I have been holding onto a prayer for a while and yesterday I let it go.

Although we knew the cause of Mikail’s death, I hoped and prayed that the autopsy would reveal something, anything, to help us make sense of this all. Mikail had a stroke at birth and this put him at risk for additional seizures or another stroke, although he hadn’t had any more since he was 2 days old, he was at risk. If his death was related to a seizure or a stroke, I feel like this would all make a lot more sense. As if this would be one answer in a sea of a million I have that have gone unanswered.

Yesterday we received the official coroners report, the forensic autopsy report, and the toxicology report. There was nothing new to report. Nothing unusual. Nothing surprising. There was nothing underlying related to his infant stroke. There is no logic behind his death. A series of minor viral infections masked a serious bacterial infection (Invasive Group A Strep) hiding the broncho-pneumonia that took his life. There is no logic to that. Like the coroner told me the day after Mikail passed away, “This was an unfortunate lightening strike situation”.

An estimated 700 million Group A Strep infections occur worldwide each year. While the overall mortality rate for these infections is 0.1%, over 650,000 of the cases are severe and invasive (IGAS), and have a mortality rate of 25%. That’s only 162, 500 deaths worldwide each year. In Canada 1/100,000 people are infected per year.  How rare is that? And why Mikail? He was such a fighter. He was such an over-comer. Why him?

We won’t ever know, this side of heaven.

How sweet that moment will be.