This week I received a note from my close friend of many years, Terry Parker. He wrote:
“As I think you know, about five years ago one of my grandchildren, Katie, who was nine years old, was given a death sentence because of a brain tumor. She came to live with us as we are a mile and a half from Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. In seven months from diagnosis she had died. While she was with us, I read to her every day for hours. But I could tell that she was sad because she couldn’t do what the children in the books I was reading were doing. I looked for a book where the hero was in a wheelchair, or had cancer, and I couldn’t find one. So I started telling her stories about adventures she would have had with an amazing rabbit named Robert P. Rabbit.”
After she died, Terry was visiting Focus on the Family when Jerry Jenkins, the co-author of the “Left Behind” series of books, learned of Katie’s death and Terry’s stories to her. He encouraged Terry to write the stories down so he did.
“I want children who have cancer, or other disabilities, to have a book to read that they can relate to, and that will encourage them as they go through treatment as Katie did, and as they seek to recover. I want children all over to be encouraged that they, too, can have adventures even though they are fighting disabilities, and I believe this book does that.
“My goal is to give the book for free to children’s hospitals and doctor’s offices all over the country.”
My oldest daughter, Catherine, was a child life specialist and worked with many children like Katie in hospitals. What I discovered about Catherine is while I was overcome with a sense of helplessness, guilt and fear, she was drawn to these children and they to her. There was no discomfort or separation. They were not cases. She was not just another professional. The children needed humor and closeness. They painfully felt the distance that now kept their friends away or made people whisper around them. Catherine and her co-workers just bounded over those obstacles and found ways to dispel the fear and confusion.
Henri Nouwen writes that we don’t need to have the perfect words of comfort or encouragement. We can have what he calls the “ministry of presence.” Nouwen writes, “The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.”
There are those, like Catherine and Terry, whose words are so genuine and creative that they give hope and the longed-for sense of being normal again, if only for a time. This book is for parents, grandparents, friends and others who don’t know what to say but can discover that the power of stories is almost the best medicine of all. These stories are part of Katie’s legacy.
If you would like to place copies of Terry’s book in a hospital or doctor’s office, you can visit the website to order copies for $4.00 and give them away as you wish. If money is an issue, you can also just leave the name and address of the person to contact and Terry will ship the copies for you—absolutely free of charge. Also if you would rather use the telephone, call Cheryl Green at 706-754-6884 and she will be glad to help you. Terry does not make any profit from these books, but he does have the joy of knowing that Katie’s stories will work their magic in the lives of other children.
James Taylor’s lyrics come to my mind when I think of Katie and so many other children who leave us too soon:
“I guess it had to happen someday soon—wasn’t nothing to hold them down.
They would rise from among us like a big balloon, take the sky, forsake the ground.
Oh, yes, other hearts were broken, yeah, other dreams ran dry
but our golden ones sail on, sail on to another land beneath another sky.”
I hope you will do this. I hope you will find out those in your community working with these “golden ones” and put Terry’s book in their hands. Above all, read to them. If it is your child, grandchild or the child of a friend just read to them.