Roald Dahl’s heartbreaking letter after losing his daughter carries a timeless plea to all parents
The 'BFG' author lost his daughter when she was 7, and 24 years later, he was able to pen the perfect letter in her honor.
The pain of losing a child to an illness is beyond shattering. There are no words to explain the grief, hollowness and heartbreak parents witness. Popular children’s author Roald Dahl lost his oldest daughter, Olivia, at the age of seven, the University of Nebraska Medical Center revealed. She passed away due to measles in 1962. He was devastated as a father and he couldn’t find the right thing to say until 24 years later. The "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" author penned a letter to fellow parents, which was published in 1988 by the Sandwell Health Authority.
Recalling the time he learned of her illness and how he’d spend time with her, the author mentioned that he wasn’t “alarmed” at first. He’d often read to her in bed, along with spending time doing other activities. One of the days when she seemed to be recovering well, things quickly took a concerning turn. “I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn’t do anything,” he wrote. He asked if she was okay and she only said she felt “sleepy.”
From there, things took a tragic turn. “In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours, she was dead,” the grieving dad wrote. Her measles turned into measles encephalitis. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the condition causes swelling in the brain and has serious or even fatal outcomes for a patient. The World Health Organization reported that measles was one of the most contagious diseases humans have ever faced. It soon became a widespread epidemic, causing 30 million cases and over 2 million deaths each year. Dahl couldn’t do anything to save his daughter, nor could the doctors.
“That was twenty-four years ago, but even now, if a child with measles happens to develop the same deadly reaction from measles as Olivia did, there would still be nothing the doctors could do to help her,” he noted. He highlighted that parents can avert this “tragedy” with a simple decision. “They can insist that their child is immunized against measles,” he said. Back then, there was no vaccination available. Thomas Peebles, MD, obtained a sample from 11-year-old David Edmonston to try to find a solution to combat the illness. John Franklin Enders, Peebles’s boss, developed the first measles vaccine around 1958.
By 1961, it had proved effective and could be distributed. Since then, even improved versions have been developed. Dahl noted that though measles is not recognized as a “deadly” condition, for him, who lost his child, it was. And he cautioned that parents are putting their kids through the same risk if they choose not to get them vaccinated. Speaking of ill effects from the dose, the author noted there were barely any.
“In a district of around 300,000 people, there will be only one child every 250 years who will develop serious side effects from measles immunization! That is about a million to one chance. I should think there would be more chance of your child choking to death on a chocolate bar than of becoming seriously ill from a measles immunization,” he remarked. Dahl’s other daughter, Ophelia, shared in an interview with Yahoo, “He thought if he talked about his own personal experience, that would awaken the slumber he felt people were in.” Pleading with parents to take advantage of the preventive measure, the dad said, “I know how happy she (Olivia) would be if only she could know that her death had helped to save a good deal of illness and death among other children."
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