6 months
Tuesday, August 18, 2009 at 10:42pm | Edit Note | Delete
On sunday we drove home from a quick weekend getaway to see some family and friends ..as we were driving it hit me that it was the 16th of August an unbelievable six months since we said goodbye to our beautiful daughter and sister. Sometimes its hard to know whether to blurt information like this out or to just let everyone discover it on their own, just in case it ir results in veering off the coquhialla in tears. One thing i have realized is that we all have different ways of coping and that there really isnt any textbook formula for getting through grief, sometimes it comes on like a tornado knkocks you to the ground and other times it lies dormant like a sneaky predator and much of the time its just a feeling of "being right next door." What i do know is that were all unique and grieving shows you just how much. Its a strange thing really when something traumatic in life happens to someone, we kind of want to peek in, to know how one gets through it , we watch, we observe , we learn and we analyze. Before tragedy struck us i watched others going through this and looked for clues on how they managed through it , some crawled into a shell , others packed up sold everything and went on adventure ...a realization there life would never be normal again... i know i am neither one of those people , athough i thought about doing both many a times. I dont have any answers for coping with grief , i couldn't write a book on it , i couldn't counsel through it, its only been 6 months but i do know that my family, friends and faith are key to my survival , first two slightly obvious , but faith , faith in what ? Well i guess i believe that my daughter is is in a much safer place whatever that looks like , my humanness , my motherness wants her back its the ego part of me , but my soul knows that she is saying to me :" mom, this place is amazing , im ok, if you saw this place you wouldnt want to go back either, i've got it better then you, , i am whole and i am in the presence of such beauty and love , i am with God...i am creating a place for you here and that is what i imagined her doing on August 7 creating a place...i envisoned her turning around and seeing her best friend in the whole world scampering up to her licking her face and Ashley greeting her with open arms. I suppose i should explain - the girls(all 3 ) went to camp goodtimes for a week , camp goodtimes is an incredible camp for children and siblings of children with cancer or bereaved siblings of cancer . My children had a phenomemal time i think it changed them forever , they formed beautiful relationships and were in the presence of some of ashleys former dr's , they were with people who finally "got it" understood their grief, their loss, their pain , stuff even darcy and i didnt always "get" Their time was mixed with adventure , joy, tears and coping. I was so proud of them. I missed them terribly and was so thrilled for their experience when i saw them, their camp stories spilled out of them like an overfilled glass of water . Unfortunately they returned right back to reality when they learned and saw how sick sophy (ashleys dog) had been while they were gone...for those of you who followed the blog last year then you know sophy was ashleys soul mate, that she too was diagnosed with cancer a few months after ashley was ..they actually had a very similar surgery within days of eachother last June. Sophys cancer was back and her battle eerily similar, in fact, when i took sophy into the vet they suggested we put her down that very night , do you know that as i checked back on the dates it was exactly 14months to the day sophy was diagnosed ...ashleys journey as you recall was 14months to the day. Uncertain of how to handle it we decided to phone the kids at camp to explain the story and give then the option of saying good bye should the need arise , i wanted them to have the opportunity to say goodbye this time. They were sad and emotional and so existential for their tender age, Sophy ended up waiting an extra day for them to come home before saying goodbye. It was hard to say farewell to Sophy she was like a living reminder of ashley , although i'm not a huge dog person sophy was a member of this family and had been since ashleys 7th birthday, but again we knew where she was going and who would be greeting her at the gates ...now how can that picture in my mind get any better than that( ok well second best pic).We will do something special in rememberance of sophy and ashley together again. And from the words of Brittany "no tears and no scars in heaven"
So to say that life has been calm and peaceful around here would not be indicative of our time right now , unfortunatley life and death continues to unfold regardless., we have had to say goodbye to our dear friend angie, our dog sophy and my amazing stepfather mike who was such a cornerstone in our life, a man of humility despite his great successes in life, someone i truly learned form,he will be greatly missed one of my favourite people. As i visited my grandmother this weekend i knew it was probably going to be the last time i saw her ,she gave away some of her belongings and as i wanted to stop her i knew how important it was for her to pass these on , she is amazing and in one of those fleeting moments again you realize how precious life is how transient and indiscriminant it can really be. so it teaches you how you really need to have a pretty darn good understanding or okayness of what life and death means ...maybe its our own gratification our own need to control, our own limited capacity that gives us such a horrid feeling of death , we want so many answers and are unwilling to be ok with "not haviing all the answers" with "building a mystery"and just believing ,... i don't know... i don't have all the answers , i dont know how were getting through this , i don't know if it gets better or worse ...i know others are grieving right along with us and have been changed forever too so i guess we just keep on keeping on( oncology parent motto). We have done alot of things to keep us distracted ,occupied, busy ...buliding a new normal ...renovations , back to work, fundraising, creating legacies,escaping, holidaying, appreciating today, giving up control (hahaha) i don't know if we are delaying or prolonging the grief or just putting time in between thoughts., its hanging on to faith, sometimes by just a thread,whatever it is it is our grief and its our coping right wrong or unique its what were doing. Thanks for reading.
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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