Just Some Girl
There is a song from the early nineties called “Monsters and Angels” by a band called Voice of the Beehive. It is catchy and a little jaded, cynical about human nature in the way that pop songs of that era often were. The singer sums herself up in a line that came back to me after thirty years: “I’m nobody’s valentine and I’m nobody’s pearl; when you get right down to it, I always seem to find just, some girl…”
Just some girl. That is what our society tells its daughters, in a thousand ways, from the time they are small. You are of no particular value. You are overlooked, unimportant. Or, at best, you are worth something for your body and for how willing you are to show it off. Beyond that, the world does not have much use for you.
That message does not come only from the secular side. I recall reading a post on X by an ostensibly traditional Catholic who announced the birth of his newest daughter by saying he was happy to have “another dishwasher” in the family. He meant it as a joke, I suppose. The joke isn’t funny, and it only works if the girl is a thing, an object, which is what the world says she is.
I want to tell you about my daughter, Josephine, because her life was a refutation of that lie.
Fierce at Four
Josephine was fierce at four years old. I do not mean she was difficult. I mean she had a will in her, a spark, a readiness to meet the world head on. That was the year she was diagnosed with leukemia.
The treatment protocol was very high intensity, and it ran from the time she was four until she was seven. Chemotherapy, spinal taps, port accesses, steroids, hospital stays, the whole cancer catalogue. The children’s hospital gave each patient a string of courage beads, one bead for every procedure endured, and special ones for particularly difficult ones. Most children ended up with a string or two. Josephine’s beads went on and on, strand after strand, a rosary of suffering for a little girl to pray. She earned them all, and somewhere in those three years, without any of us realizing it, she learned what courage was.
Then the treatment ended, and she got to be a girl again. We moved to a new town. She made new friends. We did not tell them about her history with cancer. She did not want us to. She wanted that part of her life to be left behind.
Fourteen Shots
On her eleventh birthday, the leukemia came back.
She remembered enough from when she was little to be afraid. She knew what the treatments would feel like. She also knew something that a four-year-old isn’t aware of: that lurking behind each blood draw was the possibility that this time the treatments would not work, and that if they failed, death was waiting.
When she was small, one of the drugs in her protocol was a form of asparaginase that could be given as a single dose, dripping slowly out over two weeks. By the time she relapsed, that drug could not be had, whether because of the pandemic supply chain or for some other reason we never learned. In its place she received fourteen doses of Rylaze, an intramuscular shot in the thigh. These shots were given every other day. They hurt her so badly that she would scream, then cry, and then tremble, and two days later she would have to do it again. That was one of the many treatments she had to endure.
Nonetheless she greeted every person who came into her room with courtesy. It was a teaching hospital, which meant a new attending physician appeared every week or two, along with fellows and residents and the whole supporting cast: psychologists, physical therapists, and music therapists. There were days when she was sick to death of seeing another doctor or another kind stranger with a clipboard. She was polite to all of them anyway, because that was who she was.
Different
After thirty-three days she finished the reinduction phase. The leukemia had not been cured. It had not even been slowed much. But she got to leave the hospital, and she got to see some of her friends.
That night she told us what had happened. The other girls had been standing together, talking, and when Josephine walked up to them, they went quiet. They knew now. She had never wanted her friends in this new town to know that she had had cancer when she was little. She had not wanted them to think she was different. Now they knew, and she felt different from them. She was different from them.
These were good girls. They were not catty nor cliquish. They loved her, but they did not know what to say, an understandable reaction for eleven-year-olds when faced with something scary like leukemia. Josephine was insecure the way most girls her age are insecure. She wanted to be liked and to belong.
This is the part of her story that I think every girl will recognize, even the ones who have never been seriously sick a day in their lives. Many girls have walked up to a group and sensed that they do not quite fit in. They fear that there is something about them that sets them apart, in an unwelcome way. Josephine felt that fear on top of everything else, and she endured it with the same grace with which she endured the shots.
Hoping Against Hope
Through heroic effort on the part of her doctors, she became a candidate for one final treatment. It could not cure the leukemia. Instead it would take her own T-cells, train them against the cancer, and send them back into her body to hold the leukemia down to a manageable level for the rest of her life. It was a slender hope, but it was a real one, and we clung to it.
A few weeks later, we learned that the leukemia had mutated around the treatment. The cancer was terminal. Later that day, in the kitchen, she was standing up by the bar, and she said that she had been “hoping against hope” that this treatment would succeed. She began to sob, because it had not.
I have thought about that phrase many times since. Hoping against hope, St. Paul’s phrase for Abraham, who believed God’s promise of a son when every natural sign said it was impossible. My eleven-year-old daughter reached for those words from deep in her memory, from the times she had heard it at Mass, and they were the right words. She had hoped the way Abraham had hoped, and then she wept the way anyone would weep. There was no contradiction in it. Faith does not mean you do not cry.
Blessed Are Those Who Have Not Seen
The day before she died, Josephine lamented to my wife and me that God had not given her a vision of Himself, nor of Our Lady. She had asked for one. She longed to see Him, and to see Mary, and she did not understand why He had not shown Himself.
I did not have a good answer for her, and I am not sure there is one that would have satisfied a young girl on the last full day of her life. What I can say now is that God was treating her the way He treats most of us. No extraordinary visions nor apparitions. Only the words our Lord spoke to St. Thomas, which He meant for all the rest of us who would come after: blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.
She had not seen. She believed anyway. She kept asking, kept longing, kept her face turned toward God, who stayed hidden, and she did it while her body was failing her. The faith of a child, on wordless display.
She died with my wife and me right beside her. And in the days following, I pondered the thought that she had been such an exemplar of a girl. Not a saint in stained glass, not yet, perhaps not ever. But a girl. Insecure and brave, frightened and courteous, wanting to be liked and wanting to see God, all at the same time.
Some Girl
This was my daughter, living with grace and dignity to the very end, courteous and kind when she had every excuse not to be. And here is what I have come to believe: the heroism I saw in her is in every girl. It is not rare. It is only rarely called upon so hard, and so young.
When I see my friends’ daughters now, I want them to know that they are valued by the Lord beyond all imagination. That they are worthy, not because of anything they have done or anything they look like, but because He made them and He loves them. That they are beautiful and good. That they are not unimportant things to be used up and cast aside by a brutal, evil world that has forgotten who a girl truly is.
The world will keep singing its song and telling girls that no one treasures them, that no one is coming for them, that in the end they are only ever just “some girl.” The world is lying. I know, because I watched one of them live and die heroically.
Josephine was not just some girl. She was some girl.
Photo by Janko Ferlič on Unsplash
