thank you
Friday, September 5, 2008 at 10:31am | Edit Note | Delete
I started thinking the other day as i sent the kids back to school that a new season is upon us...yes Autumn is just around the corner, normally i look so forward to this time of the year , kids going back to school, new routine, organization, but as this Fall approaches i can't help but think that we have been in this journey for all of the seasons now. I started to panic on how i would micro manage everyone now that school and committments are back in full swing.
My worries always seem to lay with "what if we have to be with ahsley and one of the other girls at the same time" It happens... and its not like phoning your boss and requesting a day off. I started to become angry at the unfairness of it all,maybe feeling al little sorry for myself, at the same time feeling so much gratitude for those who have stood by us so faithfully. Sometimes out of something so tragic amazing gifts (people) surface. I think with others who wanted to help by saying "call me if theres anything i can do " was beyond my capacity , i didn't know what i wanted or needed ..anything? ...everything?...i didn't have the brain function to crawl out of the misery enough to match my clothes let alone articulate the chores that needed to get done, especially hard for a control freak, i was just thankful when someone did it. So a great big thank you to all , especially those who just did , thank you for taking over my brain with dinners in the freezer, money gifts , gift cards, picking up my kids , having my kids over, praying, the consistent email/phonecalls , investigating alternatives, fundraising,hugs,massages, task mastering,hospital visits, wine, well placed advice,shoulder to cry on. And thank you to those who have jsut been around enough to know how this journey is going, the details, the grace to know when to ask questions and when not to. There has been alot of grief in this road but mostly disillusionment of what i thought was... isn't. But it has been replaced by the kindness of all of you, you may not have realized it but you may have been the one who got me through a particularly rough day without even relaizing it. My boss once said in a staff meeting the importance of a smile and how it can change someones day. (Sorry janice at the time(prior cancer) i thought, yeah yeah yeah,) She told us how she smiled at someone who appeared to be having a bad day and how that woman came up to her and said that it was the nicest thing someone had done for her that day. So i appreciate you people who walk by me at the mall or the school and smile at me instead of avoiding me.One thing i now know is that if a person or family is going through a hard time it is your comfortableness with them that comforts them, it is a message thats seems to transcend the families i have met on the cancer ward. One of these days when Ahsley is better and time is not being controlled by the oncology department i will sit down and thank each one of you personally for not allowing us to fall apart . Thank you if you prayed for my faith to not falter becuase there were times i could feel it draining from my body then by some miracle it would restore and i could face another day.
Speaking of which, last month Ashley had the experimental procedure stopped in stage 2 of a 3 step procedure we had to wait along time to find out if they would do it agin. They repeated the first step yesterday ...SUCCESSFULLY! It was so nice to come home to emails and phone calls from our facebook status congratulating us ...thank you for you prayers and remember the smallest thing can improve someones day or perspective if it is done consistently. Thank you all for cocnsistency...we're still in this for a while so please stick with us. (new lesson learned)
Love you all
Peace
Lori
The Journey of a butterfly...Ashleys life has become symbolic of a butterfly, peaceful beautiful and free to fly where the wind takes her. We have a white butterfly that flies around us in the garden in the springtime where the other girls play. Irish folklore tells us that a white butterfly is the rebirth of a deceased child's soul reborn into something even more beautiful than before...our butterfly
June 29 1992 - February 16 2009
Welcome to the Journey of a Butterfly
We invite you to follow along one family's journey through grief and loss, one brave young girl's journey through faith and inspiration, this is not a blog to convert anyone , nor is it a blog about fundraising , it is what i hope will reach another family on a similar journey, we are not experts , i could not give you a magic remedy for how one gets through disease and devestation but it is our story , sometimes gut wrenching other time heartwarming and all of the time, i guarantee, very real. We are not perfect, we struggle daily and i think that the more we connect to one another the more we understand what this journey through life is all about . Sometimes that path is bumpy and we fall down, sometimes we sit and stop a while,or take a step back and other times we pound our fists on the pavement like a lunatic , still other times we find ourselves picking eachother up dusting eachother off and walking alongside them even if only for short time. This blog is dedicated to Ashley , her sisters and every single angel that picked us up along this road.
