.   Could she tear the stringy bits off it?  I told her she could.  Once she had the top cleaned up she decided it was a hat and walked around with it for about ten minutes, playing with it this way and that.  

Then she asked if she could break it?  I said she could do anything she wanted with it.   So she sat on it.   She got a satisfying crunch as the bottom dropped out, leaving a big hole where the top of the egg would have been once the model had finished being printed and rotated right side up. 

Suddenly my daughter realized what she'd done.   She'd broken her hat.   She almost immediately got very upset.  It wasn't fake emotions, these were real grief tears.   She begged me to fix it and I said we'd print a new one.   No, this was the one and it had to be fixed. 

I got out the 3D pen on her suggestion and patched the broken egg up.   She became calm and normalized again.   I never know when the grief of loss will strike.   This time it was easy to fix. 

The Big Boy Update:  My son had his first class at Code Ninjas today.  He came home so excited about programming that he went straight to the computer, logged back in, and programmed two more little programs.  One was an animated graphic of a baseball being pitched to a batter that then swung to hit the ball, followed by a cheering crowd.   The second was a program that arranged letters on the screen to spell his name.   It has to be a good program if you come home and want to keep working. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:   While I repaired the broken egg with the 3D pen tonight, my daughter played darts.   I know, a blind child playing darts.   She's careful though and no one was close.   She's working on her throw—to get a dart into a small round area on the wall.   And yet, she was doing it and even hitting the dartboard from time to time.   She was very excited when this happened and asked me to tell her what score she got.