Sorry I have not updated my journal lately. I have been a bit distraught. The loss of my daughter hit me something fierce. It has just been now that I have been able to sit and write about it. I did not know what to say. I was at a loss for words, and that does not happen to me often.

Katie will be missed by me. There is not a day that goes by I do not think about her and how she was. She had made so many strides for improvement. Not but a week before we had been celebrating her 11th birthday. All seemed fine.

She was having issues with diarrhea, so we took her to the doctor. The doctor was not sure what was going on so he had her admitted for monitoring. 24 hours later my wife and I were leaving the hospital without our beloved Katie. It is all too sudden life changes.

I have searched for reasons for this. Why? Why her? Why now? Why when things were going so good? I still remain at a loss for words and emotions that fit.

I had dealt with loss before, with my father. But I had some amount of preparing (although only 2 weeks) before his untimely departure from the earth at age 43. But this was different. I don’t understand how, but it is.

Is it the fact that she was just a child? That she had not “lived” her life? I am not sure.

It could be that I could do nothing to stop it. I wanted to, but there was nothing I could do. I keep blaming myself - that I should have known something. That if I had been more persistent with the doctors or taken her in a day earlier it would have mattered - that the doctors would have had the time to figure this thing out. It is want haunts me and the nightmares I still have to this day.

I sometimes stand at the entrance to her room and peer into it. It is still. It is quiet... too quiet. It is a quiet too hard to fathom. I imagine her looking at me from her bed as she watches her television and plays carelessly, but so focused. It is a vision that brings such joy and such pain altogether.

If there was a word to sum up my feeling and thoughts it is confusion. It seems to be the most fitting.

We would later come to find out that she had died of a Volvulus bowel, or simply put twisted bowel. There was nothing anything anyone could have done to stop it. But I guess that is all part of the grieving process.

Life has started to get “back to normal” I suppose. We are re-writing our path without Katie. It is harder thing than you would imagine doing. You revolve your life around one person for so long, and then they are gone in an instant.

We have been getting the house to the way we want it and make sure that is in order. That has been keeping our minds somewhat at ease in regards to the situation. But I miss her, and I always will…