What Was Good About Today

 Carol Kruckeberg’s What Was Good About Today is a profoundly moving memoir about childhood leukemia, parental love, grief, courage, and the extraordinary capacity of the human spirit to discover meaning in circumstances that seem almost unbearably cruel. First published in 1984, the book recounts the illness and death of Kruckeberg’s young daughter, Sara, who was diagnosed with leukemia as a child and subjected to an agonising regimen of chemotherapy, radiation, and bone-marrow transplantation before dying shortly after her ninth birthday. Yet to describe the book merely as the story of a child dying of cancer would be to diminish both its emotional reach and its philosophical significance. At its heart, it is a meditation on how to live when life refuses to be fair.

What makes the memoir especially memorable is its resolute refusal to manufacture easy consolation. Kruckeberg does not transmute tragedy into a sentimental morality tale in which optimism, by some miraculous alchemy, conquers suffering. Sara is ill. She suffers. Her family is frightened. Medicine has its limits. And ultimately, despite every conceivable effort, she dies. The power of the book lies precisely in this unvarnished honesty: there is no contrived happy ending, no facile triumph over mortality, only the painstaking attempt to preserve dignity, love, and even moments of happiness in the midst of catastrophe.

The emotional centre of the book is, naturally, Sara herself. Kruckeberg presents her not merely as a tragic child but as a distinct and fully realised personality — spirited, intelligent, courageous, and determined to exercise whatever measure of control she can over the circumstances that increasingly govern her life. This is one of the most striking features of the memoir: Sara is never reduced to the status of a passive patient upon whom medical procedures and adult decisions are mechanically imposed. Even within the constricting confines of illness, she retains an extraordinary sense of agency.

That quality gives the book much of its moral force. Sara understands, at least in her own way, that she is seriously ill, but she refuses to surrender her personality to the disease. She does not become merely “the leukemia patient”; she remains Sara. The illness may inhabit her body, but it does not possess the entirety of her identity. This distinction is crucial. The book’s deepest achievement is that it allows us to encounter illness through the perspective of an entire family while keeping the child herself at the centre of the narrative — not as a medical case, not as an object of pity, but as a human being possessed of her own will, personality, fears, hopes, and dignity.

The title, What Was Good About Today, becomes the book’s governing philosophy and its quiet refrain. It is a deceptively simple question, yet within the context of Sara’s illness it assumes an almost extraordinary profundity. On days dominated by hospitals, invasive treatments, fear, exhaustion, and physical suffering, what, one might reasonably ask, could possibly be good about today?

The answer is not that every day is good. Rather, the question invites the family to search for something good within the day. It might be a conversation, a moment of laughter, a visit from someone beloved, a small pleasure, a personal triumph, or simply the consolation of being together. This is a subtle but profound distinction. The book does not preach the absurd proposition that suffering is somehow good. It suggests instead that suffering does not have to extinguish every possibility of goodness.

That idea gives the memoir its enduring relevance. The question in the title becomes almost a spiritual discipline — a deliberate resistance to the tendency of tragedy to colonise the entire field of human vision. Even when the larger circumstances cannot be altered, one may still exercise a modest but meaningful freedom in deciding where to direct one’s attention. The world may be terrible, but it is not necessarily terrible in every particular; and even in the darkest landscape, there may remain some small patch of light worth acknowledging.

One of the greatest strengths of Kruckeberg’s writing is its emotional restraint. A story about a child dying of cancer could easily have descended into excessive sentimentality, but What Was Good About Today derives much of its power from its plainspoken honesty. The family does not conceal the truth from Sara, nor does Sara permit herself to be patronised with comforting falsehoods. The relationship between the child and her parents is founded upon an unusual degree of openness and candour. This makes the eventual tragedy all the more painful, but it also renders the family’s love infinitely more credible and affecting.

The book therefore offers an important lesson about confronting terminal illness: truth and hope are not necessarily opposites. One can acknowledge the possibility — or even the inevitability — of death while continuing to hope for another day, another conversation, another laugh, another small moment of grace. This is perhaps one of the memoir’s most mature insights. Hope does not always mean believing that everything will turn out well. Sometimes hope means believing that, whatever the outcome, there can still be love, courage, dignity, and meaning.

At one level, this is a mother’s memoir of losing her child, and the grief that courses through its pages is devastating. Yet Kruckeberg’s achievement is to make the book larger than the confines of her own sorrow. She writes about the experience of the whole family: the parents, Sara, her younger brother, and the wider circle of people drawn into their struggle. The family’s response to illness is characterised by openness and mutual support rather than secrecy and emotional evasion. Even as the possibility of death becomes increasingly impossible to ignore, the family continues, as best it can, to remain a family.

This is important because terminal illness has a way of distorting the ordinary architecture of relationships. Hospitals, medical appointments, treatments, test results, and the relentless demands of care can gradually consume the rhythm of everyday existence. Kruckeberg shows how the family nevertheless attempts to preserve something recognisably normal: conversation, humour, affection, shared rituals, and the small routines that constitute the texture of ordinary life. In this respect, the memoir is as much about family resilience as it is about disease.

