Today is my brother-in-law’s birthday. Our family has a tradition of calling each other for birthdays, and you always want to be first. I can’t call Dean, but I can have a little conversation with him, and I’m sure that Karen and David are making him a castle cake to celebrate. As I was thinking about this, it made me wonder if our loved ones in heaven would celebrate their birthdays there, or the day they died instead, since it could be considered their “heavenly birthday” as the day they arrived there. Strange places my mind goes sometimes. We went on our usual ski trip to northern Pennsylvania in January. This might have been Matt’s last year to join us, since next year he’ll be working, with limited time off. We will miss him, but Susie will miss him the most! Karen enjoyed cross country skiing, but the other two prefer the excitement of downhill instead. It’s hard to go back each year without her, but I suppose it will get easier. This year, we brought three bins of quilt fabric from my mother’s house. The owner of the inn where we stay is a quilter, and so are a few of our fellow guests, so we made a lot of people happy! Mom would have loved that. We also went to Maine for a memorial gathering for Mom. Maine in January is never my first choice, but it was a great celebration that Mom would have enjoyed. A lot of people came, and a lot of them said very nice things. One of the older grandchildren had prepared some words to say, since none of her children were willing/able to do it. He did a great job in a tough situation, and brought me to tears more than once! Another grandchild made a slide show, and some others made picture display boards. I had watched all of the digitized Betamax videos from the mid 80’s, and made a composite video of clips of Mom. It was so much fun to see everybody back then. The grandchildren who were babies then have their own babies now. I would go back and watch our own videos of when our kids were little, but that would make me cry so much, so I won’t be doing that any time soon.
I still don’t see as many signs of Karen as I would like to, but there was another one recently. There’s a section on here where people can post comments, and another part to send a message. Weebly sends a notification to Karen’s email for comments and messages, and also puts them on the blog information page, but I don’t look at those things very often. I checked last week, and there was a message sent the day before. It might be entirely coincidental, but I prefer to believe that Karen is nudging me.
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AuthorI’m Karen. I was originally diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) in August 2004 when I was 10 years old. When I was working on my college and scholarship application essays two years ago, I wrote about my journey. Although it was a rough few years, it became such an influential part of my life that I can’t, and wouldn’t want to, imagine my life without having had cancer. I called it the worst best thing that ever happened to me. Archives
April 2022
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