Days go by and still I think of you

Today marks six months since Lauren left us. We stopped by her gravesite on Saturday when we were in Northern VA. It’s always so peaceful there. A small Praying Mantis sat on the flowers on her gravestone and I was surprised to find that it allowed me to “pet” it a bit.

I told Duty that it all seems so very unreal to me. Like, it’s a dream and once I wake up she will be there blogging away, taking pictures with her ever-present camera and touching stuff in stores with me and laughing about it. But when I see her name on the gravestone, it reinforces to me that it IS real and she ISN’T here any longer. We were so so fortunate to have been given the gift of time to say goodbye to her. Many people are not so lucky and are left without the kind of closure we had.

Some of my most vivid memories of her float around in my head from time to time. When we found out in October that her cancer had returned, I sat on the couch at her house and hugged her from behind and just cried and cried into her shoulder. I’m surprised she wasn’t drowning in my tears. Mary came over and she put her arms around us and the three of us sat there hugging each other. I wanted to hold on to her forever. Driving home that night I heard the song “Angel” by Sarah MacLaughlan and knew it would be one that represented that night to me for a long, long time. (And it has. Every single time I hear it, I can see the picture of us in the living room, hugging) Sweetie that she was, La let me cry all over her.

I also think about my visit to Charlottesville in January when I hung out with her for the weekend. The weather was very mild and we sat outside on the campus playing a sort of card/question game with this deck she had given me. I asked her candidly if it was hard staying at school, trying to keep up with classes while the ever-present nausea wore her down. She said yes, of course. But there were others there battling it as well and if they could do it, so could she. To go home was, in her words, to give up. And she didn’t want to do that. With her mom’s help, she attended classes almost up to the end of her life. I doubt I would be as strong. Truly.

I’ve read and been told by those who work in hospice care that the sense of hearing is the last to go before someone passes away. That brings me a sense of peace that perhaps she heard us that last day as we stood around her bedside. That she heard the beautiful songs her suitemates sang from their hearts, the love they poured out in their cards to her, all of us with her, rubbing her feet and holding her hand.

You all know me and my philosphy of “lessons are found everywhere” and I seek to find and learn mine in this experience. I’ve written about it here and also on my other blog and there are many, of course. When my dad died, I was 14. While I missed him, I was also relieved because he had spent most of the time I knew him in some sort of pain – physical, spiritual, emotional. To me, his death represented a freedom for him from all that weighed him down on the physical plane. I missed him, no question. But mostly, I was relieved. I didn’t visit his gravesite until my grandfather passed away and was buried near my dad. I always felt that if I wanted to connect with my dad in spirit, I could do that anytime and didn’t have to visit the cemetery to do that.

So, it puzzles me that I’ve already been to La’s gravesite five times since she passed away. Some days I sit there and just listen to the sounds of nature. Other times I go, cry a bit, letting my tears fall onto the earth and wish for her to come back with every fiber of my being. I guess my challenge is to know, really know, as I did with my dad, that the Lauren I loved more than life itself isn’t there, in a plot of land in Fairfax. She lives in my heart and the hearts of those who knew her and loved her. That won’t fade. And she is as close as a thought.