We wished Allison Paige Hawkes Godspeed, yesterday.  Pollard’s Funeral Home, Methuen, Massachusetts, U. S. A., planet Earth, Milky Way, was very good to our family and to all who came to commiserate with us and to celebrate the wonderful and wonder-filled life of Allie Hawkes.  She passed on Sunday, the sixth of December, less than a week ago.  It was  just after 8 in the morning.  Her mother held her as she slept.  She stirred enough to struggle to tell Christen that she loved her.  Christen had her hand upon Allie’s heart as she left the painful, cancerous bonds of Earth.  There could be no better way to finish one’s journey.

We compiled our photos, and Allie’s, and all the newspaper articles that Christen had saved.  There were thousands of the former, dozens of the latter, and millions of memories.  Christen, Allie’s dad, Gavin Hawkes, her sister-in-law, Kim Andon (brother Joe Wescott’s wife for 20+ years), Kim’s daughter, Sarah, “Grammie” Gretchen Wescott and I, her “Grampa” Bob, sorted and printed and distilled hundreds of photo’s to display during funeral services.  Allie’s girlfriends created yet another “photo-board.”  We were researching someone known more by others than by us; the breadth and depth of her people-rich life was, in part, news to all of us, even to her most-connected mother, Christen.

During Allie’s brief life, many days, weeks and months were consumed by cancer treatments and effects.  Virtually all of those hours were shared, in person, by the world’s greatest mother.  Christen became Allie’s primary nurse and watchful angel, more than once conveying the instructions of physicians and the applications of potent drugs, more accurately than nurses, themselves, remembered.  Allie and her mother built a bond of mother-daughter love that is rare.  Christen had not a burden, but an opportunity to do more mothering than most mothers have.  We all tried to be involved, but it was truly a matter of learning from Christen what Allie had just gone through or, thankfully, what she had just done.  She was a do-er, most effectively as a creator of friends.

At the funeral home most of the three families gathered to greet the hundreds of friends on whom Allie had left her impact.  She didn’t have any casual friends, it seemed, but hundreds of good ones.  They, and we, all felt a loss when her light faded out.  Indeed, as her Camp Otter, YMCA, Wheelock, Marsh School, Methuen High and, so heartbreakingly, many of her nurses from the Floating Hospital, Children’s Hospital and Dana Farber explained, she was nowhere “just” another student, another friend or another patient.  The “Allison Effect” is large on everyone she knew. 

Ostensibly, funeral preparations included having her cousin, Sarah Wescott, speak about her lifetime friend.  Sarah worked hard to get her words and feelings exactly as she wished to express them.  I, Grampa Bob, was also going to say a few words, and though mine were not written in advance, I too had prepared what I wanted to say.  In fact, my erstwhile comments were much modified as the afternoon of meeting so many of those who also loved Allie Hawkes.  They changed what I knew about my granddaughter.  So, I want to share what I had decided to say Friday evening, though could not.

Good evening and thank you all for sharing your love for Allie Hawkes.  Before she died I thought I knew her pretty well.  You, all, have told me so much more about her; culling the hundreds and hundreds of photos she and others took of the many places she went and events she attended, has made her even more wondrous in my heart and my memories so much richer.

When she was first diagnosed my first reaction was to tell her mother that she would be okay, and I believed it.  For the following 19 years that belief was justified as she beat cancer back again, again and again… until she could not.  My second reaction, as I would walk each morning, was to pray for a miracle essentially every day, and often, twice a day.  I was trying to tell God what the correct miracle for Him to effect was, and exactly when to manifest it.  I realize that a lot of our prayers are like that: giving God and Jesus instructions… as if we knew.

What I should have prayed for is mercy and understanding.

Each time our relatively crude medical tools brought her back to remission my conviction that I was issuing the correct instructions was reinforced.  Every time cancer came back, I would feel that my miracle-instructions were flawed, somehow, or not specific enough, and I would redouble my efforts and word my supplications to be much more specific as to what I wanted God to do.  I hope that what I did helped Allie in some way.  I know that as the end approached she became more of a believer, ready to pass through that awesome door alone, always part of my prayers.

So, I had been praying for a miracle for most of her life rather blindly, it turns out.  But I recognize, now, that the miracle was right here with us, all along.