By the time we found her, lying on the bathroom floor with pools of blood flowing out of her wrist, there was nothing that could have been done. The doctor at the emergency room tried his best to bring her back to us, but his shaking head as he came out of the operating theatre put an immediate finality to her life. What we had left of our daughter were only the home videos of our vacations in foreign countries, the photos she took of her friends, and her bedroom. The hardest part of this loss was the disappearance of hearing her name as we called her to us. We could no longer speak the name Cecilia and expect anyone to respond, except strangers who were nothing like the child that we had loved and raised as a part of ourselves, our souls, our spirits. The word vanished into the void where all lost names go, never to be uttered again except, perhaps, in the furthest parts of the world. We carried on the best we could, but nothing would ever be the same again – Everything had changed.
