had prayed earlier in the midst of my travels down wrong roads, that if I was not cut out for work with the children’s hospice, Edmarc, for there to be a sign. Surely, I was getting that sign now.

I was lost.


The directions seemed simple enough. It was supposed to take forty minutes to get to my destination. After an hour and a half, I was still lost. The road I was traveling on was quickly becoming rural, so I headed towards a pumpkin stand I had noticed on the left.

I had thought I would feel comfortable asking directions here. It called to memories of childhood excursions with my brother and sister to the pumpkin patches. Instead, as I walked towards the stand, I felt awkward, alone, amongst the cheerful families hoisting large pumpkins towards the counter.

Inside, I took my place in line behind the ice cream counter behind a dad with two small girls. They couldn’t decide chocolate or vanilla, chocolate or vanilla. They whined because it was taking too long. I looked at their perfectly sculpted bodies, the dirt and grass stains they had accumulated on their clothes while running through the pumpkin patch. Any other day, I would have cherished these precious embodiments of childhood. A photograph that had appeared on the front of Edmarc’s latest newsletter once again surfaced to the forefront of my mind. The despondent eyes, the slumped figure confined to the wheelchair, and the awkwardly restricted neck had haunted me for weeks. This was a child, too.

I looked at the girls in front of me with contempt for making such a big deal over whether to have chocolate or vanilla ice cream. I wanted to scream at them. I wanted to tell them they would have plenty more opportunities to taste hundreds of other ice cream cones. The child on the cover of the brochure would never taste another ice cream cone again.