Hug Your Kids

I just got back from a fundraiser my husband hosted for a childhood friend who has a two-year-old boy diagnosed with advanced liver cancer. Dillon, who has had nine rounds of chemotherapy since December 2004, used to be on a liver transplant list, but was taken off a couple of weeks ago because the doctors fear the cancer has spread. He's in the hospital now, and it doesn't look good. And I felt badly about it at first, in the way that you feel when you yourself are a parent of small children, and are told that another small child - who you don't know and in fact, have never met - is very ill. But I started crying when the mother's best friend spoke before the microphone and told about how one of her most precious moments with Dillon was when he fell asleep by stroking the end of her shirtsleeve - one of the little things he usually only does with his mother and grandmother - and when I then turned around and saw a large slideshow picture of Dillon lying on his father's chest (Dillon's back toward the camera) in a hospital bed while tubes were sticking out of his little body. We are so lucky, all of us who don't have to go through that. There isn't any joke in there. I'm just so grateful.