I was terrified when the principal called. I imagined every disaster.
The disaster was thirty children who loved my daughter’s friend enough to cut off their hair.
The catastrophe was a community discovering how good it could be.
My daughter lost her father to cancer, and three months later, she turned that loss into the most beautiful thing I’ve ever witnessed—
a room full of shorn-headed children,
a sick girl crying because she finally wasn’t alone,
and a lesson, passed from a dying father to his daughter to thirty kids to a whole town:
that you don’t let the people you love go through the hard thing by themselves.
He’d be so proud.
I told her that the night she cut her hair.
I didn’t know yet how proud.
