Erin Sullivan: SAN ANTONIO — David Roth had a simple Christmas; at home with his mom and dad andhis older brother who flew in from New Jersey, sharing good food, playing outside with his golden retriever, Callie. The Roth home is set far back off a dirt road in San Antonio. It’s serene and smells of burned leaves and earth. David, who is 14, likes being outside, breathing deep under a blue sky. It’s pure, he says.
He doesn’t want people stressed over the holidays. There will be burned turkeys. There will be casseroles that slip and crash to the floor. There will be old anger, old resentment.
None of that really matters.
“It’s all just noise,” David says.
David is about 5 feet tall and weighs less than a hundred pounds. He has thick, wavy brown hair, a dimple in his chin and blue eyes that look at you in a way a psychologist many years his senior would: piercing, studying, patient. He listens. He expresses his thoughts sincerely and with eloquence beyond his age. He feels very old.
When David was 9, he went to the doctor because of an aching leg. He was diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma, a cancer that invades one child out of 50,000. He spent a year in and out of St. Joseph’s Children’s Hospital in Tampa, an hour’s drive from home. During that year, he learned of pain and God and love.
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