I can’t remember the last time I tucked my own daughter into bed, but I remember every child I’ve held as they slipped quietly out of this world.

My name is Emily, and I’ve been a pediatric nurse for twenty-two years.
People like to call us “angels in scrubs.”
Most days I feel less like an angel and more like a tired woman with sore feet, a messy bun, and a paper cup of lukewarm coffee.

It was a Tuesday night on the pediatric floor of our small-town hospital.
The kind of night where the halls are too quiet and the clock seems too loud.
I was halfway through a twelve-hour shift, shoes aching, when I walked into Maddie’s room.

Maddie was eight.
Leukemia.
Her IV pole was covered in stickers, and she’d drawn little stars on the tape that held her line in place.
Her hair was mostly gone, but her smile was still huge.

“Hey, Nurse Em,” she said, voice raspy. “You look tired. Want some of my blanket?”

I laughed. “You’re the patient. You’re supposed to be the one who gets taken care of, remember?”

She shrugged and scooted over anyway, patting the bed like we were having a sleepover instead of a chemo night.
Her mom was in the corner chair, head tilted back, finally asleep after three nights of not leaving her side.

Maddie lowered her voice. “Can I ask you something?”

“Always.”

“Do grown-ups remember being little,” she whispered, “or do you forget once you get big and busy?”

The question hit me in a place I didn’t know was still tender.

I thought of my own daughter, Lily.
She’s nineteen now, in college two states away.
I tried to remember the last time I carried her to bed because she fell asleep on the couch.
The last time she begged, “Mom, just one more story.”
The last time she waited by the window for me to come home from a night shift.

I couldn’t remember the exact moment any of those things stopped.
They just… faded.
One day she was small and sticky-fingered; the next she was packing boxes and measuring her car trunk for dorm room supplies.

“We remember,” I told Maddie softly. “Maybe not every detail. But we remember the important parts.”

She studied my face like she wasn’t sure she believed me.

“Do you remember your little girl?” she asked. “Like… when she was my size?”

I swallowed.
Images rushed in: Lily on the front lawn running through a sprinkler, Lily in dinosaur pajamas, Lily holding up a crooked birthday cake she’d tried to frost herself while I rushed to make it to my shift on time.

“I do,” I said. “Sometimes it hurts how much I remember.”

Maddie nodded, satisfied, like she’d wanted to make sure grown-ups didn’t just… erase being kids.

Later that night, her breathing grew more shallow.
Her monitors beeped in a way I’ve learned to dread.
The doctor came and went.
Her mom woke up, clutched her hand, and whispered things no parent should ever have to say.

I stood at the bedside, adjusting lines that no longer mattered.

Maddie’s fingers found mine.
Her eyes fluttered half-open.

“Nurse Em?” she whispered.

“Yeah, honey. I’m right here.”

“If I don’t get to be big,” she said, “will you remember me anyway? Like… will you remember I was here?”

My throat closed.
In twenty-two years I have changed thousands of IV bags, cleaned up spills and tears and blood and worse.
I have watched families shatter in hospital hallways.
But no question has ever broken me like that one.

“Yes,” I said, tears finally spilling over. “I will remember you. Every silly joke, every sticker, every star you drew. I’ll remember all of it.”

She smiled, just a little.
“I guess that’s okay then,” she breathed.

She was gone before the sun came up.

After my shift, I didn’t drive straight home.
Instead, I took the long way, past the old neighborhood where Lily grew up.
The houses looked the same: porches with rocking chairs, mailboxes leaning slightly, yards with bikes dropped in the grass.

A little girl in a pink helmet wobbled down the sidewalk on a bike that was clearly too big.
Her dad jogged beside her, one hand hovering at her back, ready to catch her if she fell.

For a moment, I saw Lily in that helmet.
I saw myself, younger, less tired, promising, “I’ll be there, I’ll make it, I’ll come to your game,” and then checking my watch because I was already late for the night shift.

I pulled over and just sat there, hands on the steering wheel, eyes burning.

Here’s the thing no one tells you about childhood—yours, your child’s, anybody’s:
There is no bell that rings when it’s the last bedtime story.
No announcement when it’s the last time they reach for your hand in a parking lot.
No warning when they stop waiting up for you to get home.

It doesn’t end with a bang.
It just slips quietly into the next thing.

I can’t go back and re-tuck my daughter into all the beds I missed.
I can’t trade the nights I spent holding strangers’ children for nights at her school plays and soccer games.

But sitting there in that parked car, I understood something:

The love we pour into children—ours or someone else’s—never disappears.
It settles into them, and into us.
It becomes the softest, strongest part of who we are.

The lesson?
We don’t get a second chance at childhood, ours or theirs.
But we do get this moment, and the next one, to choose gentleness, to listen a little longer, to show up a little fuller.

Childhood doesn’t stay forever.
But if we’re careful, its light doesn’t have to leave us, either.