Columns

His life may have been short, but his light still shines

By ANDREW SKERRITT
Published April 24, 2007

ADVERTISEMENT Keenan Skerritt died in 1998 when he was 16 months old. He would have been 10 on April 21.

People are usually surprised when I tell them I have a 6-year-old daughter and a 17-year-old son.

The age difference forces me to explain those intervening years and to talk about Keenan, the missing child in the middle.

He would have been 10 this past weekend. It was a birthday not for celebration but for introspection and reflection.

He died of heart failure on Labor Day weekend 1998. But each April friends call; my wife writes him a letter. He is constantly on my mind. I look at other children his age and imagine what he might have been like.

Every day we hear about stories of lost children - a car wreck, a mysterious illness, a swimming pool drowning, or perhaps the horror of a homicide or worse, a nightmare like the massacre at Virginia Tech. Whatever the circumstance, the result is always the same. Parents are left with empty bedrooms, the vacant spaces once occupied by children of promise.

And death changes the living. Some parents become activists after losing their children; others succumb to anger and bitterness. Some get religious. I did. Some couples, saddled by too many memories, break up after they lose a child. My wife and I are among the lucky ones. Splintering our family would have stained our son's memory.

Keenan's coming and going left us a stronger family. Even before he was born, when he was diagnosed with Down's syndrome, it forced my wife and me to have conversations we've never had before.

He changed our vernacular. Why would God allow us to have a Down's baby? This was not a simple question of genetics and science. It was a fundamental question of life and purpose. God figured we could handle it.

In the 16 months that he lived, my son endured more than most people who have lived a long life. He was born with a hole in the heart. He experienced frequent ear infections, colds and fevers. When he had open-heart surgery, he endured the pain quietly without complaint. He taught us how to live.

After Keenan's death, those unanswerable life-and-death questions opened the spiritual door so I could regain the lost faith of my boyhood. It gave the pain meaning. I haven't relinquished that yet.

He made me into a man who values family and appreciates children as borrowed commodities to be cherished and molded. I see him in the face of every disabled person I encounter on the street or in the grocery store.

After more than eight years, his face and name are still alive in our home. A glow-in-the-dark clock on my daughter's bedroom wall bears his name. Below the mantelpiece sits a framed family picture taken in the Bronx just weeks before his death. He and my older son, Khalil, are seated on my knees.

My daughter, Khelee, the unexpected gift we received after we lost Keenan, wouldn't have known about him except for those pictures and the frequent mentions of his name. But she has wholeheartedly embraced the brother she never met. She prays for his protection during her morning prayers and employs his name as a weapon sometimes when she fights with her teenage sibling.

"I wish I had another brother," she'd say. "I wish Keenan were here; he'd be nice to me."

There's no question about that.

Andrew Skerritt can be reached at (813) 909-4602 or toll-free at 1-800-333-7505, ext. 4602. His e-mail address is askerritt@sptimes.com.

[Last modified April 24, 2007, 00:00:46]