“Words are a most inexhaustible source of magic.” Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II

She might have walked right by our room there on the CT wing, but The Kid let out a cry just as she passed the open doorway, and she whipped her hairless head around to look at him. She wasn’t staring at his tilt, or asking what was wrong with him. She didn’t have to, because she knew the only thing worth knowing in the moment:

He was here, so he was like her.

I never thought I’d know my way around the first floor Children’s Hospital like the back of my hand; never imagined I’d cover the distance from the parking deck to the elevator to the radiology department multiple times in a quest for the discs with TK’s scans on them, to be overnighted to doctors across the country. And so far, we’ve only been outpatients. This girl’s parents–they know every floor of that place. This girl, with her smooth head and far too grown-up eyes, has endured far more than feels fair.

She stood in the doorway, and though I smiled and waved through my own tears, she kept her eyes locked on TK: another suffering child. She knew.

And then, a few days later, another child and more staring, but this time coupled with misunderstanding: “Why is his head tilted like that? It’s weird.” I resisted the urge to inflict injury on a minor, and not for the last time, I’m sure. My urge to protect TK eclipses reason and though it comes from a place of love, it is imperfect love at best–for there is a love that made him this way for a reason that my own faulty heart could never conceive. There is redemption in this tilt, and some of it is for me.

When I was growing up, I wondered how adults knew the way to the beach by heart, and all the words to the songs that came on the radio. I figured it was a form of wisdom parceled out once you reached a certain age, like how to wash clothes and utter “because I said so”–given as a rite of passage along with a driver’s license. But once I reached adulthood, I felt lost. Anthem-less. Where were my directions? Where were my words?

Then an invisible map led me away from home, and I began to type.

Words were what led me back to grace, first others’ and then, slowly, my own. At times it felt like I was remembering, transcribing, a song I had known a long time ago: the purity of a love once it is separated from the effort of religion, distilled down to grace, and proven to be bigger than I. A love that means I don’t have to step through my life as though I’m avoiding land mines. A love that is not disqualified by landing my family on a bed at Children’s Hospital. Again.

That love, that grace, renders me incapable of sharing only the good moments, because it is in every moment. There are the moments when marriage could be reduced to a series of creaking floorboards and annoying habits; when child-rearing could amount to dirty diapers and backaches; and then I am reminded that if there is more to it all than human waste and personal deficiencies, then maybe there is more to this tilt. Maybe there is more to the hospital visits. Maybe there is more to job loss, to pregnancy disappearance, to this ubiquity of struggle. But if we don’t talk about it? If we only say “God is good” when our team wins or the wreck didn’t happen?

Since when did grace inflict selective amnesia?

Last week I wrote some words about redemption, as seen on TV. And a couple of days later, the link was retweeted by Charles Esten–the guy who plays the character about whom I wrote. After I changed my pants, I flipped through his pictures on Twitter and found out that one of his daughters had leukemia a decade ago. I looked at the picture of him with her, the little girl with no hair and her dad who was smiling as he went through hell. And I recognized those eyes. I knew.

“God made him that way, and we don’t know why quite yet,” I said, instead of drop-kicking the kid with all the questions. Twenty years ago, maybe even twenty minutes ago, they would have been words recited from a map, a trite needlepoint expression meant to hustle us all into the next moment, a preferably less painful one about things more certain. But there’s no map now. Just grace.

And now those words, they carry all the emotion of the journey we’ve been on and continue through. They are set to a rhythm of faithfulness. They are accompanied by a chorus of supporters. Now, they are becoming a song whose words and melody I already know by heart but am learning anew every day.