I was terrified. But instead of living in fear, I started to live with fear. I saw that it was okay to let down my guard for moments or even hours at a time. Fear could be on one side of me; it wasn’t going to leave entirely. But hope or happiness or even laughter could be on the other. If I needed to hover in the corner, I could hang twinkly lights and bring a cozy blanket and a great book and a glass of wine into my corner. I’d make it a beautiful corner.

When I was in high school, the three-year-old sister of a friend of mine died. My friend took a few days off school, which gave me time to obsess about what I’d say to her when she returned. She was my first friend to experience death up close, and I didn’t want to get it wrong.

The first time I went to a friend’s house for Christmas Eve, I felt like I was visiting a foreign country. The huge Christmas tree in the corner of the living room beckoned to me with its twinkling lights and metallic ornaments. I kept a safe distance, feeling like audience to its majesty rather than participant in its ceremony.

You make 18 trips to Target to buy all the essentials and clean your house until it's essentially unrecognizable. You consider putting your house on the market because it will never look this good again, but you realize you don't have time...you've got a party to plan. You spend seven hours crafting the perfect playlist, enlisting your 12-year-old to make sure it's cool. The guests begin to arrive at 3 and the first ones leave at 5. The party that you planned for four months is over in 120 minutes.

Dalia showed me you don’t need to speak to make the loudest impression in the room. She showed me you can have awesome dance moves even when all you can move is your shoulders. She taught me that sometimes the goal isn’t to find the light at the end of the tunnel but instead to make the tunnel itself as beautiful as possible.