I know Danielle only from pictures. We have our Matriarch Rachel. We have George Washington. And we have Danielle Sonnenfeld. I’d glimpsed Danielle from the photos, from the songs, from the stories, from the constant discussion that revolved around this beautiful person.

So I googled her name, yearning to discover and meet the girl that the whole world was talking about.

I googled her name and practically drowned in an ocean of information, an ocean of tears, an ocean of understanding.

I never met you, and I never will meet you, Danielle. I’ll never know what made you laugh or cry. I’ll never glimpse the bud that sprouted into your magnificent empire of kindness, or what molded you into the ray of light that you are.

But your eyes, Danielle. I’ve seen your eyes. Only your eyes.

Danielle was a warm hug, the sweetest embrace.  But is it legitimate to mourn a person whom I never knew, whom I’d never even met?  Danielle, to me, you were also a hug, also an embrace.

Not because you were there with me during those long nights when I suffered.  I spent those endless nights in the hospital all those years ago alone, weeping alone into my pillow.  But you held me tight in your arms, embracing me in your warmth when you taught me how I can mend those deep wounds of my past and my ingrained fears of the future.

You taught me that there is purpose to every mark of loneliness scarring my heart.  And I will do my utmost to ensure that no other child should suffer alone as I did.

Your light shines in me, Danielle. You are my radiant lighthouse, my guide. My source of inspiration.

Today, I also volunteer in hospital wards. Not only in Oncology, but in other, quieter wards, as well. I visit the emptier wards, passing through corridors seldom frequented by others.  I have great dreams for the future, many that are larger than life, but it’s not of these that I wish to speak now. I want to share with you the intense moment when I knelt beside a nameless little girl in an anonymous ward in a little-known hospital and smoothed out her blanket.  You know, Danielle? When I reflect upon it, I feel that it’s truer to say that we knelt beside her.  Me, and the flame of Danielle that burns inside my heart.