No parent thinks that their child will get cancer. No parent thinks that their child will lose their hair before it’s long enough to take them to the barber. No parent thinks that their child will have to endure the agony of poison running through their veins. No parent thinks that their child will scream for an end to the pain before their life has truly begun. No parent thinks that their child will die before their third birthday. But I had to hear the forsaken words that should have been locked away in the recesses of my nightmares: “Your child has cancer;” I had to watch my baby’s radiant blonde curls fall away into nonexistence; I had to witness her veins pulse with the faint red hue of the drugs that only hurt her more than the disease that ate away at her; I had to listen to her heartbreaking cries to “Make the hurting stop Daddy;” I had to watch as my baby girl’s eyes shut for the last time and an angel was stolen from the world.

I only came today because my ex-wife made me. Although the love between us had rapidly dwindled following my daughter’s passing, she still cared about me enough to force me to make an appointment for something that was almost worse than the cancer that had killed my baby: therapy. It had been nearly a year since I had lost my angel, but the grief had not been dulled by time. Although I knew I would only reopen scarred wounds, I still went to my therapist, signed in, and moved to a private room to prepare for a dose of unproductive remediation. After waiting in a comfortably reclined chair for what seemed like years, the therapist entered, grinned ignorantly, and began:

“So, why don’t you tell me why you’re here today.”

“My wife- I mean ex-wife- made me schedule a session.”

“Alright. Why’d she make you come?”

“Honestly Doc, I don’t want to talk about it. Am I able to leave? My ex will be happy that I even came, but there is nothing you can do to make me feel any better about what happened.” Without looking at the pompous white-coat sitting in front of me, I began to get up from my luxurious leather prison and walk out of the room. However, as I placed my hand on the cold knob of my gateway to freedom, the man behind me said something that chilled me even more than the cool metal on which my hand rested:

“How did Ella die?”

I felt my hand stiffen and retreat from the door. I felt my head slowly turn to the therapist with a face of utter disbelief. I felt my legs walk back over to the plush chair in the middle of the room and deposit my body within its depths. Although my hand and my head and my legs were all present and working, my mind was elsewhere. In fact, my train of thought had left the therapist’s office entirely. Instead of seeing the pale blue walls of the office where my body sat, I instead envisioned the clinical white corridors of a hospital. I smelled the hygienic, medicinal odors that had permeated my daughter's room. I heard the pervading screeches of the monitor as it slowly counted down the seconds of her life. When I answered, I heard myself through the fuzzy haze of a person enveloped in the thickest of fogs:

“She had late-diagnosed stage four brain cancer. We didn't know for a while. If the headaches hadn't started, we may never have seen it coming, but, of course, they came eventually. We took her for an MRI, and the doctors found a fist sized lump in her head. She didn't live too long after that.”

“Tell me about her.”

“Her name was Ella. She was nearly three when she died. Come to think of it, her third birthday is in a week or two. I’ve never seen a brighter, bubblier girl than my baby. I loved her so much. So goddamn much. I miss her so goddamn much Doc.” Although I was still talking to the therapist, all I could think about was Ella. Her ostentatiously blonde curls framing her plump little cheeks. Her infectious, giggling laughter that could make even the most dreary of days seem like a joyous holiday. Her mature, curious, baby blue eyes peaking out into a foreign world and seeking adventure. But she would never get to go on the adventure of life; she would never get to see the world and all of its majesties; she would never even get to see her third birthday.
“Tell me about the day she died.” The therapist sat back in his chair and stared intently at my face with an air of curiosity and the cordial sympathy of one who has not experienced any tragedy in their own lives but wishes to empathize with others.

