As a community - or rather a group of communities - we have all shared in this loss. I feel this most strongly after I have been filled with sufficient consolation to begin to see the pain in others.

My greatest joy so far has been the opportunity to reach out to the children - Jenny's friends - and to give to them the consolation I have felt from others.

We have suffered together and we shall come through this together.

As part of the healing process I will be posting the complete text of what was read at the funeral. I do not have this all in hand right now, except for what I read today. The rest will follow in time.

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To Jenny, my daughter, January 10, 1999.

I remember the struggle it was to get Jenny born into this world. Sue’s labor had gone on for so many hours that Jenny’s expected birthday changed almost three times before the struggle was finally over.

At first, Jenny had cried in protest over the trauma of her birth and all those first obligations of babyhood -- being weighed and measured and swaddled and swabbed. But out of this sudden chaos she was handed to me -- and as our eyes met her annoyance gave way to curiosity at eyes which stared back into hers.

It was at that moment that I first saw the miracle we had made. Here in my arms was a brand new life -- a totally unique person. And during that moment my mind raced through all the unfathomable possibilities of her future. She would know love and pain and loss like us all, and maybe someday a child of her own to hold. But then she blinked her new-born eyes and brought me back to reality.

As the real Jenny began to grow up I slowly came to see the frailty of my poor imagination. At every turn she was far more alive and unique than I could have ever envisioned. By the time she turned 13 this past autumn, I had long since given up predicting the course of her life. Her days were filled with countless friends and music and movies and books and sometimes sliding along a steel cable suspended more than 40 feet above the ground at camp.

For a girl so many have rightly described as quiet and accommodating, Jenny could be tenacious. On cold winter days she spoke of skating on our pond when the rest of us would rather have talked about hot chocolate by the fireplace.

On the day before Jenny died after it had finally turned cold bringing with it the first real ice of the season on the pond -- true to form -- Jenny was headed out there to slide around on it no matter what. Later, back inside the house I warmed her cold hands in mine, and we joked about how cold hands must mean a warm heart.

Eighteen hours later, after all the heroic efforts to save her were over, and after all the prayers for the departed had been said, and after everyone else had left the treatment room – I took Jenny’s cold hands and I warmed them in my own while I struggled within my frail imagination to fathom who she would have become, had she remained among us.