Written September 2024

I sit perched in the windowsill of the hospital room watching the cars on the highway. My daughter and all of the machines that now uphold her life lay feet away from me. How many times did I drive by this place of healing and death not knowing it would hold the final moments of my daughter’s life?

Nearly 15 years ago I passed by, beginning the new chapter “College”. I can nearly see the dorm room of my distant past from here. I was so close to this place and yet so far from this place.  I was oblivious to the pain it held for others and the agony it holds for me now.

Just this spring I often drove by this house of mourning,  taking Rellie to theater class, Gemma safely along for the ride, cradled in my womb. I remember thinking then about the sick and dying children with their mothers and fathers. After 15 years of life’s schooling, I was aware that death and suffering lurked here. Yet, it still stood apart from me. Stuck in the abstract and distant empathy, I drove by and prayed for those confined within the walls that held the tortured and treasured memories of their dying child.  I did not know that I myself, and the precious baby within me, would soon join them.

A day later, the room is empty of her presence and I’m again looking out that same window, waiting for the lactation consultant to tell me how to dry up my body’s milky remembrance of her, watching the cars continue to drive by blissfully unaware that my daughter had just died.

The city keeps driving by, blind to the death in its midst. These highways will remain ever full with people busy going somewhere. The living will continue to go on without knowledge that her heart had stopped its beating. 

I look out a different window now, following the hearse carrying her body. Your daddy and I joke that you will probably have had more people attend your funeral than we will at both of ours combined. I watch the escorts speed ahead to the next intersection as we creep along bringing her body to its final resting place. I watch the city finally have to stop in those minutes. I wonder what the people in those frozen cars think as they see car-after car-after car follow her.

I hope they think, “Wow, that person must have done something really incredible with their life to be so very loved.”

Because both are true – you’re life is worthy of honor and you, my daughter, are so, so loved.