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Choosing Life, One Year After the Death of My Daughter
Twelve months ago my 15-year-old daughter died, and grief rolled into my life like a thick fog.
Last week, I folded my first crane.
Cranes were our inside joke. Ana learned how to fold them when she was around 11, a skill I greatly admired because I’d never learned. I once asked her to teach me, but she refused. She liked knowing how to do something I didn’t. Over the next four years, the cranes became a kind of ritual between us. She’d ask for something — a sleepover, a new sweater, a late-night snack — and I’d hand her a bright square of origami paper. “Sure, but it will cost you one crane.”
I kept them all — those precious reminders of our private joke. Sometimes I’ll hold one and remember her slender fingers folding it into being. I picture her satisfied expression as she’d hand me the tiny, perfect crane, and it’s like she’s with me again, just for a moment.
Ana had cancer for almost five years. During the final few months of her life, I was painfully conscious of the lasts (the last day she went to school, her last birthday, the last crane she made me …).
I thought I was done counting. I thought that, with her last breath, there would be some relief from the endless agony of watching her slip away. That was before the grief flooded in, washing…
