I miss her and wonder how she is doing now.
Shortly after she died, someone asked if anyone had a compiled list of her status emails. No one had, so I compiled one for them - it's about 90 pages long. It starts with her first diagnosis and ends about a month before she died, almost a year ago. I haven't been able to bring myself to read it. Not yet. Soon.
I cried some then, but since tears have been leaking out all week, I obviously haven't begun to finish mourning her absence. When I start to cry, if I can, I crawl onto the sofa and curl up under the soft white fuzzy blanket she gave me shortly after she first got sick, after she visited and all I had for throws when she napped were the old hand-knitted kind. They were not near as soft as she wanted them to be, so she fixed that problem, she did.
I hold the softness to my face, and let my mind wander back over the times we spent together, the stories she wrote. I remember the way she railed at her fate. I remember when the whole chemo thing was too hard and she wanted to quit partway through a series and I called to try to talk her out of stopping and she yelled at me and cussed at me, and then completed the course. (Even then, we knew it wasn't going to change the end of the story, it would only extend its length.)
I remember my last visit to Minnesota to help her clean up the items on her todo list. It was just a year ago; she'd done most of the things herself, but the last turn of her illness had taken her by surprise. She'd been going along for some time, doing just fine, and then... she wasn't.
I remember her insistence that she wasn't battling cancer, and that when she died, we were NOT to say she'd lost her battle. And I agree because cancer is not the enemy, Fear is. And while Fear struggled mightily to get her to give up the days she had, and even managed to get on top a few times, she never stayed down for long. She faced Fear down. She faced her fate with trepidation, but also with the conviction of one who believes in Life after life. She lived all of the days she was given.
I remember the last time we said goodbye.
I still struggle with a huge case of the "why not me's". We were sisters. Why did her disease lead her on an unrelenting march to death, while mine shows no evidence of returning just yet, almost eight years later?
I feel guilty, undeserving of the gift of life, as if, somehow, my survival caused her death. My head knows better, but survivor's guilt is real.
I can picture her now, yelling at me for even thinking about going down that path. If she were here, she would have none of it.
Remember the blog post I wrote early last year, where I lost some earrings, and after I asked her if she wouldn't mind helping me find them, they both turned up in the unlikeliest of places?
Well, last week, I lost another one. This time, I didn't ask for her help; I figured it was just one of those things.
And. Two days later I sat down in my rocking chair in my living room and looked at the rug - and there the missing earring was; smack dab in the middle of the room. *insert an unexpected flood of tears here*
I know, I know. There are many logical explanations for how it happened. But for today, I'm going to take the illogical route and read it as a message from her.
She is lost, yes, but also true, she is found.
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