Sometimes love is about all the little things in life. For me, it means that I can never look at Dr. Pepper, or listen to the All-American Rejects, in the same way again, that I will forever have to answer to my friends why I have so many purple things in my room, that I am still afraid to play Uno with someone, even though I played it hundreds, maybe thousands of times with MacKenzie.
Sometimes love makes all the big things even more monumental, life-defining. I remember the exact moment when I first met MacKenzie - it was on April 2, 2008, a few minutes after 1 pm, just after the start of my shift as a volunteer on the 4th floor at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center. I had just brought a bingo board to her room, and I was awestruck by her hair that day, a beautiful red orange that rose against gravity, like a brilliant flame. That afternoon we would play the first of those hundreds of games of Uno. (I lost that game, and many more after that.) I remember almost everything about the night when her family called to tell me that she had died. It was on October 19th, 2010, shortly before midnight. I was on my neurology rotation in my third year of medical school, and I started that night thinking how wonderful it was that I had the next day off (even though it was a weekday). I cried most of that night on the floor of my apartment, and fell asleep sometime between 2 and 3 o’clock in the morning.
And between those two years, came everything else, all the memories that I still have of her, the fragments that come up in my mind when I feel particularly sentimental on any day. I remember the giddy feeling of walking out of a Build-a-Bear store, with a bear in a house-shaped box, a brown bear with purple angel wings. I felt like a boy about to go on his first date with someone he had a crush on, and I still remember her smile when I gave that bear to her at her birthday party, three weeks later. I remember that first summer I spent almost every day with her in the hospital while she went through her double transplant, holding her hand when her mouth hurt too much from mucositis. I remember telling her and her family that I had gotten into medical school, how sincerely excited they were for me, but at the same time sad because it meant that I was leaving for New York City. I remember the feeling of walking through the door to the Stucks’ home every time that I would visit, the sound of the fluttering footsteps that would rush to me, the force of a surprisingly powerful hug that would knock me to the ground, and what follows, a warmth that reminded how lucky I was to be loved by her, how lucky I was to have found something, someone to believe in, especially in my profession.
And here we are, 4 years after her passing, I still have her pictures at my bedside. I still can hear the little voicemails of love she had left on my phone, even though unfortunately AT&T had erased them such that I can never play them back again. And I have a seemingly lifetime’s worth of stories about a little girl, unknown to most of my friends, stories that I draw strength from when I am down, when I have a bad day at work. I am in the third year of my residency in internal medicine, still in New York City, well on my way to be an independent, practicing physician. And I still miss her, every single day.
