journey understood...thanks jen for your tributre to ashley
Tuesday, February 17, 2009 at 10:48am | Edit Note | Delete
Feb 16th 2009
What’s funny is that I am starting to type this blog at 11:11 my favorite time. For those of you who don’t know why it is my favorite, well, it is because legend says that someone who sees 11:11 has the angels watching over them.
Tonight my little angel will be Ashley Lowey. She is the newest member and most beautiful angel born into heaven today
Ashley who was 16 bravely fought her battle with ‘the beast’ for 14 months and she did so with a feisty, strong and unwavering strength. She was mainly an internal and quiet girl, a lot like Logan is and even yesterday when docs told her that treatment was no longer possible she didn’t panic but instead quietly absorbed the information and chose to close her eyes and rest instead.
Her mom, Lori is an incredibly remarkable and inspiring women. She is also the one who joked about pimping out her husband in one of my last blogs (sorry Darcy) which also makes her funny.
Lori is quick witted, will always be the first one who says it how it is and the one who I think gave Ash, her thick skin. Lori has been such an advocate, and has just played her role as an oncology mom perfectly, and I am so glad she got to be in Ashley’s corner through out this.. And for me, well I am just lucky to call her a friend.
Last night, a mere few hours before Ashley died, Lori called me and as we often do when we get together in person or on the phone we chatted for some time. However, last night our conversation was a bit more focused on the “what if’s” of deaths shadow lurking around.
We talked about previous families who have had to deal with such a painful struggle, we talked of the numerous moments in both our journeys where we too have worried if and when that moment comes how we will be able to cope.
We talked about healing vs.curing and how easily it to get them confused. And we even batted around a few “I can’t believe those….F’ing people”
But mostly we talked about honor. What an honor it is to be able to be the one that has been chosen to be with another person’s soul in a time of such need. I believe so deeply that it is the most incredible honor to be with someone when they are born, but it is a deeper and more incredible honor to be the one who is with them when they pass.
Lori completed understood and was unbelievably peaceful and calm.
About 8 hours before Ashley died, Lori was giving her a back rub to help make her comfortable and ease her pain. I know this because Lori had to call me back after her massage session with Ash.
I have thought about that all day. A mere hours before the transformation of a soul was about to occur a mother was preparing her child with the comfort of her touch, making her relax, holding her close and being completely present with her. How beautiful
How perfectly Motherly.
So, with that said, my blog tonight, although I could say a lot about Logan. Isn’t about Logan. It is about Ashley. It is in her honor, and it is in the honor of the whole beautiful Lowey family how amazingly they cared for their daughter and how they bonded together and grew closer and loved deeper and “got it” on so many levels.
It is about the healing that happened every day around them that helped carry some of the burden of this long struggle. It is about a remarkable child, a strong one, with beautiful friends and family, with a strong will to live and keep fighting. It is about those out there who lended a helping hand and brought meals or visited at the hospital or lent and ear or cried a few tears with them. It is about the community that banded together and gave Darcy, Lori and the girls the opportunity and to be with Ashley when she needed them most. No, this blog is not about sadness or pain. There has been too much of that already. It is about acknowledgment.
Acknowledging a life that has transformed. Acknowledging that today, while you wee going about your daily routine someone lost their daughter. Someones moment will forever stand still and their live will be forever changed. It is about acknowledging how precious life is and how quickly one moment can shape the rest of your life.
I ask you all to send every ounce of your love and compassion, and thoughts, and prayers, and condolences, to the Loweys. These are painful days ahead and they will need all of us hold them up.
To Ashley, I know you are running freely and you are finally without pain….smiling down ….I know that because tonight just as I was thinking of you and your family and sat down to write this it happened to be the time angels look down
11:11
and tonight I just I knew it was you.
Thanks Ash, god bless and may your beautiful soul and legacy radiate in everything meaningful that you loved and in the lives you have touched around you;
Rest in Peace. Beautiful girl.
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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