Katie, for your birthday, this blog post is for you. Two actually, because they stand alone. Part 2 here. Sometimes I joke to Joshua that you are the only one who still reads my blog. I know it’s not entirely true, but there are moments when I am all up in my feels and I imagine it’s just you and me here, sharing this screen, understanding what none of my words could ever properly convey. Moments where I say things that feel ludicrous to any other reader, but I know will find you nodding in agreement. This post, is yours. Happy Birthday.
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Dear Katie,
In September, after fifteen years of marriage, Joshua and I were finally doing what we had set out to do for our honeymoon (that never happened): visit Spain.
We made the arrangements — no small feat for two weeks away from three very busy kids. We traveled to the other side of the world and we became pilgrims. Pilgrims who would walk fifteen to twenty miles a day, in silence, on the path of St. James, el camino de Santiago. And all of it mattered — every detail more important than anything that had come before. We were here, having survived the unimaginable.
I texted you this picture, and you replied with holy truth: “Spain suits you.”
It was the day before we started the Camino. The next morning we would set out in the pre-dawn fog and walk for endless miles. So we poked around the sleepy Spanish town and found an idyllic pizzeria that made everything feel like a fairytale. The sun was just warm enough to cut through the fall breeze. We settled in just before the lunch rush.
We ordered pizza with sunny side up eggs and local wine made into Sangria. I looked at Joshua like the only care in the world was his affection for me, raised my glass of the most delicious Tinto de Verano that had ever passed my lips, and wondered if there was any limit to our long, rich future. We had done it — we had survived the unimaginable. The world felt wide and generous, full of nothing but possibility.
“Look at us!” I beamed, taking Josh’s picture.
It was in that very moment you texted me: Zuza died. You sent me her mom’s update.
Everything evaporated.
The world — which just seconds before felt expansive and full of possibility — collapsed into a single truth: children are still dying of cancer. I felt the earth open and inhale me, pulling me from a Spanish mountaintop into the bowels of what does survival even mean if kids are still dying?
I began to weep immediately. Hot tears poured down my face, and Josh asked what was going on — were they happy tears? It was a good vibe after all.
“Oh God… Zuza died.” I gasped.
I replied to your text and told you I was in Spain. You apologized for texting me, and then you said:
“It was instinct to reach for you.”
The floodgates opened.
Sometimes I write that I cried or I wept, and it’s mostly hyperbole. What I mean is that hot tears fell and I was very much sad, but I could pull it together. This was not that. The waiter brought our pizza, and I did everything I could to take a single breath to whisper gracias, but all that came out was a garbled, hysteric heave. I cried harder than I have ever cried in public, and there was no stopping it. I wanted to be embarrassed, to pull it together. But there was only unraveling.
Seven years of tears poured out.
Seven years of shallow breaths and heaving sobs.
Seven years of praying Beau, and Maeve, and Zuza, and Chinmay and Sweet Emily… would make it.
Seven years of watching our community lose child after child to this god-forsaken disease.
Seven years of wondering if we would ever be able to simply be a couple in Spain, celebrating an anniversary.
Seven years of friendships with moms who weave survival instincts around one another.
The patio wasn’t packed per se, but every patron looked our way at one point or another. I’m sure they wondered what was transpiring at our table. “This is what survival looks like. This is living!” I imagined wailing like La Llorona — the patrons fearing their fate after hearing my cries.
How could I be here? How could I be anywhere? How could I keep moving through a world where our celebrated survival was bound to the truth that other children will still die? The questions tumbled over one another, catching in my throat as the sun warmed our sangria.
Joshua and I sat there with the pizza growing cold between us, sipping our wine in the silence that only survival can carve out. My heaves eventually softened into weeping, and my weeping into hot, steady tears. We spoke quietly about what it means to survive — how to let ourselves be present to this trip we had long fought for, while knowing that survival is never earned, never guaranteed, and never ever, ever distributed fairly.
Just moments earlier, the world had felt full of nothing but possibility. And now — somehow — it held both: the heaviness of loss, as if the earth itself had opened and pulled me under, and even still the steady, unchosen duty of carrying on.
The hope of the pilgrimage — the very thing we’d come seeking — now pressed hard against my ribs.
You sent one final text:
“I love you. Now pilgrimage on.”
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