Twittering your child's death

Tragically, I know (not personally but through cyberspace and blogging) two moms in the past two weeks who have lost young children to illness. It has been an awfully gloom-filled time. I cannot imagine the pain of losing a child (and have asked my husband to rush me to a lock-down facility should that ever happen to us). What has made the two recent tragedies so real for so many of us online is watching the sharp turn in these two moms' Twitter updates and blog posts. One mom's stream of Tweets went within hours from casually looking for something good enough to eat at the hospital cafeteria to a panic-stricken observation of her daughter being wheeled away. She was dead a short while later. The other talked one day of kids clothing mishaps and random parenting frustrations, and then a few days later was cursing missing the medical examiner's call on cause of death for her son.

I have nothing to pass judgement on here except to commend these moms for how well they are holding up. Both are updating online friends on how to help (March of Dimes contributions, prayers, just good thoughts) and letting everyone who loves them see that they are hanging in there. I think Twitter and blogging has given these moms an incredible outlet.

But watching the mourning process this way - of someone I do not know personally but whom I have spent time reading - is chilling. It is just simply a brand new phenomenon that I never could have imagined even two years ago, and I'm not real sure what more to say about it other than that I'm glad these moms have this outlet, and boy has it been a dose of putting daily complaints in perspective for me and thousands of other readers. That alone could be worth the technological chill I have been living with these past two weeks.