Our friends’ daughter passed away this morning. She was seven years old.

She started her life with many challenges ahead. She was born with cerebral palsy and hydrocephalus, which through her short life caused untold problems. She required oxygen at all times to keep her saturation at a normal level; she required a feeding tube because she couldn’t eat on her own. She never spoke, she never walked. Her smile could light up a room, and her laugh brought joy to many.

Last Thursday, her oxygen saturation went down to 40%. She was brought to the hospital, where she had her first cardiac arrest. Her parents told the doctors to let her go. She stopped breathing for several minutes, and then started again on her own. This happened a couple more times. The third time, she was without oxygen for fifteen minutes before starting, once again, to breathe on her own.

Someone said to me, last week when things weren’t looking good, “Maybe this is a good thing. If it’s God’s will.” He didn’t say it in a mean way, or a “Oh, handicapped kids should die”, way, just that he knew how much Hannah had suffered in just the past six months, let alone how much her parents and her siblings had been through.

The oxygen loss caused undetermined brain damage. She was in a coma until this morning, when she passed away in her mother’s arms.

Is it a good thing? It might be a terrible kind of relief for her family – they know that she’s no longer suffering or in pain. Her younger brother had been waking up through the night for the past few months, to check her 02 sats. That’s no kind of life for a five year old. But the family is definitely going to mourn for her. They will miss her forever. She was a wonderful girl with a beautiful smile. And the pain that her family is feeling tonight is not a good thing at all.