This is an extremely personal post, but I wanted to share with you this morning.
For several years, hubby and I would make a trip to Indiana to visit with my best friend and her husband for a week. This was always such a fun vacation. Just spending time with the person who really “got” me made me very happy. Before she got sick, she was an early riser, and I remember waking up with two dogs piling into the bed with hubby and me, and being handed a cup of coffee. My friend and I always drank from cups with little faces on them. There were four different colors (the cup in the picture is really a darker blue than it shows) and each one had a different expression.
My friend developed breast cancer several years ago, and she had surgery, chemo, and radiation. She beat the cancer, but her health was never good after that. She was tired all the time. The last couple of times I went to Indiana, all we did was sit and play computer games together. But we both loved doing it, and we were TOGETHER.
In 2011, she fell and broke her wrist, which wasn’t a HUGE deal. But shortly after that, she started having short spells of passing out. When she went to her doctor after a longer spell, she was immediately taken to the emergency room. It turned out she had blood clots in both lungs. I remember talking to her on the phone on a Friday evening. She told me they were going to move her to a bigger hospital. In the wee hours of Sunday morning, May 1, 2011, I got a call from her husband. She had passed away.
A while after her death, I was invited to go to Indiana with her mother and sister to go through her things. The three of us, along with her husband, went through everything, and it was kind of cathartic. It brought back fond memories, and we all found things we had given her. We all took the things we wanted, things to treasure and remember her by. I was so thrilled when her husband offered me the cups we had drunk from all those years. They were our special cups.
Anyway, that’s the story behind the cups, plus a lot of other rambling I felt the need to do. What brought this all on was that I decided to drink coffee out of the blue one this morning. As the coffee poured into the cup, a flood of tears came from my eyes. After 3 1/2 years, the grief is still raw. I have these little bouts of tears from time to time. And I let it happen. I rarely cry anymore, but I allow tears for this. I remember her kindness mixed with her sarcasm. I remember her corny sense of humor and her infectious laugh. I loved her fiercely.
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