The monitors showed a red thread, pulled tautly, from one side of the screen to the other. For Anne Darlington, this was all she needed to see - all she could bear to see. She was left alone in the room with her daughter, and only silence surrounded her. Anne watched her angel’s arm cradle her pink teddy bear - she could have told herself her baby was sleeping. But of course, that wasn’t true. Only a slumber that she would never wake from, a world where she could no longer belong to. The doctors had offered to mute the sound on the machines as her only child died; Anne had accepted. If only it were that easy to lower the intensity of pain, just like decreasing the volume on a speaker.

Anne had welcomed her girl into the world on January 2nd, 1991. With only a few months of living, Anne’s maternal instincts and intuitive gut feeling took over. She could tell something was wrong: her daughter’s legs were a ghostly white, they lacked substance - like jelly before it solidifies. It was audibly decipherable she when tried to say her own name, and she could crawl from one end of the hallway to the other, so she should be able to at least begin to walk.  Always on her hands and arms though, Anne had noticed. Never would she try to use her legs to propel her. It was after a long argument with her husband that Anne had finally taken their daughter to see their family doctor. Anne remembered sitting in the over worn cushions of the waiting room, the dull blue walls offering no glint of comfort for the knot in her stomach. Her daughter’s father stood by the door, his back leaning against the frame. He kept checking his watch impatiently, though Anne knew he had nowhere he needed to go. After what seemed like an eternity, the man draped in white appeared from the entrance to his office. He held a clipboard on his right arm, a pen poised in his left hand. He wore a solemn expression and stepped into waiting room.

“Mr. and Mrs. Donnelly, if you’ll follow me please.”

Anne felt like she was doing a funeral march as she followed her husband into Dr. Reid’s examination room. She shut the door lithely behind her, turning to face the verdict.

  Kids born with cerebral palsy lived shorter lives than those without it, Anne knew that. She also knew the heightened risks that came with the condition: lack of physical exercise, the seizures, the social barriers far more devastating than the physical ones...but Anne was confident that none of these factors would control her daughter’s life, or her own, for that matter. The first few years after the diagnosis went by smoother than expected. Being a little girl, Anne could lift and support her child with ease. It seemed as if the disability lay dormant to the fresh experiences of growing up. As childhood began to shift into the teen years, the physical demands became more and more taxing. A single mother raising a disabled child often seemed an insurmountable task...insurmountable enough that her father had left home and never looked back. Anne was glad, it was obvious that he did not want anything to do with their daughter after she was diagnosed. People like that didn’t deserve to be in either of their lives.

Little Anne Jr. grew and changed. She developed long, dark brown curls that rested gently against her peachy cheeks, and a voice of her own that she never hesitated to use. She reminded Anne so much of herself, even in the defiant way she rowed the wheels on her wheelchair forward, like a canoeist paddling tenaciously in the harsh river. It wasn’t until these later years that the seizures started happening. When the first one occurred, Anne thought that her daughter was merely playing a trick on her, some sort of silly joke. It ended with paramedics flooding the doorway at six in the morning. Anne always found it hard to watch when the episodes took hold, she had to stand by and do nothing - mothers should never have to do nothing. Of course, it was the best thing for her only-born, but the best thing is hardly ever the easiest thing.

One of Anne’s greatest joys was the privilege she had to watch her daughter write. The tail of the pen is clamped lightly between her four front teeth - a sign of deep thought. When words flowed from her cranial chamber to ink on the white in front of her, her pen glided in broken rhythms across the page, her arm doing a dance along with it. Later she would type out her stories, journal entries, poems. The soft clack of keys as the cursor now blinked from left to right.

The layers of childhood bliss began to bloom into a beautiful young woman. Photo albums were filled with montages of captured memories, each picture evoking the emotions felt during that time. If only Anne could jump into one of those frames and live there forever...

“Mrs. Darlington?” Anne turned her head slowly and gazed unseeingly into the nurse’s brown eyes.

“I’m afraid I will need you to identify your daughter by signing her death certificate.” Anne could tell the nurse had done this many times. “I have left her name blank, as per your request,” she added on, trying to prompt a response.

But Anne could not respond, there seemed to be nothing she could say.

“What shall I write for her name?”

Anne thought back to all of the beautiful pieces of her girl’s work that she had read. That’s where she is now, Anne told herself forcefully. Living in a world where she can walk and run freely amongst the crowds, in the midst of a forest, within herself... Her writing was how she compensated for what she could not physically do. It was her escape, her portal into her rightful life. Suddenly, it appeared before Anne, a missing puzzle piece she didn’t even know she was missing until just this second. Or maybe she had always known, and just not realised. Either way, it didn’t matter, she knew now. There was one constant throughout all of her works, one name that always appeared somewhere in each adventure.

“Theresa.”