WHEN I LOOK back to the late summer and early fall of 2004, time feels both elongated and compressed, recollections alternately intensely singular and dizzyingly blurred. At times it almost felt as if I’d fallen asleep to awaken with neither peripheral vision nor perspective, trying to chart a course with only a ripped fragment from a map I didn’t recognize.
And yet, I’d felt so clear and confident when Andrew, Sophie, and I moved into our new apartment on a 93-degree day in late July. I look around, wishing Ginger could see the place now, as it had been under renovation when she’d helped me apartment-hunt just a few months before. But even through the dust and debris, she’d been able to tell that it would be spacious and full of light, and had adored the wide terrace. I imagined planting orange trees and jasmine, the scent wafting through the bedroom. Sophie had other ideas. “Mommy, this is big enough for my trike!”
I was so excited to finally move that, despite Andrew’s admonition not to lift anything, I picked up a heavy box and promptly bumped my enormous stomach. I kept forgetting that I was seven months pregnant, not to mention forty-three years old. Panicked, I scheduled an ultrasound for the next day. But everything was okay—our baby still frolicking like a manatee in its watery world. I envied the baby. I had boxes to unpack. Baby items to wash and buy. Sophie’s room to organize. Not to mention my work at Dateline.
I had recently met Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America, an organization that places top college graduates in the nation’s worst public schools for a two-year teaching commitment. Impressed by further research on Kopp and the extraordinary corps she’d created, I’d written a brief proposal, or “pitch,” for a possible story. I’d suggested we follow one teacher during her first year in the classroom—a story of drama in its own right, but also a prism through which we could examine public education in America. Dateline’s senior producers and executive producer agreed, and I was scheduled to fly to Atlanta to interview the young teacher we’d selected on the weekend of August 7. I wasn’t worried. Sophie had been two weeks late, so by my reckoning, the baby wouldn’t arrive until early October.
But my sensible obstetrician was unimpressed. “You can’t know when any baby is going to be born, Sara,” Dr. Kessler told me. “If anything happens, you’ll be giving birth in Atlanta.”
So instead I spent that weekend relaxing in the country with Andrew and Sophie. It was a decision for which I would thank God hundreds of times in the weeks that followed, because on Monday morning, August 9, I discovered to my horror that I was leaking. Except I couldn’t be. It was impossible. Our baby wasn’t due for another two months.
Andrew and I rushed to the hospital, where Dr. Kessler’s partner met us. “As you guessed, your waters have broken, so we’ll start an antibiotic drip to prevent your baby from getting an infection,” Dr. Edersheim explained, and her kind, competent manner acted as a tonic. “We’ll hope to keep you here on bedrest for the next few weeks. But when the membranes rupture, usually a mom will deliver in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours.”
I swallowed hard. “How big is our baby?”
She paused. “Probably about four pounds.”
I closed my eyes, which were suddenly leaking, too. To think what I had almost done.
Andrew patted my arm. “Everything is going to be okay.”
But the baby wasn’t born that night, or the next, or the next.
“Do you feel any contractions?” a nurse asked, tightening the blood pressure cuff.
Instead I felt bizarrely fine, as if nothing had happened. “Nope. Not one.”
“Good. And your temperature is normal, so no infection. Keep it up! If we can keep you here a month, your baby will be a good size.”
After several days of being allowed out of bed only to use the bathroom, I earned a daily two-minute shower, and found to my surprise that I was settling in. I was at a first-rate hospital and I trusted my doctors. Andrew brought my computer, a stack of movies, and, best of all, Sophie. The first night her lip quivered. “Daddy will sing ‘Twinkle,’ Soph.” She gave a watery nod, but for once said nothing. But before long she’d met the entire floor and made her own rounds, checking up on her favorite nurses and patients as well as “Dr. Kess-a-ler” before finally coming to my room to fiddle with the levers on my bed and draw pictures to decorate the stark walls.
Sophie and Andrew got me through the evenings. Friends and family got me through the days. “Here’s your decaf latte and a turkey sandwich,” offered Andi. “I’ve got chocolate,” said Lisa. Sharon brought a lovely baby bag; Amy, a purse and magazines. “Nothing heavy,” she grinned. And Roberta pulled open the curtains overlooking the East River and assessed, “This plant will make your room look much better.” Ginger telephoned, Mom and Dad visited. My sisters Elizabeth and Susan called every day. But it still seemed there were endless hours to fill and I was restless and bored. For me, that usually meant one thing.
