I often wondered just how it was that Maureen could have the incredible strength of will to go through everything that fate and her cancer threw at her. How could she remain so optimistic and full of life, knowing what she knew and facing what she faced? I think I always understood why, but a couple of days after her death I got absolute confirmation. Folded up in an envelope in her bedside drawer I found a poem she had written about our daughter Ellen. I don’t know when she wrote it, though from the font it is printed in I think it may have been shortly after Ellen’s birth. But if so, then it was incredibly prescient, because in that poem lies the explanation for Maureen’s incredible, indomitable strength. 25 Weeks When you were born too soon I thought your fight for life was Something akin to climbing a very high, dangerous MOUNTAIN Everest, K2… The mountains of the moon If you were going to fight then so was I. And you took each day, with your minute grains-of-rice fingers And clung to mine with that Impossibly small hand And I was Edmund Hilary And I could climb every peak known to man As long as you clutched my finger With your tiny, tiny Hand