In Memory of Her

A few moments ago, Jan Shaeffer, the executive director of St. Christopher's Foundation for Children and a friend, called with stunningly sad news about a beautiful young woman—this young woman—whom I'd interviewed and photographed last fall. She had been living in the Ronald McDonald House adjacent to St. Christopher's Hospital, and as part of an annual report project, I'd sat with her a few days shy of Halloween and talked about her life and the ways in which it had been shaped by cancer. She had moved me immeasurably, as I had then written here: The way she spoke with honesty of what was passing her by. The fierceness with which she approached her own survival. Her determination to get well so that she could return to a hospital one day not as a patient, but as a nurse.

Today I learn that she did not win her battle. Today I am remembering her alive.

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The Children of North Philadelphia in Words and Pictures

As those of you who have visited this blog know, I recently had the great privilege of spending a day in North Philadelphia among those who are working to make lives better for children, and among the children themselves.

This vlog tells that story in words and pictures. It, like St. Christopher's Foundation for Children that sponsors the programs I visited, holds hope high and (I'll use that word again) aloft.

The music is from Les Choristes.

Thank you, Scott Waz of Audio Post, for helping me re-engineer the sound.

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Do Not not Cross Tracks

Last night I sat at dinner with a gorgeous 15-year-old girl who told me just part of her story. The tumor that first appeared when she was 13. The tumor that returned. Her last eight months lived inside the walls of a hospital, and, at night, within the gracious, truly good rooms of a Ronald McDonald house.

She didn't, she said, remember the color of her own hair.

She hasn't gone home, not one day, in the past eight months.

Her wig was black.

Her skin was porcelain.

She will be, she said, smiling, then taking true pleasure from the thought, Snow White for Halloween.

We fashion heroines for our novels, we tread up and down the street of our own worries, and out in the world all around us are people like this young woman who are living lives we can't imagine, living those lives gracefully.

I got on a train. I took a ride. I crossed the tracks, beyond myself.

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