“I know.”
She smiled tiredly.
“But if I can’t go to the sea anymore, you can wear it for both of us.”
I bit my lip so I wouldn’t burst into tears.
“Okay.”
“And don’t lose it.”
“Never.”
Lily died peacefully, with me and her grandfather beside her.
She was seven years old.
I’m not going to say I accepted it.
I don’t think there’s a good word for what happens when a mother has to leave a room without the baby she came in with.
Part of me stayed there.
But not all of it.
Because Lily had been careful to leave pieces of herself everywhere.
In the photographs.
In the drawings.
In the adventure jar.
In the laughter I sometimes still imagined I could hear.
And in a small silver shell.
A year after her death, my father and I returned to the same hotel.
The manager was still working there.
He recognized me immediately.
He didn’t ask where Lily was.
He looked at the pendant around my neck and understood.
The next morning, I went to the beach.
My father stood beside me.
The waves came and went.
“Do you remember what she said?” he asked.
I smiled through my tears.
“That the sea really doesn’t end.”
I stayed there for a long time.
For years, I thought my daughter’s last wish had been to see the sea.
But only later did I understand that the journey had given me something.
A memory of Lily in which she wasn’t a patient.
She wasn’t a diagnosis.
She wasn’t a “stage IV cancer child.”
She was simply a six-year-old girl running through the waves and laughing because she had discovered something so vast that her eyes couldn’t see its end.
And of all the memories the disease had tried to take away from me, that was the one I had to keep forever.
