Five and Fighting

He looked into my eyes and said, “Your daughter is going to die.”  The world just fell away.

What man can truly hear those words and not be guilty of the living heart in his chest?  What man can hear those words and say that he is sane?  That child—that little thing that is half of who you are—is threatened by a man in a black cloak.

She didn’t take the candy.  She didn’t pet the puppy.  Something inside of her got sick and forgot to die, instead growing and growing until it developed into a mass on her brain, causing her pain that no one who has lived five years should experience.

This wasn’t her fault.  Not at all.  Do you think she would have chosen to seize on the floor at school, or weakness so great she couldn’t lift her hand?  Did she want her parents to hold the trash can for her as she vomited into it or hold her down when the doctors had to take what she calls a “batillion” shots?  Not at all.

This is my fault.  Mine.  This invader—this germ of cancer came from me or her mother.  What five year old develops a growth on their tender brain without prerequisites?

My apologies will do nothing for her.  She wouldn’t even understand.  She still thinks God sent her to earth on a little cloud that deposited her on our doorstep.  She would never be able to even grasp the meaning of Mendel's chromosomes and inheritance.

I pose the question, would it have been better if she hadn’t been born?

She wouldn’t have had to feel the poison running through her veins, or seen the hair on her floor that she brushed out.  There would be no scars on scalp or tears in her eyes as other children call her baldy.

She’s five and fighting.  But it sounds like the fight is over.  I realize, as I’m holding her and she asks, “Daddy, why are you crying?” that I’m just not ready to Heaven have her.