The big small life

On the same day 49 people died at Bluegrass Airport, there was another loss here. Her passing didn't make the evening news, but in many ways, I think it should have.

Tiffany was 5 years old, just a few days younger than my Meghan. I knew her only briefly; although I suppose at that age, every acquaintance was brief by default. I interviewed her and her father for a story about how families deal with being in the children's hospital over the Christmas holidays. She was afraid of me and my camera at first. She was my very first interview in my new job, and I was a mess of tangled wires, an awkward tripod, and a video camera with a battery that didn't work. I sweated it out as I made calls back to the office for someone to bring a fresh battery. While we waited, Tiffany relaxed and graced me with a big, dimpled smile.

Her eyes, however, were sleepy and red-rimmed. She was just starting another round of chemo. She was 4 then and had lived with leukemia for little more than a year. During that time, she had spent more days in the hospital than at home with her mom, dad and two big brothers. Her parents had worked out a system of switching shifts--her dad with her during the day, mom at night. While I was there in her room, I saw one of the most poignant father-daughter relationships I have ever witnessed. Her father adored her, and her pain-dimmed eyes would light up for a moment whenever she turned them toward her dad, who treated her like the healthy kid he just knew she would be someday. He tickled her and wrestled with her, making her forget that the only Christmas lights she would see that year were the ones strung along her IV pole. Like any other 4-year-old kid, her big concern was whether Santa would know where to deliver her presents. Her dad assured her that he did. She asked to watch an Elmo DVD and told me she loved Disney princesses, just like my daughter. She talked of going home and playing with her brothers. As she talked, she watched me carefully, gauging my reaction. I soon forgot that she was bald and hooked to machines and believed this child was going to make it, that she would go home and be like every other ordinary kid.

But this child was extraordinary.

Her father later emailed me at work and invited me to see the family's web site. There were photos of Tiffany with big, bouncy curls and chubby little hands exploring the cracks of a sidewalk while on vacation with the family, happy and carefree, just weeks before she was diagnosed with the disease that would cut her life short less than two years later. But I also saw message upon message posted by nurses, friends, fellow patients, church members, new acquaintances like me--people who were touched by Tiffany's strong spirit. They wrote about the same things that had impressed me--her smile, her will to live. She was not going to be defined by her illness but rather her vitality. She was going to go home to her pets and her big brothers and get that child's sweaty glow playing in the back yard. She was going to have cake on her birthday and take a vacation with her family and go shopping for school clothes.

As the months passed, her father posted messages about her progress--her last round of chemo, her trip to see Elmo, her first day of kindergarten, her hair growing back. And then suddenly, there was a message about another trip back to the hospital. She had pneumonia. I expected to see another message a few days later about how she was back to school. Instead, the news was progressively worse. She was not responding to treatment. She needed a ventillator. Then she was gone. How could that be? With all our modern medicine, how was it possible that a child die?

The news tonight was full of updates about funeral arrangements for victims of the plane crash. I held my newborn and thought of another funeral taking place today as another family buried their child. I pray I never know that kind of heartache. My hope is that time will dull the sting of their loss but that, at the same time, the rest of us don't forget that it happened and that every day, there are losses all too similar, here in the Bluegrass and around the world. Try as we might, we are not invincible. We can't always protect our children. But we can love them, unreservedly, whole-heartedly. That's the big lesson from a little life.