Falling

Elisha Cooper spends his mornings writing and illustrating children's books, his afternoons playing with his two daughters. The phrase he hates most is "throw like a girl," so he teaches them to climb trees and play ball. But when he discovers a lump in five-year-old Zoe's midsection as she sits on his lap at a Chicago Cubs game, everything changes. Surgery, sleepless nights, treatments, a drumbeat of worry. Even as the family moves to New York and Zoe starts kindergarten, they must navigate a new normal: school and soccer games and hot chocolates in cafes regularly interrupted by anxious visits to the hospital. And Elisha is forced to balance his desires to be a protective parent even as he encourages his girls to take risks, against the increasing helplessness he feels for his child's well-being, and his own. With the observant eye of an artist and remarkable humor, Elisha writes about what it took for him and his wife to preserve a sense of normalcy and joy in their daughters' lives; how the family emerged from this experience profoundly changed, but healed and whole; how we are all transformed by the fear and hope we feel for those we love.