Personal Narrative: A Poem For Kenny

Early in the afternoon, Kenny was finally moved from the operating room to the intensive care unit. He was placed on a respirator, and it was uncertain how long it would take for him to regain consciousness.
When I saw Kenny in the I.C.U. for the first time, I realized Carol would probably become hysterical when she saw him on the respirator. I knew it was important to find her and prepare her for what she was about to see.
The March family had gone to the cafeteria to get something to eat just before Kenny was moved to the I.C.U. As our team joined the other teams for floor rounds, I kept my eye on the main entrance to the pediatric unit. Halfway through rounds, I saw the front door open, and the March family enter the pediatric wing.
Why, from the depths of a placid sky, must there come some providential cry that tells the world a boy’s life is no more? Why must some secluded lake or speeding car a boy’s life take? Why must a young man die in the name of war? Why must some strange disease or holocaust across the seas cause another child’s life to be lost? Why must some accident happen and thereby prevent a man from knowing what his life did cost? Why does there have to be a single loving family that feels the loss of a brother or a son? Why must a dead man’s wife and child go through their life, questioning the senseless things that have been done? Why do all the innocent have their young lives quickly spent before they even had a chance to live? Why must a young man have to leave this world before all will believe that he really had so much to give? Why, if good men can’t survive, do all the bad ones stay alive to live off whatever good may still remain? Why, after the good have all been taken, aren’t the bad so much as shaken, even as a leaf shakes with the