What parents can't control

The Boston Globe

Beverly Beckham

It's eight in the morning and my husband and I are talking about laying stones around the periphery of the garden, big stones, more boulder than brick, in an effort to keep the dirt in and the rabbits out. It's a sensible plan, except for my worry about the little kids who cut through the garden and race down its slope. "Maybe stones are a bad idea," I say to my husband. "What if the kids fall?"

"Maybe living near a street is a bad idea," he says, meaning you can't protect children from everything.

Right then, as if on cue, the phone rings. "Adam slammed into a wall and has a lump on the side of his head," says my daughter of my grandson. "He tripped and hit his head hard. But he seems OK. Do you think he's OK?"

Adam, who is 3, isn't crying or vomiting. He's running around, as usual. I tell my daughter to watch him but that he's probably fine. She sighs. She and her husband carpeted their living room to protect Adam. But he got hurt anyway. It happens.

The job of adults is to protect children. And most of us try. We hold their hands. We tell them what they must never do. We anticipate what could hurt them and control all that we can. But the elephant in the room is all that we cannot control.

John Bish, 58, had a stroke last week. The Bishes had three children. They lived in West Warren, a small Massachusetts town 20 miles west of Sturbridge, because they believed it was safer than living in a big town or a city. They were living a quiet, happy life enmeshed in a world of family and friends and church and school and basketball games, with absolutely no warning of what was to come, when Molly, 16, vanished. That was seven years ago. Her body was found three long years later.

The pond where she worked as a lifeguard was just five minutes from their home. It's at the end of a road. It's practically in a neighborhood. "We thought she was safe there," John said. Molly's mother, Magi, drove her there at 10 o'clock every morning. Molly had a night job, too, at a drive-in. That summer she was saving for a car.

John, a gentle man, drove me to the parking lot where Magi last saw their daughter. We walked along the small beach where Molly was a lifeguard, as was her brother before her, then to the cemetery above the beach where authorities believe Molly's predator dragged her and then drove her away. John Bish didn't cry. His wife said he can't cry.

Since Molly's disappearance, the Bishes have worked to prevent another child's abduction. The Molly Bish Foundation provides identification kits - pictures and fingerprints - for children. "Tell people to always have a recent picture of their child at hand," Magi said the day I met her. She gave police an old picture of Molly. A new picture wouldn't have changed anything. But this was something she could control.

I watch a young mother. She's in a crowded store squatting on a floor, eye to eye with her twin girls, calm and patient but firm, too, explaining to them what is and isn't appropriate behavior. "Do you understand?" she says. One nods. The other wails. And the mother turns to the wailer and begins explaining again.

And I think of the Bishes and all they lost when they lost Molly, and of the parents of Kelsey Smith, abducted last month from a mall. And Ethan Patz and Sara Pryor, Polly Klaas and Samantha Runnion, names you don't have to reach for, names you wish you could forget. And how this is what their parents did, too. Every day. For thousands of days.

John Bish is on a respirator. The person who killed his daughter still has not been found. Life is fragile and incomprehensible. We try to protect people. We try and try and try. But there's no protecting them from everything. The best we can do, the only thing we can do, is love them while we can.