Kruckeberg necessarily describes the medical ordeal — leukemia, chemotherapy, radiation, and bone-marrow transplantation. Yet the medical details never become the sole substance of the narrative. The treatments matter because of what they mean to the people who endure them. This is a wise and humane narrative choice. The reader is given sufficient context to comprehend the gravity of Sara’s condition, but the book remains fundamentally a human story rather than a clinical account. The disease is the circumstance; the people are the subject.

The final chapters inevitably carry an almost unbearable emotional weight. By this stage, the reader has come to know Sara not simply as a sick child but as a lively, individual personality whose presence has become deeply precious. The tragedy, therefore, is not abstract. It is the loss of someone whom the reader has been invited to know and care about. One of the most affecting aspects of the memoir is the manner in which Sara and her parents confront the possibility of death. The emotional force does not arise from melodramatic declarations or manufactured pathos, but from the intimacy and vulnerability of the exchanges between them. In the face of mortality, the smallest gestures and simplest words acquire an almost unbearable significance.

Perhaps the most mature aspect of the memoir emerges in the aftermath of Sara’s death. Kruckeberg does not suggest that grief simply evaporates with the passage of time, nor does she imply that moving forward requires forgetting. Instead, the book recognises a more complicated and more truthful reality: one can continue living while continuing to grieve. The family does not “get over” Sara, because the death of someone so deeply loved is not an obstacle one simply crosses and leaves behind. Her memory remains woven into the fabric of their lives. Yet life itself continues. This is beautifully captured in the idea that the task is not to erase the past but to “keep the game going” — to continue choosing, trusting, loving, and living despite a wound that can never be entirely healed.

The central lesson of What Was Good About Today is therefore not conventional optimism. It is something quieter, more disciplined, and infinitely more difficult: the discipline of attention. When life becomes unbearable, the question is not necessarily, “How can I make everything better?” Sometimes nothing can make everything better. The more attainable question is: What was good about today?

That question does not deny suffering. It places suffering within a larger frame. A day can contain pain and still contain laughter. A family can confront death and still experience love. A person can grieve and still remain capable of gratitude.

A life can be tragically brief and yet profoundly meaningful. Sara’s story becomes powerful precisely because the book does not pretend that courage can defeat mortality. Sara dies. The victory, if there is one, lies elsewhere — in the fact that illness does not entirely deprive her of her individuality; that fear does not succeed in annihilating her family’s love; and that death does not erase either the life she lived or the influence she continues to exert upon those who remember her.

What Was Good About Today is one of those rare books whose importance lies less in literary fireworks than in the emotional truth of what it has to say. It is beautifully understated, deeply compassionate, and ultimately unforgettable. Carol Kruckeberg takes one of the most devastating experiences imaginable — the death of a young child — and transforms it into a meditation on courage without heroics, hope without illusion, grief without self-pity, and gratitude without denial. The book’s greatest achievement is that it never asks us to believe that tragedy is somehow a blessing, or that suffering is secretly a gift in disguise. Instead, it asks us to recognise something both humbler and more profound: that even in the midst of tragedy, life continues to offer fragments of goodness.

On a deeply personal level, I found the book extraordinarily difficult to read, because its pages repeatedly summoned memories of my own hospitalisation in 1975, when I was thirteen years old and spent approximately three months in hospital. More recently, about a decade ago, my mother was hospitalised on at least four occasions, and subsequently my daughter had to undergo five hospitalisations of her own. Each encounter with a hospital carries its own peculiar atmosphere of dread — the antiseptic corridors, the anxious waiting, the uncertainty that hangs over every medical report, and the overwhelming anguish that illness imposes not merely upon the patient but upon everyone who loves them. Such experiences are difficult to articulate to anyone who has not lived through them; the trauma, stress, helplessness, and emotional exhaustion they engender often reside in regions of experience for which ordinary language seems woefully inadequate.

It is for this reason, perhaps, that I find myself holding Carol Kruckeberg’s courage in such high regard. To take the story of her daughter Sara — a story of unimaginable suffering, love, hope, and loss — and to commit it to words for posterity requires a form of courage that is quieter than heroism but no less profound. In writing about Sara, Kruckeberg has ensured that her daughter’s life is not reduced to the briefness of its duration, nor her memory confined to the tragedy of her death. She has preserved, in words, the child who lived, loved, struggled, laughed, hoped, and left an indelible imprint upon those around her.

Perhaps that is the ultimate meaning of What Was Good About Today. It reminds us that life cannot always be measured by its length, nor happiness by the absence of suffering. Sometimes, when confronted by circumstances that cannot be repaired and losses that cannot be undone, the most courageous act available to us is simply to look at the day that has been given to us and ask what goodness it contained.

And sometimes, that question is enough to help us carry on.