In honor of a national holiday in our family, I’m reposting this wake-up moment I had a few years ago:
I was in the middle of a Thursday afternoon messy desk when someone in our waiting room picked up Serenity’s memoir. The woman read the back jacket blurb and then flipped through several pages. Finally, she looked up at me and said, “Is this girl still alive?”
“Why, yes,” I said. “She’s our daughter, actually. She’s had several bouts of cancer since that book. But she is quite healthy and happy now.”
Then I went back to my messy desk while the reader kept flipping pages. A few minutes later, she looked up again and said quietly, “Did she get to have the baby?”
Oh. My. Heart.
How soon I’ve forgotten those desperate days when we didn’t know the ending of this story. How quickly I have moved from, “Dear God, let them live,” to “What time is the ballgame Friday night?”.
Yet, it hasn’t been quick at all. It’s just that the wonderful parts of the past dozen years have overshadowed the frightening parts, and sometimes I forget. At least for a minute or two.
I shoved all the Very Important Papers to the back of my desk and walked out into the waiting room. “Yes,” I told the lady. “She had that baby, and here is a picture of him today.”
Happy Eleventh Birthday, Jake. You are a miracle.
Jake posing with his brothers and their cousin, Claire, on her birthday.