up above the world so high
On Sunday night I made another trip to Children’s Hospital…the place is growing on me…though there is a fine balance between loving a place that helps children and hating the fact that kids have to even be there in the first place. This trip was to visit little Cash who was in the middle of his first round of chemotherapy. He has been has been doing well, and his parents continue to amaze me with their strength and hope and reliance on something much bigger than themselves. In my effort to be helpful during the visit I offered to take Cash for a walk for mom and dad to have some “alone time”. To be honest I was a little nervous because taking this 16 month old for a walk involves tubes in his body and a pole with his chemo drip. Was I responsible enough? Well, I was up for learning something new. So we put him in a little buggy and I began to push is toy car with one hand and his pole with the other. Afraid of what he might do when his dad left I asked what songs Cash likes to since on these walks (he had done this several times already). Dad said they usually just talk about what they see on the walls and in the halls- we were cruising the hallways was the SCCA (seattle cancer care alliance) floor.
Not a moment into Cash’s and my alone time he got a little more squirmy than I was comfortable with. The quickest thing I could come up with to distract him was a rousing round of “the wheels on the bus go round and round”. It worked. He settled comfortable into his seat. Not long after that we drove over some stars, and so I started singing “Twinkle, twinkle little star”. And then, this is the part where I wish I had a tape recorder to share with you the sweetest sound in the world on that sunday evening. Little Cash man starts singing, “up a bub ba ba ba hi…”- on key. I knew he could say a few words, but I didn’t know he could sing. My heart started racing and for the next 15-20 minutes I proudly walked him through the halls passed all the nurses stations and we sang together, “up above the world so high, like a diamond in the sky…”and the rest of the song, over and over and over. I was that proud auntie grinning from ear to ear. When I asked his parents if they had noticed this before, they said it was a first. Ha! Take that stupid brain tumor! No brain tumor could take that melody from his mind. No brain tumor could takes those words away from his lips. Nothing could take the joy from that moment.
I wish with everything Cash didn’t have a tumor. I wish it would just go away. I wish there was a way to alleviate the pain from this family. I love what my friends said- “when we want to ask ‘why us?’ we have to ask ‘well, why not us?’ “. God, who is bigger than us and bigger than our knowledge of him, is writing the story of this little boy. And I am proud to report that in one little paragraph (maybe only a sentence) about his second year of life, a story will be told of the time Cash first started singing up above the world so high…and what a fitting song to begin with. A song of hope about a little star that cannot be seen, but a star that is known. I pray that star is Cash’s complete healing from this brain tumor. Though we don’t see what the future holds, we hope for that star-like moment when his body is fully restored to health.