“This is the NBC operator. Atlanta, are you on the line?”
“We are.”
“We’re here, too.” I heard Dateline producer Izhar Harpaz and senior producer Ellen Mason chime in.
I propped two pillows under my arm, trying to get comfortable.
“Ms. James? Are you ready for the conference call?”
“Yes, I am.”
School started in Atlanta in just a few days and we needed to iron out the final details with the local school board for our story on Teach for America. I refused to fast-forward to the end of September, when I’d need to leave our tiny newborn for a couple of days to fly to Georgia to interview the teacher and her students. I adored this story and somehow, someway, planned to complete it.
BY THE END of August, I’d been in the hospital for nearly a month and was thirty-six weeks pregnant. While our baby was still one month shy of full term, Dr. Kessler and his colleagues decided it was time to induce labor, because the baby’s risk of contracting an infection now outweighed the risk of being born premature. Andrew and I agreed. I couldn’t wait to meet our child. So early one morning, I was hooked to an IV of contraction-inducing Pitocin for what everyone assumed would be a quick labor. After all, this was my second child and the amniotic sac had been broken for a month.
But hour after hour, the contractions continued, as the obstetric team carefully added more Pitocin. By midnight there was talk of a C-section but the operating rooms were full. Andrew and I anxiously watched the fetal stress monitor, but our baby seemed perfectly tranquil. Finally, after twenty-four hours, at 6 A.M. on August 28, Jacqueline Elizabeth made her debut.
Andrew and I looked into the sweet face of our newborn. Just under six pounds, she seemed tiny compared with her three-and-a-half-year-old sister, yet we knew she was a healthy size. Relief and delight mingled on my husband’s face, emotions I knew were mirrored on mine. “Hello, little treasure,” Andrew said. “She’s perfect, just like Sophie.” And she was. Indeed Jacqueline was doing so well she was allowed to come straight to my room. As I held our tiny daughter, leaning forward to breathe in the newness of her, I felt a bright, bracing happiness as if I’d tapped a deep, clear spring. I’d had a child at forty-three, just like my Grannykins. Our family felt complete.
The celebration lasted less than twenty-four hours. The next morning Jacqueline seemed listless and refused to breast-feed.
“She’s a little yellow. Probably jaundice,” one nurse suggested.
The pediatric team wasn’t convinced. “Even though you were on antibiotics, it’s possible Jacqueline contracted an infection. We’d like to do a spinal tap to know for sure.”
Andrew and I looked at each other. A needle plunged into our baby’s spine. My friend Julie and her son had been in New York a few years before when Tarl had contracted meningitis. Thankfully, he’d made a complete recovery. But I knew from that experience how painful a spinal tap was. So when doctors returned with news that our newborn hadn’t cried, I didn’t know whether to weep from joy or fear.
While the test showed no signs of infection, Jacqueline still wouldn’t nurse. I willed myself to be calm. Lots of infants got jaundice. Kimber had had it. But I felt slashes of anxiety: stealthy, unpredictable, sharp as lightning cleaving a darkening sky.
Exhausted, that night I fell into a deep sleep interrupted by a careful knock. The light from the hall outlined an indistinct shape in scrubs, one hand holding a mask.
“I’m sorry to disturb you, especially at four in the morning. Look, everything is okay, but we’ve moved Jacqueline to the NICU—the neonatal intensive care unit.”
I sat up on the bed, held on to my knees for support, rocked like a baby. My mouth wouldn’t work properly. My tongue felt swollen. “Why is she in the NICU??” I managed.
“She was a little blue.”
“She’s not breathing?”
“Please don’t worry,” responded the doctor. “She’s fine now. But in the NICU, all babies are hooked to monitors and we have far more nurses. We’ll just keep her for observation.”
For observation. Such a safe, innocuous term. Little could I know the next four days would be the most harrowing of my life.
The following morning I stumbled as I gathered together my belongings to check out of the hospital. Maternity clothes, Sophie’s artwork, the plant from my window. But inside the tiny infant carrier, no baby. I wept all the way home. “She’ll be home soon,” Andrew consoled me. A few hours later the telephone rang. “Could you come back to the NICU? Jacqueline is okay, but we believe she’s had a seizure.”
