I have not had to live in crisis mode since 2004. My life now is peaceful for the most part. I keep everything as simple as I can. But being human, I create obstacles for myself and unwittingly fall into my own traps.

I have been studying books on awakening since I was in my thirties. At this point I can tell you that events don’t change the inner you. Read that again: Events don’t change the inner you. They hassle the outer self, the ego, but that doesn’t matter in the overall scheme of things.

I have a strong inner core; as the oldest child in a family of three I was uber-responsible. I made mostly A’s in school, took dancing lessons and was an all-around obedient kid. I caused no ripples in the family stream.

I graduated from college with high honors, married a Georgia Tech graduate and moved to Atlanta. Here I have been ever since.

The discovery of our youngest child’s cancer came slowly. First I found a knot in her upper thigh and I took her to the pediatrician. He thought it was probably a muscle spasm but it didn’t go away. Since we were going to visit family in Memphis, we decided to let a pediatric surgeon take a look at it.

He felt the lump and his face grew grave. “I need to biopsy this right away,” he said. “It will be a surgical procedure done in the OR.” And as we left the children’s hospital where he practiced, she rode a bouncing pony on the front grounds and I knew my former life was over. I knew by the look on his face.

I don’t remember much after that. I do remember him coming down the hall to her room and telling us that she had rhabdomyosarcoma, a muscle cancer. He would operate to remove the large muscle in her leg that held the tumor. Then she would be moved to St. Jude’s to begin chemo there.

We rode the ambulance to St. Jude’s, only a hop away. But let me tell you, it was like a ride to the morgue. Inside I saw bald-headed pale-skinned children of all ages. Babies and teenagers and everything in between. I went into the bathroom and cried.

Our child, our little four-year-old Laurie, was now a patient on “The Wing” as they called it. A team of doctors made their rounds each day and soon she was dismissed to recuperate. We had decided to lease an apartment in my mother’s complex for 3 months.

She would soon lose her hair but she didn’t seem concerned about that. Her radiance was undimmed. The rest of us were lost.

We returned to Atlanta at the end of that summer so Rob, who would begin the third grade, could start school. The house plants were dead; the grass was unmown and our family was about to experience the worst days of our lives. Or so we thought. It would be worse three years later when we returned home from her burial in Memphis.

I could go on, but most of you know this story I tell over and over. This is how my family began to be destroyed by cancer. This is how we survived but not without great trauma and a deep sense of not belonging in a world where no one had kids who died. In those days there was no plan to help us out of our grief. We had to soldier on, one sad day at a time.

Vicki Woodyard