Blog 3839 – 05.27.2026
Darkest Before the Dawn
Sometimes during one of those especially trying times in life today’s title is the most encouraging word we can muster. Watching a love one suffer and being powerless to relieve their pain or change the course of their disease is one if not the most hopeless situation there is.
Fourteen years ago this month my daughter Emily Elaine White went to a hospital Emergency Room near where she lived in Chantilly, Virginia with what she thought was an acute attack of appendicitis. It was not. After testing, the doctors determined that she had a large tumor on her liver. I was working in Alaska at the time and the news overwhelmed me. I arranged for her mother Sandra and her brother Ben to fly to Virginia to be by her side. And Emily’s other mother, my wife Linda Lee drove from Texas to Virginia to be with Emily. I did not make the trip to watch my daughter die. I did not think my heart could bear it.
When Emily was three she was jumping on her bed and fell face first on a plastic toy that cut her upper lip. I rushed her to the Emergency Room in same hospital where she was born and watched as the ER doctor stitched her bleeding upper lip. They had secured her on a papoose like board with laces so she could not move. She was terrified and I was powerless to help her through that scary time. All I could do was watch. It was over quickly and she got over it, but I never did.
In the hospital during Emily’s last days, she was surrounded my friends and families. I spoke with her by phone several times and told her how very much I loved her and how glad I was that I got to be her dad. Emily made it to her thirty-second birthday and died peacefully in the hospital five days later. On July 20, 2012.
Though I was not there to watch her died, her passing was the hardest thing that I have ever experienced in this life. I have never watched anyone die. The nearest I have come so far was visiting my grandpa in the hospital with lung cancer a few weeks before he passed and one of my wife’s dearest friends Genevieve in hospice care a few days before she died.
For over four years now I have watched dementia slowly take my wife one little piece at a time. Cancer almost seems kind by comparison. A year or so before I met Linda Lee again in 1988 (I had been introduced to her in college in the spring of 1973) she had lost her left breast to cancer. She had also gone through a very intensive reconstruction surgery where they took tissues from her abdomen and a muscle for blood supply and moved it underneath her skin to replace the missing breast with all natural tissue. She walked bent over with pain for weeks recovering from that surgery. When I met her the next year she was still in mourning her lost breast and devastated by the scars. The scar on her abdomen looked like she had birthed a child by caesarean delivery.
The cancer doctors had told her that she would never be able to have a baby. She mourned that loss as well. On April third, 1990 Linda proved the doctors wrong delivering an eight pound baby Jay (Jonathan David James Wallace White) through the plastic mess that the doctor performing her first breast reconstruction had place in her abdomen to replace the muscle that had been moved with surrounding tissue. Linda was the happiest pregnant lady I ever saw and has been a wonderful mother to our son and was as I already wrote Emily’s second mom.
After Jonathan was grown Linda lost her right breast to cancer and had an another very pain back flap procedure to reconstruct that breast. The scars from both reconstruction surgeries have caused her much pain. Oddly the abdomen scar looking the same after the caesarean delivery and the mesh stitched back together underneath for the joy of her baby boy never hurt her again.
Linda took my place at Emily’s side and the pain of watching a loved one die that I so hoped to avoid is catching up with me at last. I do not know how long this dark night will last nor how much darker it may get before dawn breaks. I wish with all my heart that I could calm all of Linda’s fears and silence the voices only she hears that torment her so. Alas, I cannot, all I can do is be here for her as she was for Emily.
The two sayings seem to fit together: “It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.” And “It is always darkest before the dawn.”
Your friend and fellow traveler,
David James White
Josh Groban – You’ll Never Walk Alone [AUDIO]
theencouragingword 