I miss Ezra every day.

Yesterday was Father’s Day. It was a good day for me. It was also a heavy one. I woke up yesterday to find out Tessa had died – this young lady battling neuroblastoma who I’d met only once, but whose approach to life moves me. I saw in her something I knew in Ezra – a zesty snap toward smiling, and a wisdom she shouldn’t need to have yet. To all the fathers who have holes in their heart, and today especially to Bobby Prothero, I am with you.

And we are here. Still. Insensibly, we bumble on while everything else does. I know, logically, it matters that we work to change what we can. That Beat Nb is working to stop kids from dying. That the dinners and phone calls and laughter in my own home work to prove there is love within loss. “Pain and joy can coexist.”

I know it’s been this way forever. I’m not naive enough to posture any of our current struggle (“our” me or “our” all of us) as unique. Still, it’s not right, and it weighs on me. In a broken world, we are broken people.

We make a difference. It can never, WILL never be fast enough. I don’t know how to wrap my head around that. It is war, and the enemy is cancer. The “cost” we pay to one day (I hope sooner than we think) beat cancer is too high. It is my son, Ezra. It is Tessa. It is Brooke. Max. Emma. Melina. Ronan. Alex. Lola. Among the many, many names I will never forget.

And more and more names of kids BEATING cancer. Sofia. Rea. Parker. Lily-Mae. Isaiah. Anthony. John. Cannon. Not just lists of names – all of these kids are stories I know and can tell well. This reality of so many beating cancer just wasn’t the case when Ezra was diagnosed. Oh sure, it happened often enough. But not with the frequency it does now. Sweet evidence we are beating neuroblastoma.

I’ll never be ok with how much it has cost.