From My Dad

When I give scholarship money to young peacemakers at our local high school, Heather’s family is there. They give a scholarship to someone who wants to become a nurse. Heather was Nancy’s classmate, and Sara and Laurie knew her too. She struggled with leukemia for several years. She would come to school wearing a scarf after radiation treatments. She wanted so badly to graduate from eighth grade. She did that and a week later leukemia took her. Leukemia was a word I threw into a corner. I found it once a year for about two minutes. Leukemia was death. When I look up “leukemia” in the dictionary, Heather’s face was there.

Eliot had been very ill over the weekend. At one point I got within about five feet of him and he started wailing and crawled up tighter into Sara’s arms. Sara called the doctor’s hot line on Saturday and was told “Your son has a cold”. As the weekend wore on it was clear to her that it was more than a cold. She took him in on Monday and when she called us with the news we were all shocked. I knew, or I thought I knew that Eliot was going to be sick, and he was going to struggle and he was going to die.

Nancy was not at Sara’s house on Monday and was very concerned. She called at one point to see how Eliot was doing. I knew, or at least I thought I knew. For some typically over cautious reason I didn’t want to tell her. Concerned that it might be contagious, she pressed me about whether anyone else could get what he had. “No,” I said, “You guys can’t catch it. But I’d better let Sara tell you.” That was the first burden I could have lifted from my Sara’s shoulders.

Soon we learned that he would start treatment right away. We learned that induction therapy achieves remission over 90% of the time. We learned that there was hope, in fact a lot of hope, that Eliot would die long after I’m gone, from some cause other than leukemia. We learned a lot about leukemia in a short time.

The first months were very difficult as we watched him struggle with the treatments. When he made it to the maintenance phase, we started to see him lose some of the weight he had gained with the steroids. By autumn he was running around more like a three year old should. We all have the strong hope that he will beat this thing in the next several years.

I missed the scholarship award this year. I missed talking to Heather’s parents. But leukemia doesn’t have Heather’s face on it any more; it has Eliot’s face. There are a lot of other faces there too. They belong to Sara and Aron and all the rest of our family and all those at work who know about Eliot and pray for him, and all the other faces from halfway around the world. I’m proud and happy about all the efforts everyone has made