The First Child Who Reminded Me of Alicia
Several months later, I met a young patient named Sophie.
She was nine years old and had been receiving treatment for a serious illness. She rarely spoke during appointments, and her parents worried that she was keeping her fears to herself.
One afternoon, I found her sitting near the window, drawing in a notebook.
I asked what she was making.
“A house,” she replied.
“Who lives there?”
She shrugged.
“Nobody yet.”
I pulled up a chair, leaving enough space for her to decide whether she wanted me nearby.
“Do you think someone might live there eventually?”
She looked at the drawing.
“Maybe. If they aren’t scared.”
I thought of Alicia.
I thought of the question she had once asked me about whether people remembered the little things after someone was gone.
So I didn’t tell Sophie that she had nothing to fear. I didn’t promise that everything would turn out the way she wanted.
I simply asked whether she wanted to tell me what frightened her.
At first, she said no.
A few minutes later, she began talking.
She was afraid of being away from home. She missed her friends. She hated when adults stopped speaking as soon as she entered the room.
Most of all, she was afraid that if she asked whether she might die, everyone would become upset.
I listened.
When she finished, I told her that she was allowed to ask difficult questions, and that her care team could help her and her parents talk about them in an honest, age-appropriate way.
She looked at me.
“You’re not angry that I asked?”
“No.”
“Are you scared when people ask you things like that?”
I thought carefully before answering.
“Sometimes I feel sad, because I know the questions matter. But I would rather you ask than sit alone with something frightening.”
Sophie considered that.
Then she returned to her drawing.
A few minutes later, she added a small figure to the house.
“That’s me,” she explained.
“Who else lives there?”
She drew another figure beside it.
“My mom.”
Then, after a pause, she added a dog.
I smiled.
“That’s a good-looking dog.”
“It’s imaginary,” she said. “He doesn’t get sick.”
For a moment, I couldn’t speak.
I thought of Scout-like dogs, imaginary homes, and all the ordinary things that young patients dreamed about while their lives were filled with hospital appointments.
And I thought of Alicia.
She had wanted children like Sophie to have someone who would listen.
Now, in a small way, that was happening.
Not because I had saved Alicia.
I hadn’t.
But because she had helped me understand what it meant to care for someone when there was no simple solution.
What Love Left Behind
A year after Alicia died, Emily and I met at a quiet café near the hospital.
She brought a photograph of her sister and placed it on the table.
It was from a summer before Alicia became seriously ill. She was laughing at something outside the frame, her hair blowing across her face.
I had never seen the photograph before.
“She was happy that day,” Emily said.
I smiled.
“She looks happy.”
“She was. We went to the beach. She complained about the sand for two hours and then refused to leave.”
We laughed.
For a while, we talked about Alicia’s childhood, her terrible sense of direction, and the way she could never remember where she had put her phone.
Then Emily looked at me.
“She loved you, you know.”
I lowered my eyes.
“I loved her, too.”
“I know.”
Emily reached into her bag and removed a small envelope.
“I found this with some of her other things. I think it belongs to you.”
Inside was a photograph of our hospital wedding.
On the back, Alicia had written another sentence.
We didn’t get forever. But we got this.
I read it several times.
Then I placed the photograph carefully in my wallet.
For a long time, I had thought of our wedding as something that belonged to the final days of Alicia’s life.
Now I understood that it belonged to our life together, however brief that life had been.
It was part of our story.
Not the whole story.
Alicia had been more than the young woman I married in a hospital room. She had been a daughter, a sister, a friend, a person with ridiculous jokes and unfinished plans.
Her illness had shaped the circumstances of our time together, but it had never defined everything she was.
I wanted to remember all of it.
The laughter.
The fear.
The wedding.
The difficult conversations.
The way she had asked me to promise that I would tell her the truth.
And the way she had left me a letter reminding me that I wasn’t responsible for defeating death.
I was responsible for being human.
