I worked with Kathy years ago at one of my first jobs out of college. She brought a box of Baltimore’s famous fudge-slathered Berger Cookies to a meeting once and I raved about them; after that, the cookies showed up regularly. They still do. Although we’ve both moved on to different jobs, every year without fail, she sends my family a box of these cookies, which have the heft of palm-sized paperweights. Shipping can’t be cheap.

But this has never deterred her from sending them, because she does so to mark an odd intersection of our lives: the time when her baby daughter, her first, almost died, and then, weeks later, our first daughter did.

Though Kathy and I worked for the same massive company, we were based in different cities. I was her boss, technically, but I had just joined the company and relied on her know-how and calm (the latter especially rare at that company) to get through most days. Once, when talking by phone, I asked if she could get to some place quieter—there was too much noise on her end. She apologized, said she’d never realized how noisy hospitals were. Only then did I learn that her daughter Kara, just seven months old at the time, was gravely ill and would need brain surgery in the months ahead.

I’d been told my blood type, O-negative, was coveted by pediatric surgeons. For karma’s sake, the day of Kara’s surgery, I went and donated.

The operation, meanwhile, was a success, and if karma played a role, it was only in that it attracted the world-famous (as a neurosurgeon, then) Ben Carson to perform Kara’s high-stakes operation.

Not long after, I was in a hospital myself, looking down at my first daughter in my arms. Stillborn at seven and a half months, she never made a sound. That’s what I remember most: silence. Even the doctor, who cried during the delivery, did so soundlessly. Afterward, the nursing staff affixed a yellow rose to our door with surgical tape. I don't know if this is a universal symbol of stillbirth or that hospital’s tradition; either way, it served as a silent signal to everyone who entered our room thereafter. We named her Lucy.

The world urged us to move on, and in many ways, we did. My wife and I traveled, changed jobs, moved away. We were blessed with one and then two and then three more daughters—and so was Kathy. And while fewer people in our lives ever knew we once had a daughter named Lucy, our daughters did. Kathy most certainly did. And all of our daughters collectively knew that every year around Lucy’s birthday, a package of Berger Cookies went in the mail.

Then came the year when, as part of my thank-you note, I told Kathy that she should not feel obligated to carry on the tradition. The cookies were wonderful, but I worried it had become a burden for her.

Because over the years, others had implied that the ways I tended to Lucy’s memory was a burden, and I sensed it was—one that clumsily fell more on them. Let it go, people gently suggested, and so I did, or tried: the conversations, the writing, and now, the cookies.

There was one tradition I still discreetly clung to. Having discovered that charities never have enough safe, brand-new cribs (as they can’t accept used ones), we bought and donated a crib each year on Lucy’s birthday. “That’s a lot of cribs,” a new acquaintance said, and she was right. She looked at me kindly and continued, “Maybe it’s time for that tradition to come to an end?”

Kathy never replied to my note about retiring the cookie tradition. And so, I thought, that’s that. 

But the next year, right on schedule, a box arrived. Larger than before, the box contained not just cookies, but an envelope addressed to my daughters. Tailored just for them, the letter told the story of her Kara, of our Lucy—and of me.  

“Perhaps he thought he was being kind,” Kathy wrote of my suggestion that the cookie shipments end. “I am not sure. Regardless, I was hoping you girls could do me a favor. Would you talk to your dad and let him know that obviously sending Berger Cookies isn’t anything close to an obligation. It is a matter of the heart. It is a pleasure. It is a privilege. And as Kara once pointed out at school, and as my kids tell me every year, it’s a family tradition, yours and mine. Agreed?”

Reading over my daughters’ shoulders, I held my breath. I wonder daily if I’m doing it right, parenting. I often think of myself as the curator of their childhoods, editing experiences so that they have just the right mix. Plenty of vegetables, but also impromptu frozen yogurt excursions. Nothing scary.

Was it a mistake, then, that I’d ever told them about Lucy? That I’d allowed even one box of cookies to be opened in our house?

When my girls finished Kathy’s letter, they looked up at me and frowned. Then they smiled and told me to write Kathy right away to tell her to keep the cookies coming. 

We have delivered our cribs to churches, apartments, and, once, a high school. Of late, we deliver more portable cribs than old-fashioned wooden ones, as the recipients find them more useful. 

This February, we’ll deliver our twenty-fifth crib.

And back at home, we’ll await another box from Kathy: the twenty-fifth time she’s gone to the store, found the cookies, bubble-wrapped and boxed them, gone to the post office, and paid the exorbitant postage, now to multiple addresses—my oldest out on her own, the middle in college, the youngest in high school.

Kathy’s baby girl Kara turns 25 this year. The brain surgery she endured as an infant, when I went and gave blood, wasn’t her last, but she’s doing okay now, and it’s not because I still go and give blood every year, though I do. 

I buy cribs, too. Eat cookies. Send thank you notes. And savor the sweetness of a girl I once, for a terrible moment, thought was gone forever. 

__________

Liam Callanan is the author of several novels, most recently When in Rome. He’s taught for the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Learn more at www.liamcallanan.com.