A SEIZURE. THE word struck like another slash of lightning. I simply could not believe it. This could not be happening. I had a sudden, terrifying image of Jacqueline’s mind shorting, arcing out of control. I pictured wildfires like those I’d covered in California, the hills orange and crackling. My feverish mind clattered, jumped tracks, and now the image was of hurricane winds ripping down electrical poles in a crash of sparks, all this fury unleashed in my baby’s brain. How much did it hurt, the jolt from those mangled lines, everything burning, melting?
I knew too much. Too much from Ginger. Too much about dear Tish. Her sister. Now our baby. And Jacqueline was only three days old.
We took a taxi to the hospital and I hobbled into the hospital clutching Andrew’s arm, struggling to walk after a month in bed and an arduous labor. Jacqueline didn’t open her eyes. A feeding tube had been threaded through her nose. One arm was splinted and her tiny hands were salted with pricks from IVs and blood tests. Her head was wrapped in gauze, a tiny cap with a whale spout of wires.
“We’ve put her on phenobarbital, to suppress any seizures, and that machine is an EEG. It will map her brain waves,” a nurse explained, guiding us toward a machine where a series of lines moved up and down to the unseen conductor in Jacqueline’s mind. It was like trying to decipher a score if you couldn’t read music. The paper had already pooled on the floor, reminding me of the old wire service machines, the day’s news distilled to be ripped and read. “And tonight we’ll do an MRI,” the nurse continued, “to see if there are any…structural issues.”
I’d been afraid before. Afraid for my own life in remote, hostile situations. And during 9/11 and especially anthrax, terrified for Sophie. I’d endured hours, even days of fear that suffused everything, where you counted a minute by the pulse thumping in your neck. But no matter how dire the situation I’d always been able to spot the crack of light that led to the escape route. I’d never felt fear like this, fear that I would never escape fear. This was a sickening tumble through mile after mile of a briny Atlantic that had no bottom, trapped in a tiny titanium sphere and sinking, endlessly sinking.
I called Gin.
“Oh, Sara. How I wish I were there.”
“Not as much as I do.”
Ginger was calm, although I knew she must be thinking about Tish, too, about all that she’d seen, about all that she’d told me. But when she spoke, what she said was “Sara, she’s a fighter.”
In spite of myself, I was surprised. “I don’t know, Gin. She’s so small. Less than six pounds!”
“Maybe, but she’s your little girl, Sara. She’s a fighter. You’ll see.” But I felt like I was in a free fall, trying to hide my fear from three-year-old Sophie, clutching desperately to Andrew, unable to rescue anyone, even myself.
OVER THE NEXT few days we learned a lot about what Jacqueline did not have. The MRI scan of her brain was normal. A second spinal tap also showed no sign of infection. Yet Jacqueline appeared lifeless, as if bewitched, as if the pricks in her arm had come from a spinning wheel and our girl was an infant Sleeping Beauty lying in a glass casket instead of a plastic isolette. Around her, the White Coats flapped and fluttered, chattered and conferred. Perhaps her near-comatose state was a result of the medicine. They reduced the pheno. Jacqueline seized again. They shook their heads, tried another drug, Dilantin, even though they warned us that it might thicken her gums, cause hair to sprout all over her body, coarsen her lovely features. More wicked, wicked spells.
Our daughter had been in intensive care for a week, but she remained an enigma. Did she have some catastrophic disease? Were the seizures connected to my ruptured membranes or to a lengthy labor? I prayed not. Even with their expensive equipment and state-of-the-art tests, the brilliant doctors were flummoxed.
I try not to remember those days. They return unbidden, in fragments, pieces of a quilt. A memory here stitched to a recollection there, a shred of conversation connected to an image, scraps of color, broken threads, often out of order, a pattern I knew wouldn’t become clear for months.
I called Linda, who’d left life at the network to spend more time with her son, Ryan. “Listen, I’m picturing you here at Goose Rocks Beach this summer. Jacqueline healthy. Sophie and Ryan running around. Can you hold on to that?”
I tried. In mid-September, Sophie started nursery school. I’d looked forward to this day. I hadn’t imagined dashing over from the hospital. And as we met the other parents, Andrew was forced to speak for both of us as I withdrew, afraid of dissolving. Sophie knew something was wrong, even drew pictures of her family without her baby sister. I was glad she’d have three hours a day away from the electrical current of fear and uncertainty. Wearing a pink-and-blue-striped dress and a hesitant expression, she gave us a wave. Then she squared her shoulders, smiled up at her teachers, and never looked back.
