Stitch

I was born the youngest of four.
Then five. Then four more.
Five girls, four boys. Different parents. One family.

You can imagine what Sunday dinners were like. 

The first one got married at 19. The second 18.
They mostly fell like flies after that.
We’re all quite a catch. 😉

Then the babies came. I helped deliver nephew #1.
They didn’t let me back in the hospital til #10
They were cute. All small and squishy and discovering the world.

It’s amazing how fast you grow attached.
They didn’t come out of me, but they became a part of me.

And each one unique.
The sports star. The science nerd.
The Princess. The bookworm.
The jokester. The artist.
The absolute chaos in a pink ruffled dress.

I called her Stitch.
You know, Lilo and Stitch?
The well-meaning clutz of a girl who befriends an adorable purple alien who’s really an indestructible galactic criminal who causes chaos everywhere it goes?

Yea, the alien is my niece. 

At 12 months we joked
you needed one babysitter for the four older siblings
and one just for Stitch.

She was a handful.
In everything, going everywhere, eating all of the time.

Then she stopped.
She stopped.
She stopped playing. She stopped walking. She stopped eating.

Doctor after doctor told us remedies to try.
Allergies, ear infection, flu.
Nothing changed. Nothing fixed her.
We had this adorable purple alien but she was … a stuffed doll. No life.

It was February 8th. I was rocking Nephew #10 in my arms,
I’d been singing lullabies to him for over an hour.
My anxiousness keeping us both awake.

The phone rang… and I struggled to answer without disturbing his doze.
My mom. From the hospital with Stitch.
She was scared. Her voice was trembling.

Cancer. She gasped. It’s Leukemia. It’s…it’s bad.
We can’t leave …she…she has to start treatment now.
Now, now. Or she’ll…she’ll die.

I couldn’t breath.
I was supposed to act, to call the others. But I was frozen.
I was clutching my nephew to my chest. You can’t have him, I screamed in my heart.
You can’t have her. Not any of them!
Not one!

That nickname, the doctors said.
Meant she was a fighter.
An indestructible alien, called Stitch.
And she needed to fight.

18 months old, a tube in her chest.
Needles the size of her arm pushed into her bones.
Blood, platelets, marrow.
Steroids to lift her up, chemo that brought her back down.

The hospital tended to her body.

Her family, we tended to her soul.

100% healed, we said.
It was our motto. Our rallying cry.
Aunts and Uncles, Grandmas and Bapas. Innumerable cousins.
We held her and fed her and slept by her bed, waiting to calm her.
We read to her and played with her and begged that her chaos would return.

We loved her. And we loved on her.
And we loved each other.
Through difficult days and nights that brought little rest.
Through small victories and terrifying setbacks.

For one year, then two, three years, and four.
We fought – as a family.
We fought and we won.

I have 8 siblings. 20 nephews and nieces.
Parents, cousins, 2nd cousins. Aunts and Uncles.
Friends.
This is love.
To love and be loved.
To stand together. To fight.

To family. And to one indestructible child at the center of all our galaxies who taught us that the definition of courage is: faith, hope…and the greatest of these is Love.

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Read more about Emily’s journey to beat Leukemia here on her blog