We run a small hair-donation drive every year, in my husband’s name and Millie’s. Kids come and cut their hair for wigs for children with cancer, and every year Letty tells them the story — her father, Millie, the room full of shorn heads, the day thirty children decided no one should be alone in the hardest thing. It’s grown every year. Letty wants to be an oncology nurse now, “so I can be there for the kids like Dad needed people to be there for him.”
Here’s what I learned, standing in a doorway looking at a room full of children who’d cut off their hair.
Children are capable of a moral clarity that shames the rest of us. My daughter, at twelve, drowning in her own grief, looked at a sick classmate being laughed at and did not think about herself for one second. She just gave what she had — her beautiful hair, and the lesson her dying father left her — and it turned out that one act of a grieving child’s kindness could move an entire community to be better.
