You know how you can form a totally one-sided bond with a famous person, especially when you are young? Maybe you don’t. Maybe you haven’t. Maybe I was a weird kid. But I confess that ever since I can remember, I’ve felt that bond with Caroline Kennedy. We had a lot in common, after all: We were both born in 1957, both eldest daughters, both Americans with Irish roots, both Catholic, both freckled. 

My parents, who voted for her father, President John F. Kennedy, and who mourned his assassination with alarming emotion to my first-grade eyes, had a coffee table book about J.F.K.’s tragically abbreviated term. I spent a lot of time perusing the glossy photos of Caroline and her family. I felt so sorry for her life without her dad. I knew in my heart that if we were ever to meet, we would be friends.

I grew out of my obsession with Caroline, but my ears perked up whenever I heard news about her life, her accomplishments, her milestones, her losses and public occasions of grief. 

Does this childhood fantasy now explain my rush of affection for her and my irrational urge to protect her, as I read the news of her daughter’s terminal cancer? Tatiana Schlossberg, Caroline Kennedy’s middle child, has written a moving account in The New Yorker of her diagnosis. She is 35 years old and the mother of two small children, babies, really. My heart breaks for this young woman’s pain, for her family and for her mother.

Caroline and I are both grandmothers now. We had children around the same time, and now we have grandkids around the same age. The reason I’ve been reading Tatiana’s story with particular empathy is that I have been helping my daughter, who has two small children, babies really, and who has been unexpectedly stricken with a debilitating, although not life-threatening, illness. My week-long visit for Halloween turned into a month-long stay in the trenches of child care and household chores as my daughter has gone to a succession of doctors. My daughter’s diagnosis has required many tests, some quite serious, and she has been in considerable pain.

“I don’t want Mommy to go to the doctor,” wails my 3-year-old granddaughter. She is not used to spending so much time apart from her mother. The baby, who is still nursing although old enough to go without, also doesn’t understand these maternal absences. Life is upside down for them, and I think of Tatiana’s children, equally too young to understand. We grandmothers are meager substitutes for their mothers.

Mostly, I think of Caroline facing the loss of her child. When you become a mother, you understand selfless love. You understand unconditional love. It may be the closest we come to getting a feel for God’s boundless, fathomless love for us. A mother would gladly take on any illness or pain or diagnosis in place of her child. When I said this to my daughter, I knew she knew exactly what I meant because she is herself a mother. My sister told me recently that her teenage daughter randomly asked her if she would be willing to “take a bullet” for her. My sister answered yes without hesitation. “You would?” my niece asked. 

Yes, dear child. We all would.

In the midst of my daughter’s extensive and inconclusive medical tests, my unbidden thoughts turned to what would happen if she died. She would leave these small children motherless. She would leave her partner mired in grief. She would leave our devastated family forever incomplete. She would leave me brokenhearted. 

I have often thought of Mary at the foot of the cross as her son Jesus suffered and died, and what that must have been like for her. Suddenly, my imagining of Mary’s pain cut far deeper and felt more personal than ever before. No matter how a mother loses a child, the mourning must feel like an abyss. Mary’s child is every child who has died too soon. Mary remained steadfast in the face of her tragedy, but I suspect I would be more driven to anger at God. My current sense of helplessness would already like to fight God’s will. I don’t know that my faith is strong or sustainable enough to endure the worst scenario. I don’t want to find out.

Famous people must yearn for privacy, for the blessing of anonymity, when their faith is shaken to their core. I don’t know Caroline Kennedy, but I pray for her every time the press publishes another story about her troubles. I pray that our mother Mary will hold her close at this terrible time. I pray for every mother who has lost or may lose a child: Remember, O most gracious Mother Mary.

My daughter will recover, although it will be a slog through good days and bad. I am beyond grateful. Like every mother, I pray that she outlives me. For now, I find myself reading to my baby granddaughter—an avid reader in the family tradition—the board book version of The Runaway Bunny, by Margaret Wise Brown. Thanks to the many times I read this book to my children, my memorization of the text seems to transcend time. I show her the pictures and read her the words about the mother rabbit who promises to pursue her little bunny no matter where the bunny runs to, without fail, without condition, “for you are my little bunny,” says the mother rabbit. And I almost can’t get the words out for fear of weeping. This little bunny on my lap has come from the womb of my little bunny. How marvelous. How miraculous. How lucky we mothers are that we get to experience such love, no matter where it takes us. 

Valerie Schultz is a freelance writer, a columnist for The Bakersfield Californian and the author of Till the Moon Be No More: The Grit and Grace of Growing Older. She lives on the Oregon Coast.