Monsters INC

You can't remember pain when you’re a child.
If you sit and think now, you'll realise you could never remember the pain of your first tooth, of your first fall, of grazing your knee as a child. You also don't remember when you were sick, how your mother held you close and sang you songs. Throughout life you'll remember these things surely had to have happened you but you just don't remember it actually happening and that I think is by the Grace of God!!

I remember the day she was born, hours of labour and phone calls and wondering and then we were told we had a niece. A cuddly doting smiley child with long lashes, tanned skin and an infectious smile and it was the start of something wonderful.

She was the first grandchild, the happiest thing to have entered our lives in a long time. I remember the whole family smiling and bursting with pride fighting to tell anyone that would listen about her first smile, the first time she crawled, the first time she held her own food, the things that made her happy and sad. We couldn't get enough of her but sadly this world was beyond her, it was not big enough for an angel in disguise. Not long enough for Maeve.

She was 11 months old when her life ended and ours turned upside down.

For anyone that looses a loved one, the pain is a searing heat in your chest, a burning sensation never to be quelled by laughter or tears. It never leaves you, its always there, for someone to loose a loved one in a tragic senseless act of murder, the horror is so much more different.

The realization that someone who you trusted, someone who God put on this earth to love, someone who was loved and had loved could hurt your family and rip them to pieces is un-comprehendible.

Daylight breaks for me each morning, the sky turns blue and cloudless, or grey and rainy albeit each morning may be different, it is still always the same.
You wake wanting answers, you wake wondering and you wake drained and tired and void of all rational thinking. You wake with pain.

In March 2005 my niece was shaken so hard by her child minder that she died from massive head injuries, an over-extended neck (snapped), blind, bleeding of the brain and eyes, a haemorrhage (all consistent with SBS).

We never got to see her first day at school, we never got to hear her sing or see her dance, we never got to see her running on the beach, but most of all, we never got to say goodbye.

The hardest loss of all is the never knowing. I want to believe Keran, I want to think that maybe it never happened, and then I could preserve Maeve in that tiny bubble of hope, that she didn’t die in pain. That the doctors were wrong and she just slipped peacefully in a deep sleep and never woke. That her time on earth was fulfilled, that her true meaning in life was to bring happiness to those she encountered and that she had done that.

But I don’t believe Keran.

In my life Doctors, teachers, guards etc were of a higher regard for me. They were professionals that helped you in life (some times this is not the case).
But I don’t believe that in March 2005 all of these professionals conspired to make me believe my niece was murdered. They told the truth and the only one with anything to gain by lying is Keran.

She shook her for reasons unknown and as she will never tell the truth, those reasons will never be known. She was a professional, a modern day Mary Poppin’s but she took a life and will have to live with her conscience for eternity.

I remember after the trial the media going on about the judge’s comments: “Your reputation as someone who parents can confidently leave their children with has been shattered. You are going to have to live the rest of you life knowing that Maeve died in your care".
They were going on and on about if the judge believed she was guilty he would have said ‘that Maeve was murdered by you’ but I understand what and why he said that.

It is hard to understand why someone so normal would kill, maybe it wasn’t intentional, maybe if she told the truth then we would know but because she won’t then she has to live the rest of her life, with the knowledge that Maeve died in her care’. She has to live with a far greater weight than many; she has to live with her conscience!
Only Keran knows what truly happened my niece and for that, in my eyes that warrants no forgiveness. Maybe if I knew what actually made all this happen or saw remorse or maybe just if I was a bigger or better person I could forgive her but sadly I can’t and I am not sure I ever will.

To ask yourself the question, then you need to read this:
http://justice4maeve.blogspot.com/2008/03/imagine.html

Now could you forgive?