BUT SLEEPING BEAUTY slumbered on. The first week became the second. At the hospital, while I took the day shift, Andrew would come home from work, have dinner with Sophie, then head to the hospital, where he would remain until the early hours of the morning. The sight of him gently holding our fairy-tale daughter in her Medusa cap of wires made me want to weep. Yet holding her was all we could do.
It was more than Andrew and I could handle alone, and our families rallied, forming a rotating crisis support team. Mom reorganized her busy schedule of piano students and Dad brought his research material for the paper he was writing on theologian Paul Tillich. Their presence was a comfort to us, and Sophie. “You make the best chicken, Granne! And I even ate my carrots,” raved our big girl. And Mom patted Andrew’s arm and told him softly, “It’s hard to be the strong, silent one.” Dad, the professor, offered analogies. “Think of Jacqueline as a diamond and the medicine as a chisel. You’re going to chip away the rock to reveal her true facets, the brilliance of your girl.”
My sister Elizabeth took time off from her job in development at Saint Mary’s College of California to fly east. A talented singer and music professor, she’d had to start a whole new career after sustaining a vocal injury. My sister’s misfortune had made her stronger. Her hugs were filled with love and loyalty, and she immediately set to work spoiling her nieces. And my sister Susan, herself due in just a few weeks, called daily, and sent us Psalm 91: “…He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge.”
When my family could stay no longer, Andrew’s mother flew across from Australia for an entire month, leaving her husband’s side for the first time in their thirty-eight-year marriage. By day Nana laughed and played games with Sophie and visited Jacqueline. “Ah, look at her,” Nana said, her large blue eyes welling with tears when she saw her silent, slumbering granddaughter for the first time. But it was a rare moment, for she was resolutely upbeat. Only in the evenings, after preparing an enormous feast, would Andrew’s mother’s face show the strain, and she’d knit her sorrows into lovely sweaters for her granddaughters. The rest of the Butcher clan called frequently, and we spoke to Andrew’s sister Chrissie every day. A skilled nurse who’d worked with premature infants and in an NICU, Chrissie could translate all we were hearing in the hospital. One night she had a question.
“Have they tried pyridoxine?”
“Peer-a-what?” Andrew replied.
“It’s actually a vitamin, B6. But in Australia, we also use it for seizures in newborns.”
The New York doctors were polite but somewhat skeptical. Nevertheless, Jacqueline had been asleep and on a feeding tube in intensive care for nearly two weeks. Whether humoring us or running out of options, they gave our daughter the vitamin in addition to her Dilantin. Several hours later a nurse at the NICU telephoned.
“Come down, right away!” she exclaimed. “Jacqueline opened her eyes. And she’s crying!”
After endless days of silence, what a sweet sweet sound it was.
TWO AND A half weeks after she was born, Jacqueline was finally well enough for us to take her home. We tucked her pretty pink and white frock into her car seat, took pictures of her and Sophie with the beaming nurses. I finally felt ready to open the baby gifts I’d shoved out of sight, including a soft, fawn-colored blanket hand-stitched with a pink giraffe from Ginger, Nad, and Kimber. Now both girls had a touch of Africa in their rooms, for they’d already given Sophie a beautiful karakul rug bordered with elephants, rhinos, and giraffes. Every eight hours we administered our daughter’s two medicines, a small price for having her home with us.
But a few days later the telephone rang. Jacqueline’s doctors had decided she no longer needed Dilantin, with its potentially serious side effects for newborns.
“You want us to stop cold turkey?” I asked, anxious to know if I’d heard correctly.
“Yes.” The doctor explained that our daughter was already on such a low dose that the medicine couldn’t be working. It seemed too good to be true.
In the middle of the night, barely twenty-four hours later, Jacqueline made a strange distressing cry. Was this a seizure? We’d never seen one. Forty-five minutes later we had no doubt. This time Jacqueline screamed as if someone had stabbed her through the skull with a stiletto. And then she began to jerk, short, terrible twitches, once again under an evil spell, her arms and legs moving rhythmically.
“Andrew, she’s not breathing!”
