Hamilton Star Sings “Dear Theodosia” for His Daughter

I have had two prophetic dreams in my life.

The first was that I was going to own a pair of yellow galoshes that went up to my knees and had laces. That may have been manifesting, because I just went out and bought them.

The second was that I was pregnant with a ladybug, which might seem odd if I hadn’t actually been pregnant at the time. I woke up from my nap and immediately called my mother. I told her we were going to scrap the safari-themed nursery. It was going to be ladybugs, and I was forwarding her a Pinterest board right now.

On October 17, 2015, we welcomed our Adelaide, our Adel-ladybug, into the world.

Unfortunately, Adelaide’s story is far too similar to Javi’s: extensive testing, missed milestones, and lots of sleepless nights. When Adel was three and a half years old, the doctors confirmed our worst fears.

Adelaide never received a formal diagnosis, but they could tell from back-to-back MRIs that whatever was causing her variety of symptoms was neurodegenerative. There was nothing else they could do to help her.

In the fall of 2019, as Matt and Myra were wrestling with Javi’s diagnosis, my husband Miguel and I lay in our daughter’s bed with her as she took her final breaths.

Now I’m going to take you back about three and a half years, to a very momentous week in my family’s life. It was the week Adelaide had the first of what would become thousands of seizures, and the week my husband received the job opportunity of a lifetime.

He had been asked to audition for this little show. It had taken over New York City, but it hadn’t quite reached the rest of the country yet. It was called Hamilton. You might have heard of it.

Lin was leaving the Broadway company. They needed someone to take over as the understudy on Broadway before becoming the lead in the first production outside New York City, in Chicago.

Between Broadway, Chicago, and eventually returning to Broadway, Miguel would perform the role of Alexander Hamilton more than 2,000 times. In fact, when he took his final bow earlier this year, Lin got onstage and said you would have to go back to the 1700s, to the man himself, to find someone who had portrayed Alexander Hamilton more.

Spoiler alert for those of you who haven’t seen the show, or read history: Hamilton’s son dies. Sorry.

People often ask Miguel how he could get onstage night after night after night and perform “It’s Quiet Uptown,” a scene in which Alexander Hamilton and his wife, Eliza, are grieving the death of their son.

Miguel says, “Well, it’s my job,” or, “It’s not my kid who dies onstage each night,” admitting that by the time Adelaide passed away, he had already performed that scene more than a thousand times.

I agree with him. It actually isn’t that scene that hits me the hardest.

For me, it is one that comes much earlier in the show. It is a song a parent sings to their child about the hope they have for that child’s life. A hope for a life that is not guaranteed. A hope that can evaporate so quickly when the unimaginable becomes our reality.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is my absolute honor to introduce my husband and forever Adel’s daddy, Miguel Cervantes.

So, I played Alexander Hamilton for a little while. That was a great job. Let me tell you, that was a good job.

But that other job she was talking about was a good job too.

Sometimes it’s hard, right? Sometimes jobs are hard, and that was a hard one.

There are moments that the words don’t reach. There is pain too terrible to name. You hold your child as tight as you can and push away the unimaginable. The moments when you’re in so deep,