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It came without warning. One day my sixteen year old daughter was typical, healthy, teen age girl. She did suffer from allergies, but nothing too severe, she only had to take the prescription as needed, not every day. One Memorial Day weekend, she had an allergy attack that was more severe than usual. When the symptoms continued to worsen, even with the medication, I took her to the doctor. The doctor gave her a stronger prescription for her symptoms, and ordered some blood tests, "just to be sure it is allergies". The next day, the doctor's office called, saying that I needed to take her to the hospital within the hour, as her white blood count was dangerously high. We immediately went to the hospital, where she was diagnosed with acute leukemia; high-risk leukemia, we were told, because of her age and lack of symptoms. Seventeen days later she was dead. The leukemia had been beaten into submission, but her body couldn't tolerate the intense treatments she'd had to endure. Her body shut down, and she died.

During those seventeen days, we focused mostly on the 75% that survived the type of cancer that had stricken her. Yet, we knew that we still had to look at the 25% that didn't survive. We had to face the very real possibility that she would die. We weren't consumed with it; by that I mean, we didn't talk about it all the time. But we had to face it nonetheless. She had a strong Christian faith, as do I, so naturally our conversations about death, about what it meant and what came after, center on our Christian beliefs.

She was very certain that death had to be better than what she was suffering. Her treatments were harsh, and many. Often she was in severe pain, even with the morphine she was given to alleviate it. She firmly believed that death as a step forward, a wonderful release from her intense suffering in this temporal world. To her, death was a welcome step forward, one that would take her straight into the arms of Jesus. She was scared, too, of course. After all, she was only sixteen, yet she had been forced to look squarely at her own mortality. She prayed hard and furious for relief from her pain. We'd been told that, if she survived the first round of treatments, the rest wouldn't be quite as intense, and within two years the leukemia would be declared in remission. "Two years!" she cried to me, "two years of being so sick and hurting so much! Mom, I'm sorry, I'd rather just die.' This life was not worth it to her, she didn't want to suffer

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