This is an introduction to the beginning and middle part of our journey the specific blogs are more indepth , the end...well there will never be an end to this journey i've come to realize that , not on this earth, for now we just assimilate it into our life like a hole , a missing limb, a continous ache that you just learn to live with.
When Ashley was about 12 years old she asked if she could go to youth group at a local church , i didn't have any church upbringing but know i craved it throughout my life , this was a rare opportunity and i recognized that if i didn't embrace it now she may lose her interst in it very quickly and beocme a jaded, cynical, stubborn person like her mom. My husband grew up in a very religious (shove it down your throat) kinda religion( i wont mention any names)or maybe it was the way he was raised ? Anyways i encouraged her to go because the community we had moved to embraced this kinda thing so i thought why not? Naturally and shortly after she started attending she was soon encouraging us to go , she had made quite a leadership name for herself there , pionner leader , sunday school helper etc, i was comfortable for the first time in my life going to a church, maybe it was the first word that greeted you as you walked in..."belong" maybe it was because they embraced community and outreach service in our city , dont know, but soon found it very therapeutic, cheaper than a shrink, and our other 3 girls jumped on board pretty quickly, my husband well... a work in progress , he communes with God in a fishing boat he says , although makes many efforts to go even if just for good way to start the week, i was still cynical , felt i wasnt holy enough but went anyways.
Ashley was scheduled to sing a solo in the church choir Dec 16 2007 , i was scared for her, i was sure she got her singing skills from me which was nil at best. She sang beautifully and you couldnt tell she had been complaining of cramps , something i chalked up to girls stuff/growing pains for a couple weeks off and on, she was an active healthy girl. When the performnce was done we got our christmas tree and i took her to the clinic to have it checked out before Christmas , they sent us to our local hosptial for tests , i was worried it was appendix. Darcy, my husband left the hosptial to go pick up our other 3 girls from friends houses , i caught the doctor in the ahallways and asked if the ulstrasound pictures were back, i remember having eye contact with Ashley only feet away from me but far enough away for her not to hear the doctor to so impassionaltely say "its not appendix, it looks like cancer", i have to stop as i write this because it is still one of the 2 biggest shocks in my entire life, i think i ran down the hallways screaming with no sound coming from my throat and not knowing where i was running . I phoned Darcy and words didnt come out of my mouth. Before I knew it we were at out local Childrens Hospital(100km away) meeting oncologiosts , being give an "oncology team" which consisted of a primary nurse, a social worker, a main oncologist and a shrink....wait a minute ...what is an oncologist? yep, a cancer doctor, this was the real thing . we waited 4 days to find out what type we were dealing with ... it was curable 90 % even though she was stage 4 , how the hell can my kid have stage 4 cancer and only a few cramps , it was mind bending. We were thrown stright into a world so foriegn to us , everything stopped ..jobs ..PAC meetings ,carppoling and yes even some friends who"couldn't handle it" it was no longer our own beds , our own home, our own anything. Treatments and life became unbearable , the 90% cure rate was not looking good at any stage throughout our journey , it seemd to be always full of negative news to the point where i couldnt stand the face of her oncologist , it nearly made me want to vomit everytime i saw him...The words they briefed us on as we began this mind altering path was " one of you will grieve through this process and no matter the out come the other will grieve after " they couldn't have been more right.......Ashley insisted on going to church on Christmas eve, two nights before she was to start chemo at the end of the service our pastor came to pray with us , i didn't know many people in the church , but wow did they know Ashley, when we rose our heads from bowing in prayer the whole congregation was surrounding us , i knew at that moment who i was going to need to get me through this ...would he be willing to listen to me...
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