Life will take her from you. Life will have no mercy. It will destroy her bit by bit. Just when you can't imagine anything more painful, when you can't imagine enduring any more pain, life will inflict her most devastating blow. You know it now, but it wont seem real until it actually happens.
Leah will die in the third week of June. Emily will visit her a few times before it happens, but she won't be there for it. She'll get the call the next morning.
You'll all go to the funeral. Her parents will thank you for coming, looking at your daughter with sad longing eyes. They'll look at you with pity you wont yet be able to understand, with wisdom you cannot not yet possess.
Emily will be depressed for weeks after that. You'll fly her, one of her old school friends, and Gillian to California for the weekend in hopes that some proper sunlight might start to cheer her up, that she'll reconnect with friends from her "old life," She'll start to improve after that, slowly. But the lights in her eyes will always be just that much dimmer.
The summer will pass in a series of short trips, chemotherapy visits, planning ahead for university. In August, Emily will have another MRI, and it'll be another good visit. They'll work on weaning her off the steroids, reducing her risk of infection and other serious side effects.
Her doctors will recommend taking a part time load, an idea she'll promptly dismiss. She'll say that she can drop classes later if she needs to, but she can never make up for lost time. They'll fill out forms for her to have a student note-taker with her in class and extra time on exams. She will hand out pamphlets to all of her professors instructing them on what to do if she has a seizure in class, and hope she will never need them.
You'll all adapt. That's what people do. You'll hope more and more, because Emily wont be dead yet, and most days you can barely tell that she has brain cancer, that she's had her head cut open twice, that she goes to chemotherapy every couple of weeks.
You'll hope. You'll allow yourself to believe that Emily might be one of the exceptional cases, that she might live long enough that the magic treatment finally comes along, gives her enough time to really experience adulthood. Her doctors will be cautiously optimistic as well. There will be talk about transitioning out of the paediatric brain tumour program at some point in the future.
You'll celebrate her one year of survival, allow yourself to believe that it might be the first celebration of many.
Her thirteenth month scan will bring more positive news. Emily will decide to major in journalism. Gillian will, despite the relative stability, show no signs of wanting to move on from the situation. You'll both continue to have your lives revolve around Emily, and around one another.
The fifteen and seventeenth months will come and go, and in April you will both celebrate her 19th month surviving with this disease and her 19th birthday. You will be proud of the woman she is becoming. She will be strong, happy. She'll fight to do well in school, make friends, grow. It will all seem worth it. The 21st month will breeze by.