This essay, published in the St. Petersburg Times on Mother’s Day in 1992, is what led me to a job writing for the paper, a position I held until May of 2020, with a short break for child #4.
Of all my roles as a parent, often the most frustrating and difficult to accept is that of spectator. I learned this as I watched my daughter Danielle’s graceful dance with life and her bold struggle with leukemia. Never was it more painfully clear than when I cradled her in my arms and watched her drift out of this world and into the next.
For my 7-year-old son Jesse, the loss of his younger sister seems an enormous burden for him to bear. How I want to act as his surrogate, envisioning myself the “mother sponge,” absorbing his grief, sopping up his pain. But as with Danielle, this is one of those rites of passage.
Jesse wants specific answers about heaven. He wants to know, for instance, what angels eat or if they have to go to the bathroom. My ideas about heaven are ever-evolving and based on what I have learned to be faith, but I cannot pour it into a cup and tell him to drink up. It is he who must delve into himself, dig it out, and offer it up…