Better Angels: What do you give a child needing special care? 'All the love we can'

When Bonnie Bruhn returned to Milwaukee in the mid-1980s, she was a nurse looking for a job that would allow her, a single mom, to take care of her two children. She found:

"Penfield," she says.

"Or Penfield found me."

Penfield Children's Center occupies what was once a bowling alley and a two-story apartment building and it's located near some of the poorest neighborhoods in Milwaukee. Backed by generous benefactors, it provides underserved kids, medically fragile kids, disabled kids and, of course, typical kids cutting-edge early education, family programming and wellness services.

It was in there, in the center's special care nursery, among babies and toddlers with serious health issues, among kids whose lives had been smashed to pieces by abuse, among little ones with birth anomalies, chronic illnesses and fatal conditions, that Bonnie found where she belonged.

"This is my mission," she says. "Penfield is my mission."

"The kids here fill my soul."

Bonnie, 71, retired from Penfield several years ago. Now she volunteers there.

"This is what I was meant to do, as long as I can do it," she says.

Outside the entrance to the special care nursery is a mural, beautifully painted, that depicts three children sailing in a wooden shoe into a starry night sky.

A poem by Eugene Field is written over gliding clouds:

"Wynken, Blynkenand Nod one night,

Sailed off on a wooden shoe.

Sailed off on a river of crystal light

Into a sea of dew."

It is hard, Bonnie says, to care for children who die. Some of their deaths are expected. Some are not.

"Often times the staff here goes home crying. Or goes home to cry because of what they've seen. Or there's been a loss of a child that is unexpected. You come in Monday morning, and you hope all the kids are coming back.

"You just fall back on your strength, that this is what you were meant to do and you can do it."

Once, over the course of single summer, four children in the nursery died, she says. Their deaths, one on top of the other, were crushing.

Then, strange things began to happen, Bonnie says.

"When I stayed late in the nursery, toys would start playing music, and I would hear giggling," she says. "Sometimes in the back room. Sometimes in the front room. It brought me such comfort."

"Clocks were falling off the wall in other rooms," she says.

"Staff blamed the angels."

The mothers of two of the children — Bonnie calls them "angel moms" — called to say they had dreamed of their babies dancing in the Penfield courtyard.

Scoff if you want.

"None of these sweet babies could talk or walk," Bonnie says. "I knew they were all OK."

Parents, of course, ask why. Why is my child this way? Why is my child broken? Why is my child about to die?

"We don't know," Bonnie says. "There are no answers."

But what then can you give to a dying child, or to an infant boy who may never walk or talk because he was shaken by an angry adult, or to a little girl, born with a devastating anomaly, who may never open her eyes?

"All the love we can," Bonnie says.