The saddest moments are when life passes by...
5 years ago...on that cold February day we drove...2 hours to say goodbye to my Aunt who had battled cancer for many years of her life. I remember it like it was yesterday. The hospice wing of the hospital....machines beeping....tears silently falling down every face. I looked into your beautiful, brave face and wondered why...why are these moments when our hearts are so broken a moment that we must live.
But is it these moments when our hearts are broken really times that life forces them open so they can fill with love...And I let my troubled mind wonder...
One day no one would ever see through these eyes again. Be in this body of warm life. Think any of these thoughts in this place of skin and bone and blood again. Once I wasn’t yet here, and someday I just wouldn’t be here. The lid would close tight and they’d lower me too into earth.
What song does the world sing when your voice is forever silenced? 
Does the wind still murmur through leaves of silver birch at pond’s edge though you never walk that way again?
Does sun kindle a grey sky into a dawn inferno though you no longer rise?
Does the wind still murmur through leaves of silver birch at pond’s edge though you never walk that way again?
Does sun kindle a grey sky into a dawn inferno though you no longer rise?
I remember a time when I was young...afraid I might die like someone in a movie did...
“Your body is like a tent, Jessica.”Mom told me “See? What I’m touching, this is just your tent. The real you is deep inside, your soul, the part of your that feels and loves and makes you!”
“Your body tent will die. Everyone’s body tent dies.”
She finds my eyes again.
“But you, the soul-you on the inside, that will never, ever die!. God made our souls to live forever and ever.“
Hmm....forever and ever...
You awoke a short moment and we gathered around you and took turns at our attempts at goodbye.
We brushed away tears that didn't stop.
“Your body tent will die. Everyone’s body tent dies.”
She finds my eyes again.
“But you, the soul-you on the inside, that will never, ever die!. God made our souls to live forever and ever.“
Hmm....forever and ever...
You awoke a short moment and we gathered around you and took turns at our attempts at goodbye.
We brushed away tears that didn't stop.
And here too, near the pit of mortality and what that means for fragile humanity, us who are but a vapor, withering grass.
We drove home in silence. The kind of silence that you don't have to talk out words to communicate with each others hearts the sorrow.
But life went on.... We gathered on that cold day in the early day of March to celebrate you and your life. We cried more while Sarah McLachlan sang I will Remember You and pictures of you rolled across the screen.
Its a sad, sad thing....to have to loose you.
I want to call you so bad sometimes. To tell you I met a lady where I work that's as clean crazy as you. To have those conversations that the 16 and 17 year old me wasn't old enough to think to have. To have just one trip to Basken Robbins for some ice cream and long talk. To polish the plant leaves and vacuum the carpets in the same direction, then again the other way to lift out *all* the dirt I brought in with my bare feet.
But God called you.....
And before we knew it future became the past. We all live and we all die. In spite of what's been gained and what's been lost. But an end is not goodbye, the sun comes up and seasons change.
"If only there could be an invitation that bottled up a memory, like scent. And it never faded, never got stale. And when ever wanted we could open it up and live that moment all over again." -Ann Voskamp
I love you Aunt Jackie!! I miss you so much along with the rest of the family left here living on. Thank you for those hot summer nights we stayed up late drinking soda eating cashews and painting nails.
Your Jessica Lynn <3
