When you’ve spent your life trying to keep everyone else alive, what happens when your own life is on the line?

Days before her sixth birthday, Raye Williams lost her grandpa—and began learning how to be the strong one. For her grieving grandmother. For her younger siblings. For a family navigating years of hospital rooms and unanswered questions.

Decades later, thirteen months into her marriage, she’s headed into surgery for cervical cancer. This time, the family protector is the one in the hospital bed.

In Chapter 3 of Like We Were Never Kids, Raye traces the tangled roots of resilience and hypervigilance: the childhood losses that taught her to anticipate the storm, the love behind her need to protect everyone, and the cost of leaving herself off that list.

At the center is “Fighting Lightning,” an original song that builds like a storm. Raye shares how a summer dog walk, her grandmother’s lightning-struck apple tree, and a tornado tearing through her parents’ backyard helped her find the story - and how her own cancer became its final verse.

For the eldest daughters. The family protectors. Anyone who’s ever mistaken being needed for being safe.

Maybe love can be present without always standing guard.

Like We Were Never Kids is a series of personal stories accompanied by original songs, created by singer-songwriter Raye Williams. Each chapter tells a complete story, with a song of its own.

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Childhood grief and becoming “the strong one”

• The bond between a granddaughter and her widowed grandmother

• Growing up with a parent’s chronic illness

• Eldest-daughter responsibility, resilience, and hypervigilance

• Cervical cancer, surgery, and an altered future

• The real storms behind “Fighting Lightning”

• Learning a different way to love as Aunt RayeRaye

CONTENT NOTE

Includes strong language and personal accounts of childhood bereavement, a child’s death from leukemia, family illness, cervical cancer, hysterectomy, and loss of the ability to carry a pregnancy.

If this chapter brings someone to mind, send it to them. And if you recognize yourself here, follow Like We Were Never Kids for more stories and original songs.

Give the kid the mic.