Prayer for Breathing. Thinking of Henry.

We try to keep things light n’ breezy here at the Mommy Prayers nerve center – after all, Mommy Prayers is a humor book – but sometimes the wind blows from a different direction.   

So it did last week as a vast legion of online followers, me included, sent prayers and thoughts to longtime mother-blogger Katie Granju, whose 19-year-old son Henry, her beautiful boy as she calls him (and he was beautiful), succumbed to the horrific brain injuries he received as the result of a beating.

I don’t know Katie, other than in the online sense, and there’s nothing more to say that hasn’t already been said in the pages and pages of comments on her blog and Facebook page and Twitterfeed, but I would like to humbly offer this up in Henry’s memory:  

Most of us — thankfully, thankfully – cannot know what it feels like to lose a child, but we all know where the feeling begins. From the moment our babies are born, what we want most for them is to Just. Keep. Breathing. And that never goes away, no matter how old or bold or strong they become.

To honor that universal fear of loss that connects us all, here’s an excerpt from Prayer for Breathing: 

Dear God,

I know I’m being irrational, but I’m obsessed with the thought that my baby is going to stop breathing any second.

His lungs must be the size of a butterfly’s wing, his heart is like a hummingbird’s, his chest with its impossibly slight ups and downs… 

The package is tiny, but I have to admit, so far it’s worked perfectly. It’s just…will it still work perfectly if I crawl back to my own bed for half a night’s sleep?

I need to hand off the controls to you, God, and go off-duty for a few hours here. Please keep my babe’s miniature mechanics working while I’m gone. Please keep those tiny lungs pumping.

Thanks, and Amen.