Remembering Ana, A Child Who Died of Cancer
It never feels like enough — these tokens of our love for Ana — but at least it’s something.
In a calendar full of months dedicated to specific illnesses, September is particularly painful. This is the month focused on childhood cancer awareness. You’ll see gold everywhere — gold ribbons, gold banners, gold-themed profile photos on social media, all in the name of awareness and remembrance for children battling cancer. And kids, like my Ana, who lost that fight.
Each year in the United States, roughly 16,000 children from birth to age 19 will be diagnosed with cancer and 1,780 of them will die of it.
Ana died on March 22, 2017, at age 15, of a rare type of cancerous tumor.
Yet she’s always with me, always at the periphery of every thought, every moment. I still say good night to her. I talk to her in the morning as I replenish the bird feeders. It’s no burden for me to remember Ana, but keeping her memory alive in the minds and hearts of other people? I’m finding this a challenge, particularly as time passes.
In the beginning, it wasn’t difficult because everyone was grieving. Ana was in the thoughts and hearts of an entire community of people who had been with us, cheering us on and rooting for Ana, for five years. But life, as they say, goes on.