As I spoke, I felt myself travelling back in my memories to that fateful day where I would lose my heart, my soul, my everything to a nefarious, insatiable monster. With a mental agony assaulting my emotions, I forced myself to remember the day that Cancer stole my daughter from me:

“Six months ago, my daughter died. She had been doing chemo for a while at that point, but we all knew that there was really nothing to be done about her tumor. It was too risky to have it surgically removed and chemotherapy was nothing but a slap on the wrist to such a massive, untameable, cancerous beast. Something changed in Ella the week she died. It was like she knew her time was up. There was this despondent, resigned look in her eyes that wouldn’t go away. Even when she’d smile, there would be this fatalistic hopelessness hovering right behind the joy. She was too young to be feeling that way, Doc. She would giggle with a passion unlike any I had ever seen before, but there would always be a brief yet profound moment of clarity where the laughing would pause and she’d focus her clear, mature eyes into the depths of my soul. In those moments, she was more than my daughter, more than a cancer patient, more than a human. In those moments, she rose above the pettiness of existence and transcended the temporariness of humanity. In those moments, Ella was an angel of light and darkness, life and death, joy and sorrow. She was and still is a shining beacon of hope. But I digress.” By this time I was profusely crying, but I frankly didn’t care what anyone thought of me. After dabbing my drenched eyes with a tissue, I continued: “On the day she died, Ella woke up screaming before dawn. We had taken her home from the hospital the day before to make her last hours a little more normal than her perpetual residency in the hospital. There was a short period of peace, but that soon gave way to a chaos of unforeseen proportions. A flood of mind-numbing pain burst through the feeble dam of her mentality and left her shivering and crying in incoherence. Tears streaming down our faces, my wife and I drove with utter abandon to the ER as our daughter’s body lay convulsing in our laps. By the time we had rushed her to the hospital, she was unconscious, lying in my arms. As I frantically dashed into the emergency room, Ella grew to be increasingly slack-jawed and dead-eyed. A crowd of nurses and doctors grew around my daughter, who grew paler and paler with each passing second, and brought her into a room. I watched as they hooked her up to a million invasive, snake-like tubes. I watched Ella’s eyes fade away into nothingness. I heard her whisper ‘Daddy’ with a final lingering breath-”

I couldn’t talk anymore. I was crying so hard that my nose had clogged up and my shirt was drenched in the streams of sorrow flowing from my aching eyes. I sat there in my chair, convulsing with the agony of the deep wounds that I had just reopened. I sat there for what seemed like hours before the crying subsided and I managed to compose myself. The therapist, who had been waiting patiently for me to become coherent again, handed me a box of tissues from a table nearby and clinically asked:

“How did this make you feel?”

“Are you kidding me? How do you think it felt to have the only thing that you cared about in the whole world taken from you in the most brutish, inhumane way possible? I am a broken man. Life holds no meaning without my baby girl. Imagine having your heart torn out of your body and burned to an ashy crisp before your eyes. Multiply that utter agony by an unfathomable number and maybe, just maybe, you could begin to empathize with the raw pain that I felt as she died!”

With unforeseen rage, I got up from my chair, opened the door to our private room, and stormed out of the apathetic therapist’s office. I was both shocked and disgusted at the audacity of the therapist to ask me how my daughter’s passing had affected me. In fact, I was not pleased at all with any of the other questions he had asked before. Therapist or not, that stony-faced jerk had no right to delve into my heart and bring back those awful memories. Maybe he didn’t understand, but losing a kid is one of the most terrible things that could befall a parent. To have a bubbly ball of joy in your life one moment and then have it stolen from you in the next is traumatizing to say the least.

I ended up going back to see that pompous therapist again after our first meeting. Whether or not I liked remembering the horrors of Ella’s death, it had to be done. With his help, I managed to reconnect with my ex-wife and come to terms with the fact that my baby was gone. The pain of losing Ella will never fade, but I now realize that the happiness stored within my memories of her can be used to dim the agony. Whenever thoughts of my angel fading into the nothingness of death pass through my mind, I remember her infectious laughter, I remember the way she’d play dolls with me, I remember the love that existed between us.

Parent or not, realize the importance of a single moment. It only took a moment for Ella to be born. It only took a moment for her to be diagnosed with cancer. It only took a moment for her to whisper “Daddy” in her final breath.

Your life can change in a moment, so cherish every one you have.