This poem is a tribute to a young woman who lived with cancer from childhood and carried her struggles with extraordinary courage. It is about the pain she endured, the love that surrounded her, and the quiet strength she found in the smallest reasons to keep going. Though she left this world in her early thirties, her story reminds us that a life is not measured only by its length, but by the love it leaves behind.
‘A New Day Has Come’ is not only about death, but about finding light even in the darkest places—and believing that, somewhere beyond suffering, there is still a new beginning.
I was born into a house where happiness knew my name.
It lived in my mother’s hands,
in my sister’s laughter,
in the warm, familiar corners of home,
in ordinary mornings
that seemed too small to ever become memories.
I was a child then—
fragile, curious,
with a heart that had not yet learned
how much a body could endure.
I thought childhood was supposed to last.
I did not know
that some children learn the language of hospitals
before they learn the language of goodbyes.
There were white walls
and colder mornings,
needles, medicines,
the smell of antiseptic
that followed me like an unwanted shadow.
There were days
when my body became a battlefield
I never volunteered to enter.
And yet I grew.
I learned how to smile
when people looked at me with pity.
I learned how to say
I am okay
because sometimes
the truth frightened people more
than the illness frightened me.
Cancer took things from me
in small, almost invisible ways.
A little strength.
A little freedom.
A little of the childhood
I should have been allowed to keep.
But it never managed
to take everything.
My mother remained.
My sister remained.
And somewhere inside me
there remained a girl
who still wanted to see tomorrow.
Then, as if the illness itself
had not been enough,
another darkness began growing inside me.
Depression.
It did not arrive
with the sound of thunder.
It came quietly.
It sat beside me.
It followed me into sleep
and waited for me when I woke.
There were days
when my body hurt so much
that I could almost forgive my mind
for hurting too.
But there were other days
when nothing seemed wrong
from the outside,
and still
I felt as though I were drowning
in a room full of air.
I began losing things
that no doctor could find
on an X-ray.
My certainty.
My appetite for tomorrow.
The simple belief
that life was something
I could keep.
I asked God questions.
I was too tired to dress politely.
Why me?
Why did I have to learn suffering before I learned how to live?
