The impossible answer to the nagging, unspoken question: why is this the plan?

I closed my Google document, which opened with “Letter to the Editor, Dear Mishpacha mishpachah,” and closed with “B’ahavah, Ahava.”

It was, I assumed, my final piece about Saadya in the magazine. A long and happy relationship, bringing infinite joy to the subject of the many articles and, I hoped, providing more than mere reading satisfaction to readers.

But then, the emails started arriving, WhatsApps, texts, phone calls…. “You don’t know me but I know your son through your writing and I share your loss as if it were my own,” they said. Someone forwarded a shiur given by a speaker I don’t know, who’d never met Saadya. Based on what he had read through the years, he spoke the week after Saadya’s petirah about his positivity, suggesting a “Smile for Saadya’’ campaign as a zechus for his neshamah.

An old neighbor relayed that Saadi was her first exposure to, and had formed her attitudes toward, special children. She recalled being instructed, “If you see Saadya on his tricycle, on your side of the block, gently return him to his (either frantic or oblivious) parents.” (No gates were high enough or locks strong enough to deter Saadya from his need for independence — a trait that served him far better as an adult than as a five-year-old!)

Then came a letter that took my breath away. I don’t know the age or location of the writer (and changed details to protect privacy): “I never met your son except for reading about him in Family First,” he wrote. “I have an 11-year-old brother with Down Syndrome. I wanted a brother like other guys have, and I was kind of angry at Hashem. Then I read about all the things Saadya did and how he changed people. I saw my brother in a new way.

“He knows all the Jewish singers better than other guys’ brothers, and there are lots of things we can do together. I saw that even if he looks different, there are many ways we’re alike. He plays a great game of basketball and really loves people, no matter who they are.

“That’s how your son changed me. Your son changed a lot of people, and he will always be remembered. Dovid.”

Thank you, Dovid! I hope you’re reading this article. You gave me a gift. There’s no such thing as “closure” for the wound of losing someone we love (especially a child). It’s an oxymoron; you can’t close an open wound that can never heal. But what you can get, or hope to acquire, is clarity. The impossible answer to the nagging, unspoken question: why is this the plan?