Forever Young

Hello readers.  It’s been a while since I’ve blogged anything worth writing about.  My life has been in a season of flux.  When you’re lost, you get tired of explaining the same tree to someone; the one you saw last time you turned around on the path, the one you’re leaning against, the one you marked to remember where you started.  After a while, it’s all circles.  People don’t want to hear about that. They want to hear about straight shots and a bull’s eye. They want to hear about beginnings and endings.  I have that for you today.

This week I wrote the end of a story, the story of Katrina Kelley Prangers’ life.  Also known as, an obituary. She was my Uncle Shane’s wife and according to her, my favorite Aunt.

I propped myself up to the bar at my parents house and pounded black letters onto an electronic white page.  It felt so cold to use that medium considering Katrina was by far one of the most warm and effervescent people I’d ever know.  She was the other “curvy girl” in the family.  Most of our catch up time included how we cared about calories, but not really at all.  Then we would venture into stories of our mothers and finally if I was getting any action.  She wanted to make sure this luscious body of mine wasn’t going to waste. 

Wednesday morning on my way to work I got the call.  The minute I hung up the phone and spun my car around to join my family, the sky opened up.  The rain came down without restraint. God was weeping.  Between my windshield wipers and my eyelids I figure it might be easier just to drown.  This is how the next few days will go. 

She was 39 and her heart just stopped.

If people die how they live than Katrina is a showstopper.  If you don’t mind me joking here, I think she would be thrilled to know that she got me out of work for a few days, that her pictures are all over the kitchen table between the meals people brought, that she is all we’re talking about, that Shane (her husband who hates Facebook) is managing her Facebook account and that in her honor we bought her favorite beer “Miller Light 64” and toasted to her on the front lawn like true Rednecks. 

My thoughts about her come easy when I’m weeping or when I'm blasting "Forever Young" in the shower where tears mix well with water.  I’m not pulling the sympathy card here. I’m simply saying that I loved her.  She was a fan of my words, which is now the only place I can meet her.  The funny thing about grief is that it doesn’t tell you when it’s coming and you don’t know when it’s going to leave.  You have to sit with it even though we’d rather be sitting with her.  Could Heaven not wait?

I’m at the office right now to get some work done.  It’s fairly clear that all I wanted to do was meet with her today, all by myself in a corner where no one can hear us. Katrina ended well. I’m not sure who said it but let me quote it,

“Even if I knew the world was going to end, I would still plant my tulips.” 

Let us get up tomorrow, paint life on our faces and join the world she never took for granted.  Let us make a house out of the tree where we are lost.   Let us get pedicures, drink Miller Light 64’s and say to those around us,

“I love you.”

After all, in the words of Katrina, “Just embrace it.”