Living differently

In a few hours, one year ago, we said goodbye to a precious friend.

We stood by her bedside, tears dripping onto the blanket covering her tiny frame, not wanting to leave. I think she knew we were there. She just couldn't express it.
We couldn't stay for long. This was a time for her family, as they gathered for her final hours.

The doctors were preparing to take her off the steroid that was staving off the tumors in her brain, and we steeled ourselves for what was to come.

I don't remember much about those moments after we left the hospital. All I remember is praying continuously: "God, you are the Healer. Please wipe those tumors away. Just erase them. Please show us, show Leslie's friends, her family, that you are the Miracle-worker. Please. God. Please."

Mike and Mickey have been friends for decades, since grade school. Put those two together and you will laugh for hours. Laugh until your sides hurt. Laugh until you have to get up and run to the bathroom, or else.

I met Leslie the summer we moved to Imperial from Bremerton, Wash. I was 19. She was 16. She had a crush on my little brother, for awhile. When she met Mike a few short years later, that was it. He was the man for her and she the woman for him.

Each adored the other, that was plain to see. Just look at their dating pictures. Their wedding pictures. Of first Jenna, then Jeff, making their family complete. Of their 25th anniversary photos. Of shots of Mike tenderly looking at her, wracked by chemo or looking fully healed. Of them with Tyler, their eldest grandson, who will turn 3 in October.

When our Jonathan was learning to talk, he couldn't say Leslie. She became Sassy. And so she stayed. Mike and Sassy.

Our family responsibilities and work intervened, and our regular get-togethers with Mike and Sassy became farther apart, and eventually came to a pause. We'd run into each other and it was as if time stood still. We'd laugh till we cried. And say, let's do this again. Soon.

And then, shortly after our husbands' 30-year high school reunion, Leslie was diagnosed with Stage 4 melanoma. There were tumors in her lymph nodes and a bleak diagnosis. Talk about putting on the brakes. Things that seemed so important became trivial.

She was determined to beat this terrible disease. We were determined to pray her through it.

She began writing a blog chronicling her life with cancer. She and Mike found an oncologist developing a vaccine for her type of cancer, and she was accepted into his trial. One round of chemo. Radiation. Another round of chemo. Surgery.

She blogged constantly, and when she was too weak or too sick to her stomach to blog, her sister or her husband would.

Her blog went viral. She made friends around the world, people she never otherwise would have met. She was determined to keep a cheery demeanor on that blog, never complaining, never letting discouragement set in.

She became a prayer warrior, keeping an organized file of people and things to pray for. And I became her prayer warrior. We prayed without ceasing.

We made a pact to get together for dinner once a month. And so we did. We laughed until we cried. We sat in the back seat listening to our husbands and their antics, and treasured the closeness a car's interior brings.

More tumors grew in her brain, and she was flown to San Diego for surgery. As she was healing she wasn't up to going somewhere for dinner, so we brought it to her. She was hungry for In 'N Out. Mickey convinced her to try it his way -- animal style -- and she loved it.

But those tumors kept surfacing. And it became clear they would never go away.

So when, late that afternoon of Aug. 18, 2011, Mickey called to tell me Leslie was gone, tears welled and fell onto my keyboard. My lap. My desk. Words on the screen blurred. There was work to do, and it got done. But my heart wasn't in it. I was disappointed. Emptied. We had become a pretty good team, Mike and Sassy, Mick and I. And now we were three. And I felt lost.

Daddy had died just a few weeks before, and two days later our newborn grandson would face his own life-threatening episode that put him into the NICU for a week or so. I needed Leslie. I missed Leslie. I knew she was in heaven, with our God, but there was -- is -- a void that can never be filled. I could feel the absence of her prayers.

I felt for awhile that I had let Leslie down, that my prayers hadn't worked, as if it were up to me. Until that gentle nudge came telling me, "Oh yes, they did. She IS fully healed."

Sometimes, sitting in church, we sing precious words and images of Daddy and Leslie singing praises to our King spring to mind, and I'm thankful for the little packets of tissues in the pews.

Her daughter, today, while visiting her grave, said it best: "One year later and life is not any easier without you...it's just different. We are learning to live life differently."

And so we are.

To the beach! To the beach!

We're heading to the beach today, and my heart lifts at the thought.

You see, it's hot where I live. Pretty much six months of hot, we get (that's the Yoda influence). And right now it's blazingly hot. Hellishly (although nowhere nearly as horrendously as, well, aitch-e-double-toothpicks) hot. At 6:30 in the a.m., it's already well on the way to the 115 or so degrees predicted as a high. It's been day after day after day of that kind of external oppression that transforms one's car into an oven, the steering wheel just waiting to singe away fingerprints. Turn on the shower and you don't need the "H" part. "C" is tepid enough.

We live in a place where even plunging into the swimming pool isn't refreshing this time of year, potted plants shrivel and a mid-afternoon walk is at your own risk. And you can never get enough water. Or iced tea. With lemon. Over a full glass of Sonic ice.

So to the beach we go, where adventure awaits the day before our girl flies away for her junior year in college.

Sitting underneath the ceiling fan above our dining room table, I can close my eyes and already feel the breeze, the sun burning through 50-proof sunscreen, my toes sinking into damp sand, gripping as the surf tries to drag them outward.

The ocean is my healing place. That enormous ebbing and flowing body of water, a living, breathing organism, if you will, that soothes the soul. It teems with life, above and below. Pelicans are my favorite, skimming the surface in military formation and, spotting something delectable, putting on the brakes and plunging toward breakfast. Or lunch. Or dinner. Or a mid-afternoon snack.

Stand with your back to the beach and the surf that entices you to step deeper and deeper erases the chatter of thousands of people behind you.

Yes, I love the beach, because it frames that big, beautiful, blue ocean, the enormity of it an affirmation of a Love that is deeper and wider and more vast than any other.