“If hair doesn’t matter,” Emily said, “then we can cut off all of yours.”
I paused for a second. She’d caught me in my hypocrisy. I meant her hair didn’t matter, not mine. So I grabbed the electric razor from my duffel bag and popped out the beard-trimmer attachment to hand to Emily.
“Okay,” I said. “You shave my head and then I’ll shave yours.”
I laid my head on her lap and she went to work. To be honest with you, I thought there was no way that small clipper manipulated by her little hand would give me much of a pruning. When I pulled myself up and took a look in the mirror, I had just a thin layer of fuzz. It was shocking to see.
“My turn to shave yours!” I said. And I did.
When I was done, we were completely bald. I took her over to the mirror so she could get a look at the two of us together. I saw a look, a mood, come over her face. It was not shock or anger, but gratitude. Emily put her little arms around my neck and gave me a kiss on the cheek.
“I love you, Daddy,” she said.
The next day, we had a visit from Penn State students who participate in THON.
The Penn State Dance Marathon, or THON, is a forty-six-hour dance marathon that the students hold every year on the third weekend in February. The event raises money to financially support the pediatric cancer families who are treated at Hershey Medical Center. Nearly 15,000 Penn State students participate in THON each year. THON has supported thousands of families, and now we were among them. We were grateful for that monetary support, but on this day in October we learned how much more support those students had to offer. Each child and family are adopted by a Penn State student organization, and our family was adopted by the university’s public relations student society, the PRSSA.
We were in Emily’s room watching Nickelodeon when we heard a commotion in the hallway, the sound of high voices and laughter that always precede a visit from THON. The nursing staff lets families know when the THON kids are coming because not every family is ready for the energy of a half dozen excitable young people. We were eager, though, and when the blast of joy of their arrival reached our ears, Emily asked us to turn off the television. Then there they were, decked out in their Penn State Nittany Lions gear, framed by the six window panes in the door to Emily’s room. I saw Ariana, the junior who a few weeks earlier had shepherded us around the THON Harvest Festival, walking us between the corn maze and the pumpkin patch. We all liked Ariana, a native of Pittston, a small town in the northeastern part of Pennsylvania, close to Scranton. We were hoping she’d be one of the students allowed into Emily’s room, but two of the other students came inside to visit instead.
I went into the hallway to thank Ariana and the others for coming, and Emily insisted she wanted to give them all Silly Bandz, these colorful, stretchy wristbands she’d been collecting from the doctors and the nurses on the unit.
Later that day one of the students who had visited Emily’s room, Becky Salman, wrote a note for us on the CaringBridge blog that really touched Kari and me. Becky wrote that she loved and admired our family, even from that brief visit. Many in her family had survived cancer, and she wrote that she didn’t know which was harder: to have cancer or “to watch it happen to someone you would give your life for.… When all is in the past Emily will have her strength, her wonderful parents by her side, and a story she will share with others who are in the shoes she is in now. She will be a role model and will inspire others with her bravery and experiences.”
What we loved about that note from Becky was her positive attitude that matched our own, and her powerful heartfelt message. She wrote that she followed Kari’s blog and that “Emily is in my every prayer. The little angel has not left my mind since I had the opportunity to meet her on Tuesday. Thank you for letting us be a part of your child’s life.” When we got out of the hospital and back to Philipsburg, we invited Becky to come visit. We had no idea what a big part of our lives she was about to become.
From the moment she arrived in our home, Becky fit right in with our family. She was excitable and flamboyant, a force of nature, and all of that came through as joy. Many times, when people came to visit Emily, Kari and I acted as entertainment coordinators, trying to think of something to do that Emily and the visitors could both enjoy. Becky came ready to play, with a satchel full of Silly String and prepared to become a dog or a space alien, or whatever kind of character would make Emily laugh. She walked in the door and straight off to Emily’s room, like her kindergarten friends did. We heard them giggling and goofing around until they were ready to eat. All of us agreed that Becky was welcome anytime she wanted to visit.
In November, when Emily returned to school after a hospital stay, she was wearing a hat to cover her bald head and felt a little self-conscious about it. When she entered her kindergarten class, she saw that all her classmates and teachers were wearing hats, too. The principal had allowed the students to show their support for her if they wanted to do so, and many of
