OyChicago articles

Marie (left) with the author's daughter, Jenna

At her big sister’s funeral, 6-year-old Ava searched for coins to throw in the baptismal font so she could make a wish. It was the only moment of the entire event that could pass for normal.

In the front of the church lay the body of Ava’s sister, a beautiful 17-year-old girl—a girl who only days beforehand had been full of life, promise and no small measure of piss and vinegar. One minute she was preparing to audition for college music scholarships and getting ready for her senior prom, and the next she was in a box.

It was, as her heartbroken friends said, so random.

Marie was sassy and funny and sweet and talented, and the girl could fight. She had a weak lung but the heart of a lion. I heard that even when that heart stopped, so strong was her spirit that Marie clawed her way back to life—four times over. The fifth time, death won.

If I were a betting woman, I would have bet on Marie.

At her parents’ request, Marie’s friends from jazz and choir sang at her memorial service and funeral mass. Teetering on their high heels, the ashen-faced teenagers rose to the occasion. Later that night they would kick off their shoes and their composure, but at the church they stood together like soldiers and sang like angels.

Afterwards, I held my sobbing child in my arms and yearned for the days when she only needed comfort because she’d scraped her knee.

Each of us punctuates our lives with annual holidays and occasional life cycle events, creating a personal sense of our position in time. We might calculate “He was president when I was in 8th grade,” or ask “Wasn’t that the year we went to Denver for Passover?” But there is also a parallel universe in which grown-ups measure the passing years by annual screening tests and yarzheits: “That was just before my surgery,” we say, and “This is our first Thanksgiving since Herb died.” Isn’t 16 too young to start cataloguing the passage of time in terms of loss?
It is said that teenagers are resilient, and I suppose that’s true. In the days surrounding her death, Marie’s friends created Facebook groups, videos and posters in her memory. My daughter politely asked her literature teacher for an extension on reading a book centered around a child’s life-threatening illness. The teens comforted one another, and made plans to honor Marie at their remaining choir performances. They were exceptionally kind and compassionate to the anguished high school administrators and teachers hovering over them. Gradually the students resumed their schoolwork, their car pools and their college applications. But the look in their eyes was changed, maybe forever.

Rule #1: Sometimes life sucks.

Rule #2: Mothers can’t change Rule #1.

I religiously recorded my daughter’s first tooth, first steps and first words, but I found no space in her baby book for this milestone. The hardest part of being a mom is neither the “terrible twos” nor the teen years, but this: the agony of bearing witness as my child’s heart is broken. I expected this to come when she didn’t get the role she wanted in a school play, or when a boy she liked just wanted to be “friends.” I did not expect a loss so great that it also would shatter her to the core.

When others reminisce about their first lover, first apartment or first job, I’m afraid my daughter and her friends will instead identify Marie’s death as the moment in time when their childhoods ended. Because it’s the truth.