We Are Living the Consequences

There is a woman in Guyana who has lost seven children on the ill-fated MV Barima vessel. A family of 17 people began the journey, only 7 survived. I have tried all week to find words large enough for those two sentences. I was unsuccessful. There comes a point when statistics fail us. They cannot capture the silence of an empty home, the unanswered phone calls, the untouched schoolbooks, the birthday that will never be celebrated, or the unbearable task of explaining to a parent why the future they imagined disappeared beneath the water.