Relay for Life

The stadium is dark and silent; the neighborhood relieved. They only know the music stopped. From their living rooms and beds, whoever will later call the cops cannot see the flickers of so many memories, the luminaria flames that will glow throughout the night. They cannot hear the scattered sobs or see the suddenly somber faces of some of the survivors. For hours, the Relay has been a party, but now cancer has barged back in. That being, after all, the point. To raise money, to defeat it all, so nobody has to do this again.

I walk alone and listen for the names I wrote out on bags, silently recite all the others I could have, should have added. As the long list concludes and the floodlights slowly brighten in the first dawn we'll see this day, I'm reunited with my daughter who's been crying a little for people she never met.

"They didn't pronounce great-grandpa's name right," she says.

"They never, ever do."

And I think once more, reflexively, what a loss that was for our family. "Things would have been so different." The virtual family motto. It's a useless rote pattern, that phrase that I say by heart, so instead I shake it out of my head, go back around the track, and try to make it true.