Daniel pressed the letter against his chest and cried harder than I had seen him cry since the day we learned I was pregnant.
Sometimes I still think about that hospital entrance all those years ago.
I think about how close we came to getting into the car.
How close I came to allowing fear to make the most important decision of my life.
And I think about the little girl waiting upstairs, completely unaware that her parents were deciding whether loving her would hurt too much.
Sophie’s life was shorter than I wanted.
I would have taken another year, another month, another morning with her if someone had offered it to me.
But when I remember those sixteen years, I no longer think first about the disease that took her from us.
I remember the little pink cardigan.
Her hand wrapped around Daniel’s finger.
The way she yelled “Mama” when I walked into a room.
The seventeen candles on her sixteenth birthday cake.
And the sentence she left behind for the two frightened parents who had once almost walked away from her:
“Thank you for choosing me even though you knew you might lose me.”
For eleven years, Daniel and I believed our greatest pain was not being able to have a child.
We were wrong.
Our greatest fear became losing the daughter we finally had.
But Sophie taught us something neither of us understood when she was diagnosed:
