Two years ago during Advent, my eleven-year old daughter, Josephine, breathed her last.
She had relapsed eight months prior, around her birthday, from a leukemia that we thought had been eradicated when she was four. But God knew that it was not gone. One or two cells remained in her bone marrow, and they stayed there, hidden, ready to begin dividing again, ultimately uncontrollably, with us oblivious.
I’ve thought a lot about those cells, the cancer cells that didn’t die. All that time, unbeknownst to us, Josephine had something deadly within her, waiting to grow large and strike. It was a death sentence even then, which seems unfair to give to a little girl.
But as I thought more about it, I realized that we all live under a death sentence. Nobody here gets out alive. We are destined to die once, and face judgment, and we don’t know whether that will be today, tomorrow, next year, next decade, or at a ripe old age.
With Josephine, we were given a gift to know that her leukemia had become terminal. Did we try to cram everything into those last few months of her earthly life? No. We just kept living the life we always had. Because long ago, when my children were very young, I had an image of my mind of the next decade being crucial to their happy and holy upbringings. I thought of it as “the defining decade” of their lives, and I committed to being with them as much as I could.
That spring, Josephine hit a growth spurt and complained of pain in her leg joints. We attributed it to growing pains. But they got worse, and my wife and I began to fear the worst. We took her to the children’s hospital. They ran more tests, and we waited for days there. Then the doctors filed in and sat around her hospital bed. We held her hand. We knew what was coming. They told her that she had relapsed. We sat there together and wept.
We knew that this time, the leukemia would likely resist the chemo and be uncurable. We chose not to put her struggle on social media. We didn’t have bracelets produced. We just shared the news with friends and family, asking for prayers. And they prayed, and prayed faithfully.
After a grueling month in the hospital after her relapse, she finally got to go home. But the bone marrow biopsy showed that the leukemia load in her marrow had barely been affected by the potent chemo doses she’d received.
Only one treatment had a possibility of success, a T-cell treatment where they would drain out her blood, filter the T-cells, mark them up with special killer nodules to target the leukemia, then infuse them back in. The treatment itself would render her unable to have children. I never told my daughter that. She was eleven and didn’t need to know. She had always wanted to be a wife and mother when she grew up.
While hooked up to the machines to extract her blood and get the T-cells, both her arms were out to her side, with large PICC lines in each one to handle the volume of the blood. For hours she could not move, and the image of Christ, arms outstretched on the cross, came to my mind.
Heroically, she offered all these sufferings to Our Lord for her aunts and uncles, all of whom, save one, have left the Catholic faith. One day, I pray they may know the price for their hardened hearts to be moved back to Christ.
The doctors reinfused her T-cells, and her leukemia was killed. My daughter told me that she was “hoping against hope” that she would be cured.
We got to leave the hospital, but we knew that they had to now do ongoing special bone marrow biopsies every month to see if all the cancer was gone. A few months in, they found what we feared: two cells out of a million had mutated to find a way to evade the T-cells. The doctors called us and told us that she was terminal. There was nothing they could do.
We sat on the couch after getting that call, and together we cried as family. I had told my daughter that this relapse might end in her death, but I had never dwelt on it. It didn’t seem right to burden a little girl with such a weight. Now we had to face it.
We just sat together. Eventually my wife and son moved off the couch to take care of other things, and my daughter and I remained. Quiet. Next to each other. There was nothing more to say then, just a need to be together. I was her protector, but I could not protect her from this disease.
Over the next month, the leukemia spread and grew all over. Near the end, our daughter said to us, “I’m ready to die.” I was cut to the heart, and yet relieved, that by God’s grace she had come to such a place of peace.
I bought St. Alphonsus Liguouri’s book, Preparation for Death, with the thought that I would read it aloud to my daughter, but after prereading the first chapters, I realized that it was not the right thing for her to hear. It was instead for me to read, to internalize, to prepare for my own death. My daughter was already prepared for hers.
Together, we prayed the indulgenced prayer to accept the death that God has chosen for each of us: “My Lord God, even now resignedly and willingly, I accept at thy hand, with all its anxieties, pains, and sufferings, whatever kind of death it shall please Thee to be mine.”
The last novena that I prayed was the St. Andrew Christmas novena, a beautiful devotion that begins on St. Andrew’s feast day at the end of November, through Advent, to Christmas Day. My intention for it was “for Josephine’s salvation.”
My wife and I knelt by her bedside when she breathed her last breath.
Every time now when we pray the Sorrowful Mysteries, the Crucifixion, I think of Jesus breathing his last. Like my daughter, Jesus had undergone an agony.
It’s been two years since my daughter died. I have come to understand that my daughter’s life was not “cut short.” Rather, she lived exactly the number of days that God willed her to live. She lived those days as Christ wanted her to live them.
My daughter’s gravestone reads, Ave Crux Spes Unica—Hail the Cross, Our Only Hope. Her death has lessened my attachment to this world, to this life, and made me long for reunion together in the beatific vision of heaven.
That Advent was a mixture of the joy of Christmas, the liberation of my daughter from her passion, and the heart-rending grief at her leaving this world. Each Advent for us carries that same joy and sadness. A great deal of sweetness has left our family’s life, and it will not return. But all the more do we look forward to that day when Our Lord will come in his love and glory.