“Hang on, she is, yes, yes she is, yes she is! Hold on there, sweetie,” he crooned, cradling our tiny girl as she gasped for air, her pale skin turning a frightening muddy color. And finally the seizure ended and her eyes closed and her labored breathing returned to normal. We scooped her up in a cocoon of blankets and dashed downstairs to the taxi, the fastest route to the emergency room. She had been home three days.
OVER THE NEXT twenty-four hours in the hospital, Andrew and I would witness our newborn have five more seizures, each precipitated by a shattering scream. The sight of her jabbed and stuck and clapped with an oxygen mask as she struggled to breathe caused my milk to dry up in a day.
“Please give her Dilantin,” I begged. “She doesn’t respond well to pheno.”
The emergency room team gave her pheno, the first choice for newborns with seizures.
Hours later she seized again. More screams, more oxygen. I knew I must look crazy, judging by the increasingly calm expressions of everyone around me. “It’s okay, Mom, don’t worry. We’ve got another med. We’ll figure out mg’s per kg’s—the right dose for your girl,” the doctors tried to reassure me. “And we’ve also hooked her up to video monitors. Maybe we can diagnose her condition from the appearance of her seizures.”
I slumped at the thought of someone, somewhere, casually watching this tape, slurping coffee and scribbling notes while watching my daughter seize. She wasn’t a cipher, wasn’t a code to be broken. She was a baby, our baby girl.
Andrew stroked my hand. I didn’t recognize myself. The wild-eyed face in the mirror. My shaky hands. The biting sound of my voice. I felt like I must be losing my mind. I called Gin again.
“How did your mom do it?”
“I don’t know, Sara. She had four kids and one endless search to find the right doctors for Tish. But she managed and so will you. Look, Sara, didn’t you say doctors told you Jacqueline’s MRI was normal?”
“Yes. And she’s had two.”
I could hear her sigh. “Sara, that is great news. That’s not the case with Tish. I wish it were. Once they figure out the medicine for Jacqueline everything will be all right. I just wish I could be there! Do you want Mom to come up?”
I felt tears well up again. We had been friends so long that Gin’s family now felt like an extension of my own.
“We’ll be okay.”
IT WAS SEPTEMBER 21, 2004. Jacqueline’s due date. Instead she was three and a half weeks old and still in the NICU. The new medicine hadn’t worked, and she’d had seizure after seizure. I felt as if I were living a Dateline story. And I hated it. I’d always considered myself a reporter by nature as well as training, instinctively curious. But now I was stripped of everything save the desire to see our little girl get better. After more than 20 years as a reporter, suddenly I didn’t care about chasing stories. Let someone else fly to Atlanta, report on Teach for America. What an idiot I’d been, sitting in my hospital bed, thinking such a thing were possible. I’d lost my balance, and with it my inquisitiveness. I realized I no longer cared what disease or disorder Jacqueline had. I just wanted her to get better.
Yet even as part of me rejected work, I discovered that all those years of training were impossible to ignore. I couldn’t erase the knowledge of how to ask questions, how to analyze. I was neither dismissive of White Coats nor cowed by them. I was Jacqueline’s advocate, her ally, her mom. No one knew Jacqueline better than Andrew and I, no one loved her more. Slowly I realized that to be the mother of a sick child meant being a reporter. It certainly felt better to walk into the intensive care unit armed with notepad and pen than to sit by her bed and weep. And while I knew that Jacqueline’s case was rare and difficult, and while I was a mom, not a neurologist, the time I’d spent at her bedside had given me confidence in my observations. Andrew and I were convinced our daughter needed to be placed back on the combination of medicines which had allowed her to come home in the first place. The doctors reached the same conclusion, and slowly began the gradual, challenging process of weaning her from one medicine while starting another.
All through those bleak days, family and friends rallied to support us. Andrew’s sister and my NBC colleagues scoured medical journals and trawled the Net, searching for any condition similar to Jacqueline’s. They sat by us at the hospital. And they reached out to us at home.
“Sara,” said Andrew’s mom, “what’s this?”
“Bob and Suzanne Wright,” read the tag on the Moses basket overflowing with food, baby clothes, blankets, and bibs. The chairman and CEO of NBC Universal and his wife. Next to it was a giant box of food from Agata & Valentina, courtesy of Bridget, Linda’s college roommate and now my friend, too. “This is just the beginning,” she warned cheerfully. “You’ll get Elena’s tomorrow.” Twice a week for months the boxes arrived, each with a card listing friends from Nightly News, from Specials, from the front office, and, of course, from Dateline.
