THIS IS US

I’m Mourning the Life My Daughter Never Got to Live

Not all children grow up

Jacqueline Dooley
Published in
7 min readMay 16, 2021

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Ana, age 12 (with her cat Pepper)

The first playdate was the product of an infant/toddler reading hour at my local library in the fall of 2002. I’d been freshly laid off from a dot-com job that had consumed me. My daughter Ana was 18 months old.

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Jacqueline Dooley
Human Parts

Essayist, content writer, bereaved parent. Bylines: Human Parts, GEN, Marker, OneZero, Washington Post, Al Jazeera, Pulse, HuffPost, Longreads, Modern Loss