She lives for costume changes. On an average day she’ll switch outfits two or three times. Early this afternoon she ditched a blouse and airy summer skirt for the comfort of a USC t-shirt and cotton shorts. As I walked past her room a few minutes ago I noted that she had added knee-high, rainbow-striped Juicy Couture socks. –Nice socks, I say. –Thanks. She sits hunched over, engrossed in her sketches, alternately rifling through colored pencils.

I wanted to provide a quick update on what we’ve been up to. Jordan’s surgery is tentatively scheduled for Tuesday, August 24th. As I mentioned in the earlier post, that gives Jordan time to go to summer camp and to celebrate her 12th birthday. It also buys us plenty of time to get second opinions. That’s just what we’ve been scheduling. We are flying to Chicago in late July to meet with a neuro-oncologist at Children’s Memorial Hospital.

Physicists and astronomers believe that there is a spacetime boundary that surrounds a black hole. They call it the event horizon. If you were to observe a black hole, you would never be able to see anything past the event horizon. Even light cannot escape. If you watched an object fall into a black hole, it would appear to slow down to the point of stopping as it got closer to the horizon.

One is 14, the other nearly 12. They can raise the roof with their bickering. It doesn’t take much. One comment. A rolled eye. Breathing. But no matter how much they fight, there is a bond. Luc goes out of his way to do things for his sister when she is need. For all his mouthy grandstanding, when he serves Jordan he is genuine and reserved. Though in normal times he is prone to condescend to her, when she is in the midst of her fight against the disease he possesses the rarest ability to treat her with utmost respect and a simple good nature.

I must be a fountain of optimism. At least, that’s how people have come to know me when I speak of Jordan’s journey. At the darkest moments–when her health was most in jeopardy, when she slipped off into a coma, when her body writhed in pain and jerked in seizures–I found myself comforting others. I found myself projecting hope. I found myself lying to myself in order to sustain a veneer of vitality when every part of me ached and doubted.