On a quiet weekend near the end of September, I suggested Andrew take his mom and Sophie to the country. They needed a break and Ellen, my friend from Dateline, would join me at the hospital. Jacqueline hadn’t had a seizure in several days and seemed to be improving. She still wore her cap of wires, but at least she was now in a crib. As Ellen and I chatted quietly, a neurologist scanned Jacqueline’s EEG report, appearing increasingly agitated.
“What is it?” I asked, alarmed.
He shook his head. “I cannot begin to tell you how concerned I am about your daughter’s brain.”
It seemed as if the floor were suddenly undulating, even sinking. I put a hand on the metal bar of Jacqueline’s crib to steady myself. “Excuse me?”
He gestured to the EEG reading. “I cannot sugarcoat this.”
“But she’s getting better!” I argued. “She’s opening her eyes, looking around—”
He shook his head impatiently. “I am sorry, but look, I must tell you. The electrical activity in your daughter’s brain is a mess. A mess. This is not about bedside manner. This is about telling you the truth, getting you prepared.”
Frightened as I was, I fought to remain calm. I did not believe him. I would not. I could not.
“But her MRI was clear!”
He shook his head. “This is not a normal brain. This is a brain with problems.”
“So what are you telling me? What does that mean for the future? Her development?”
He shook his head again. His only answer was to open his hands, the answer unknowable. But the expression on his face made me shiver.
I felt vanquished. I looked over at my friend. Ellen’s face had crumpled, too. Tears coursed down her face. She had a daughter, too. Lovely Natalie. She understood.
I called Andrew. “We’ll be home in two hours,” he said, then paused. “Look, things have a way of working out.” But for once his voice sounded hollow, flat. And I realized how much I wanted to throw my arms around him, realized how much the husband who loved and supported me needed support himself. But to do that, I needed to pull myself together.
I called Ginger. “I don’t know what to think, what to believe. It sounds like the doctor’s saying Jacqueline could be like Kristy’s daughter Emma,” I finished.
“Sara, I’m still not sure I believe that. But you must call Kristy.”
When I did, Ginger’s old friend, a friend who’d become my friend, too, called back immediately. “Sara how can I help?”
I paused. “Just one thing, really. I just want you to tell me that I’m going to get through this.”
To my surprise, she didn’t hesitate. “Of course you will.”
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
I drew a shaky breath. I believed her. And to believe her restored my belief in myself. The free fall was over and I’d landed on firm ground. Suddenly I heard the sound of cheering in the background. “Kristy, where are you?”
She chuckled. “Well, I’m actually at the starting line for a half marathon but figured I had time to call you first.”
I began laughing, and laughing felt good. “You are too much. I can’t believe how together you are.”
“Look, Sara, it’s not that we don’t have problems. Emma can’t walk. She can’t talk. We don’t know how much she understands. And yes, she has seizures. I’d be the first to tell you, sometimes it’s scary. But Gordy and Carter are great with her. We all love her. And we’re happy.”
I hung up the phone and I realized with relief that I didn’t feel crazy anymore. Sad, yes. Angry and confused. But not crazy. I could go on, I knew it. I could be strong, as my husband was strong, could support him as he, more than anyone else, supported me. And the person who had helped me get there was the friend of a friend.
I had been lucky in life, I knew. Blessed to have loving parents and sisters I’d always known I could count on. And blessed to have extraordinary friends. Friends I’d known most of my life. Friends I’d met along the way. And those whom I barely knew, but who’d been willing to help in a crisis, simply because they were friends of a friend.
ON OCTOBER 1, my sister Susan became a mom. “His name is Sebastian,” she told us, euphoric if exhausted.
“Oh, Susan, that’s fantastic!” I said, thrilled for Danny and her, and for the chance to be Sebastian’s aunt. And a few days later, on October 5, there was another reason for excitement. Six weeks after her birth, Jacqueline was again coming home from the hospital. This time our departure was muted. We had oxygen tanks, CPR instructions, additional details about administering her medicine every three hours. But we also had experience. We’d learned to prune expectations, to hold fast to hope. It was dangerous to look too far ahead. But then again, it was far more dangerous not to be grateful, to miss out on the chance to savor one extraordinary day. Please, God, let tomorrow be the same.