By Rachel Hess Wachman
She walks through the world as if walking on eggshells, afraid to lean into the full weight of her steps. This hesitance is new; it’s raw and confusing. She ponders mortality and questions permanence, no longer able to trust the ground which has previously held steady underneath her feet. No longer certain of anything other than the heavy knowledge that the tumor growing in her father’s pancreas holds the power to change her family forever.
I wish I could tell her that she possesses an incredible resilience that will live inside her for the rest of her days. But if I could have told her that from the beginning—if someone could have told me that from the beginning—then I wouldn’t have grown from her into me.
Some things you need to live in order to believe.
In her ten years of life, death has only ever been a distant spectre claiming the lives of fictional characters within the pages of the library books she voraciously reads. Her world has been a simple one, full of love. She has lived secure in the knowledge that this love protects her, but even her parents cannot mask the worry etched into the lines on their faces. They cannot hide the stacks of medical forms on the dining room table or the rows of orange pill bottles spreading throughout the kitchen.
She pretends not to know what the word “cancer” means, for if the truth seeps through her, fear will erode the denial protecting her heart. The truth would reveal her father not as a sick man but as a dying one. She doesn’t know what the survival rate for pancreatic cancer is, but she can tell from the whispered conversations her parents hold behind closed doors that it is not high. No child should have to look at a parent and wonder how many days they have left to live.
I wish I could tell her that it is alright to cry, that she should let the tears fill her coffee-colored eyes, spill down her cheeks, seep into her brown hair. She sometimes slips out of her fourth- grade classroom to splash her face with cool water from the bathroom faucet, but this is the closest she gets to letting herself come undone. She meets her own eyes in the smudgy mirror and forces her lips upwards until the strain within her eases slightly. This charade is the only coping mechanism she has.
Her dad’s death later that year shatters her in ways which no one can discern from her painted-on smile and the false light in her eyes–eyes which have yet to grow into my own acceptance-filled ones. Her house is emptier, and so is her heart, but she lets the world believe otherwise.
She takes no pleasure in styling her long, wavy hair or choosing bright, sparkly Justice clothes from her cramped closet, but she does it anyway. She eats the lukewarm lasagna the neighbors drop off every week so her mom doesn’t have to cook, yet hardly tastes a bite. The covers of her beloved books become her refuge, a place to lose herself in other worlds. At school, she learns to nod at exactly the right times so the teacher thinks she’s paying attention. She plays tag with friends on the playground but fakes the laughs that come so naturally to everyone else. And through it all, she tries to remember the sound of his laugh, the gentleness in his eyes, the warmth of his presence.
I wish I could tell her that it gets easier. She needs to know that this will not break her forever. But every day that passes is one more since she last saw him, since she last had someone to call “Dad.” Every day, the grief lessens imperceptibly, yet every day carries her farther from that first decade of her life when her family was complete.
Now, she’s almost lived without him for as much time as she lived with him, desperately clinging to memories which succumb to blurriness over time. These are the same memories she once couldn’t bear to recall at all–seeing his face in her mind reminded her of everything she’d lost. Despite the ache that will never truly subside, looking back no longer means reliving that brokenness all over again. After nearly ten years, the act of remembrance fills her with something that feels almost like happiness.
She remembers him laughing at the breakfast table until his shoulders shook, him picking her up from school with his leather briefcase in hand and setting it down to envelop her in a hug. She remembers how it felt to call him “Dad,” and this time the tears mingle with a smile she cannot repress.