I wake up in my own bed and house on this seventh anniversary, not on a pulled-out sofa bed by Ewan’s side. I didn’t really sleep that first night. No one does. How can they with the shock of being suddenly transplanted into an alien world with an unknown journey ahead? The before life fading fast in the rear-view mirror. We hadn’t been given a treatment road map, yet. We didn’t know what a diagnosis of acute lymphoblastic leukemia meant. We just knew Ewan couldn’t walk and had cancer cells circulating in his blood. And we knew that for decades children with this illness were being cured.

We were optimists.

Ewan’s bedroom is empty. His shirts from seven years ago still hang in his closet. His favorite dogeared books, tattered and now dusty, are still on his shelves. While in treatment, we read them together many times over. There wasn’t much more to do while waiting to be rid of cancer. Read, rest, watch TV, hope. It all felt exhausting at the time. I was constantly scanning the horizon to catch moments of joy. On his first anniversary of Diagnosis Day, Ewan learned to ride a bike. I learned to sandwich slivers of normalcy between nausea and pain.

The trouble with being an optimist is that sometimes hope lets you down. In my current rear view mirror, the work that when into waiting doesn’t feel worth it. My memories are acrid, shellacked in agony. I still look back and wonder where I took a wrong turn. Cure didn’t come for Ewan. Seven years later, and I am still angry, hurt, and lost about the loss of his life. I hate having an additional anniversary in bold permanent Sharpie: May 7, 2018, Death Day.

Between the two dates, twenty months in total, we lived. It was a hardscrabble, patchwork existence between home and hospital stays. Lots of hands of Uno were played and many movies watched. Magically, I remember laughter, both mine and Ewan’s. I am still living between those two dates. It may not look like it because I buy bread, take vacation, pull up weeds, and walk the dog, but I am still trying to cure Ewan.