A little girl died today.

I did not know her, but I felt like I did. She went to school with my kids, and my sister was her teacher.

She had cancer. She fought it for a year, but today she lost that fight. Last week she was playing soccer and dreaming of going to Lollapalooza. Today she is gone.

Hers is not my story to tell. I knew her only in the way that you might know any of the hundred tiny faces milling around the playground or passing in the school halls.

I came to know her as I watched my sister teach her, and worry about her, and wish that there was something more she could do.  My sister came to love this little girl -- as good teachers always do -- and through her I did too.

But I am attached to this child by only the thinnest thread of knowing – knowing the people who knew her, knowing the terror I feel as a parent that something terrible will happen to my own children, and knowing that there is nothing I or anyone can do to prevent these kinds of tragedies.

Sometimes children die, and no matter how hard we wish or pray that it won’t happen, it does. And that is the most horrible thing.

 She did not belong to me, but the pain of her death has filled me with a hot heavy sorrow that makes my eyes swell with tears and my shoulders sag with the weight of mourning her. I feel a loss that I have no right to, except that it is what anyone with a heart would feel knowing that a child they barely knew has died.

I learned about her battle with cancer as I was writing my book, and the character Lacey was inspired by her story. Lacey is a funny, sweet courageous child who is recovering from cancer, and becomes an anchor and best friend to another character in the story.

In my book Lacey survives. That is how I wrote it. But that is not how reality played out.

We do not get to write our own stories, shaping the plots and conjuring up happy endings from thin air. The big things that happen in our lives are too often completely out of our control and happy endings disappear like so much smoke.

For some reason the stories I write are always about this kind of tragedy -- children getting lost, or injured, or even dying. It is a theme that runs through every book I’ve ever started, and every plot that still sits waiting anxiously  in my head to be released. I think I write these stories to ready myself for a real loss, to accustom myself to tragedy so that if and when it comes I will be able to handle it.

But today I realize that can never be the case.

No amount of sad stories in books ever readies you for loss in the real world. I can only imagine what her parents must be feeling today; the ragged gaping hole that has been torn in their hearts,  left in the wake of their daughter’s life.

Even though I didn’t know her, I will miss her. And every time I write a story about a child, I will remember her and how much she was loved.