season, often backwards, and run up and down our street (barefoot if we don't catch him before he's out the door) recruiting friends to play with...soccer, t-ball, gaga ball. He will stand in the space between the kitchen and living room while everyone is quietly focused doing work in both of those rooms and bounce a ball again...and again...and again. At night, he gathers them all--the soccer balls, gaga balls, volleyball--together and tucks them into a corner for bed so they will be well-rested for the day ahead when he will run them up and down the street again, bouncing, kicking, and hitting endlessly. He likes the idea of being famous but doesn't want the recognition or expectation that comes with fame.
He is so excited about the World Cup he assigned himself reports on the countries of all his favorite players — Mbappe, Neymar, Lamine Yamal, Messi and Ronaldo — interspersing them with encyclopedic knowledge about their flags, languages, demonyms, quizzing me in the car.
He is somewhat stubborn and can be sensitive.
He picks fights with his sisters and delights in teasing.
He will interrogate you with endless mathematical questions ("how many minutes are in twenty-four hours...?") then repeat the answer as a question ("one-thousand-four-hundred-and...what?") maybe three times in a row.
He will sit at the table for hours drawing all of the characters from Poppy Playtime to give as gifts to his sister, throw himself on the floor with the dog and roll around while hugging her madly.
Phin will ask his mom (me) not to play videogames with him because he cannot bear the thought of her dying, even in the game. He will exempt her from "last one there is a rotten egg" because he cannot allow her to be a rotten egg.
This is the life I imagined for Phin, for his sisters, when we started having children 15 years ago--the kind of life where our biggest concerns and their biggest challenges would be whether they struggled academically or had trouble making friends, whether they were kind or knew how to stand up to bullies or defend themselves when bullies came for them. I took for granted those struggles when we had them--before cancer--worrying over them as they slept soundly in their beds at night, praying over them while standing in their doorframes.
Cancer is not a gift; it's a hell I fear arriving back in full force every day, but there is giftedness in the appreciation we have for waking up in a house together under one roof where every child is healthy, no one is fighting for their life, and the air is easier to breathe because of it. Two years out from Phin's transplant means we are safer, but far from safe. There's mourning in this gratitude...mourning for the trauma-free childhood we'd worked so hard to create for our children, the carefully constructed parenting and choices made for them; the organized systems and schedules and carefully selected activities and schools, mourning for the people they don't get to be because cancer stole things from them and left them with trauma people don't know how to approach: the lack of comments on their essays about Phin, the adults in their lives who gave no grace when they visibly struggled.
After Phin's first bout with cancer, because of this lingering fear that it would return if we put our guard down, some part of me never fully returned to the world. It maintained vigilance instead. Every day past 18 months in remission is terrain we've never tread before — we are in it now, and we are proceeding as if this gets to be our life forever, because to proceed any other way would be a misery of its own kind.
"I love watching him, too," he said. I smiled, a little embarrassed to be caught in my reverie of delight over something as simple as a child swimming in a pool.
"It never gets old," I admitted.
"He looks amazing. Every time I see him zipping through the neighborhood, I get teary." He paused, swiped his fingers beneath his sunglasses. "I'm sorry. I'm crying now, too."
He has two children close to Phin's age, slightly older, and when Phin went into remission at four-years-old, he celebrated from the solitude of his own home several blocks away. His whole family did, he told me. The whole neighborhood celebrated triumphantly. They watched from their yards and porches when Phin came home that summer, biking past them or running barefoot, his laughter echoing wildly through their grassy lawns. For 18 whole months, their hearts leapt at that healthy boy whipping through our neighborhood. And when winter 2024 brought relapse with it, they retreated to the solitude of their homes, their altars, the darkness of an empty room and wept.
"I understand," I said. "He's not just ours anymore. He hasn't been just ours for years."
He nodded in agreement: "He's all of ours now."
We stood together, watching Phin splash and squeal like an ordinary kid living an ordinary life with the whole careful, watchful world--divine providence--covering him in gratitude and love.
-N
