Parents who lost children to hot cars and pool accidents move their suffering forward so others won’t

Every year, loving, conscientious, responsible parents who think it could never, ever happen to them lose children in pool accidents or hot cars. A new initiative strives to spread awareness of child-safety education and the availability of preventative devices, because painful experience has shown that very traumatic things can happen to very good people

Sarena Cohen, an events planner and camp director in Baltimore, thought she knew all the ins and outs of pool safety. Her in-laws have a pool, she’s worked in camps, and her family frequently went swimming. All her children, with the exception of two-year-old Aliza, had learned to swim, and Aliza was never allowed to approach a pool without floaties.

“We’re neurotic about pool safety,” Sarena says. “Our family members who live in Florida have double locks on their pool gates and are always super vigilant.”

This past Pesach, she and her extended family rented a home with a pool in the Encore community in Florida. Perhaps it was the “neurotic about safety” aspect of her personality that led her to lie awake the first night of Chol Hamoed, wondering if she’d stored the local Hatzolah’s number in her phone. When she awoke the next morning, her phone was still open to her search, and she updated the information.

After two days of chag, everyone was anxious to get into the pool. A few family members dove right in, some were enjoying sitting around, and Aliza, wearing floaties, sat like a princess on the pool’s tanning ledge.

When her older daughter asked for some lunch, Sarena did a quick survey of the pool and saw there were plenty of adults around.

“I’m going inside to make some eggs,” she told them.

Aliza noticed her mommy leaving and announced, “I want to go with Mommy!”

She stood up, took off her floaties, and everyone saw her follow Sarena to the kitchen door.

No one knows what really happened after that. Aliza must have changed her mind about coming inside — she returned to the pool, unnoticed by the adults, who assumed she was in the kitchen. All Sarena knows is that a little bit later she heard her sister-in-law give a scream she can only describe as “otherworldly… the kind of scream you make when you’ve lost a loved one. Aliza was lying motionless on the bottom of the pool.”

Her husband Levi flew into action, but it was actually their five-year-old who dived down and pulled Aliza up from the bottom. Her wet hair was hanging in her face, and she was blue and completely limp. Sarena started shrieking. But she did her best not to panic.

“I’ve taken CPR classes four times — I ran a camp of 400 kids,” she says. “One thing that did stay ingrained was to stay calm. I remember looking at my feet, at my white sneakers that were pulling me toward my daughter, but I knew I had to go to the kitchen to call Hatzalah.

“I also knew to delegate. I asked someone else to call for help, and asked my brother and sister-in-law to watch the other kids. Levi started to do CPR, although he wasn’t confident in his skills, and by now my daughter was a horrifying shade of purple. She finally produced a sound that was just unearthly.”