- I started reading “Harry Potter” out loud to my daughter when she was in kindergarten.
- It became more of a practice as she went through cancer treatment.
- When she returned to school, she had something to talk about with her friends.
I started reading the “Harry Potter” series aloud to my daughter when she was in kindergarten.
Magic and belief were as accessible for her as air, even when, a few chapters in, she was gasping for breath. “Keep reading,” she would say — until we learned her cancer was so advanced that her lungs were collapsing, and then she could only point.
Barely capable of thought, I would ask her if she wanted me to read. She would nod. Sweaty, drifting in and out of sleep, she listened.
Too sick to complain about being sick, she longed for mother comforts. My voice. My body, close to hers. And magic. I straddled two fantastical landscapes: one a boarding school for witches and wizards, the other a pediatric intensive-care unit.
Between the pulpy soft pages came the diagnosis, the treatment, and, eventually, the hope.
We read through her cancer treatment
We moved slowly through the first book of the series as we were both exhausted and constantly interrupted. Cytarabine could easily have been a character born of J.K. Rowling’s imagination, perhaps a Death Eater. Medically and metaphorically speaking it was a death eater, another tool to kill her “bad cells.”
“I’m hot,” my daughter said one day. As soon as I touched her, I jumped. Fevers were not unexpected with cytarabine, but even after she was given meds her temperature kept going up. When her fever hit 107.9 degrees, our nurse said, “I’m getting some ice.” “Wingardium leviosa,” I thought to myself. “Let’s fly away.”
On we went, reading and talking about The Boy Who Lived while I begged the universe for my child to do the same. Some days I would read pages and pages aloud to my daughter without absorbing a single word.
By book three, the children at Hogwarts were more real to her than her own friends, whom she hadn’t seen in months. She missed almost a year of school — nearly all of first grade — but she did return cancer-free and bald as a baby.
The distance we felt from our old life held a chasm of changes. How would she reconnect with her little friends? She has been to places I hope they never have to go to and experienced pain I hope they never feel.
The books helped her connect with her friends
But something magical happened. While we were in the hospital going through chapter after chapter, her friends were doing the same back home in their bedrooms. She easily fell into a shared experience with her long-lost playmates using a common language of giants and spells and Triwizard Tournaments.
She got better, and we kept up with our reading ritual.
According to Scholastic, the publisher of the series, there are 4,224 pages in the US editions. I look at those paperbacks stacked high at my bedside and think of the wiggly teeth lost, the sight words learned, the blood-pressure checks, the bad days at school, the good days in the hospital, negative COVID-19 tests, positive COVID-19 tests, Google Classroom instead of real classrooms — all these moments tangibly turned into piles of pages.
Over the course of our reading quest, my daughter’s hairstyle evolved from pigtails to baldness to buzz cut to pixie to shag to bob to chin length to shoulder length to long, smooth, shiny, deep-brown hair that swings down her back when she throws her head back laughing.
We read all the “Harry Potter” books together over the rest of her time in elementary school. Last night, she turned to me and said, “You did a good job reading that.”
“Which part?” I asked.
“All of it,” she said.
I can’t help but wonder if I will ever read aloud to her again. In the fall, she’ll begin middle school. She’s older now. She’s better now. I stared at her, The Girl Who Lived, and got a little choked up — until she said, “How about we read the ‘Lord of the Rings’ books next?”