The Holidays behind us and another year older

Well the holidays are over and I must say I am glad. This year was way harder for us than last, and least me and Roger and Ashley anyway. I loved seeing Laura Beth with her eyes wide, opening presents, and I enjoyed spending time with her and Christa,  but the Holidays are just not the same with Katie being gone, and her birthday being two days after Christmas makes it even harder. I do not think Christmas will ever be the same again. But I pray that having Laura Beth to see Christmas through her eyes will help more as time goes by. My 55th birthday was yesterday and I was so pleased that Laura Beth and Christa came down on my birthday and spent the night and went to church with us this morning. They left awhile after lunch to go home. I am feeling lonesome. We had a good day yesterday. We first went out to eat at Olive Garden and then went looking and shopping at the 99cent store and the half price book store and then the mall. It was a good day. Then we came home and my sweet hubby had gotten me a cake. What a good time. You know when I think about it, I don't remember many of my birthdays. I remember my thirteenth birthday. It was my first real party. Before that I only had "family parties", but that year I got to invite friends. Then the next one I remember was my 22nd one which is the first birthday after Christa was born. Dad got me a cake and we celebrated and I felt so blessed. Of course Bobby had left me by then,. but I had Christa, and I was so grateful. Then the next one I remember was my thirty seventh and that was the year after Ashley was born. Roget and Ashley and Christa celebrated with a cake and Roger got me flowers, and once again I felt so blessed. Not only had God blessed me with one beautiful, smart daughter in the face of huge odds, with her being a premie and everything....but he blessed me again with my baby Ashley which also was a scary situation with me having to have a Cesarean with her.  I did not think it was possible to be blessed even more, but it was I would later see. Then the next birthday I remember was my fortieth. I took that one pretty hard. I always just thought I would die really young and I would still be pretty....but guess what? I fooled myself! Lol. That birthday Roger and Christa gave me a party with cake and ice cream at our church! It was awesome! Then there was my forty nineth. That one topped all the other birthdays! Katie had just been born, and We celebrated my birthday at Christa's house. I think we celebrated it early that year cuz we were down there to see our first grandchild, and boy she was so beautiful, and so special and I never knew it was possible to love anyone so much. I felt profound maternal love for  both my girls, dont misunderstand me,  more that words can ever say.... but the love a grandparent feels for a grandchild is just so powerful and special and different. Anyone who has not experienced becoming a grandparent just can not know what I mean. You have to experience it. My first grand baby, Katie, was a treasure. She was so smart and wise and special. She was not one to want to love on and kiss me, her mom and Ashley she saved that for, but we had this special relationship too. She could talk to me for hours. When I lost her, it ripped a whole in my heart that will never be filled again. When Katie died, my life just stopped making sense, not just my life, either, but life in general. I am beginning to come to terms with it, but I will never stop missing my Katie bug. Then in July 2008 my second little miracle grand daughter came on the scene. She and I connected from the moment we met. We still do, and the older she gets, the more she reminds me of my angel Katie, in many ways, but she is also very different. She needs me to love on and to play with and to spoil her, which Katie didn't need me for any of those things, well.... may be for the spoiling. lol. She doesn't want me to talk alot to, she wants to be close to me and she lets me kiss and  hug her, well.....most of the time...LOL. I miss her so bad when weeks go by and I do not get to go down there or her come here. I am so grateful for the times my daughter and her husband have allowed her to come visit her Nana and Pop and Ashley. Every time is a blessing.
Well I have rambled on and on, but sometimes I just need to do that. It helps. I pray anyone who reads this had a glorious holiday season. May we all remember the reason for the season. God bless.

Almost Christmas

I cannot believe that it has been seven months or so since I updated this blog. I never did get my spring. Spring and summer and fall came and went and I never felt as if spring came. The spring, summer,and fall of my grief melted right into the winter of my grief and all that has changed is that I am having more anxiety than I have ever had in my life. I do not really know what the source of my anxiety is, but it sure is worse.  Life has been busy. The hole left in our hearts by Katie leaving is not any smaller. Life just has to go on as long as we are blessed with life here on this earth. Ashley started to college this fall and she is having a pretty hard time adjusting to college. This week is her finals week, and she is really stressed. I have been trying to help her as much as I can, but she is just really experiencing terrible anxiety about tests, and also about alot of things. She is angry a lot. But at least we are all up and moving and doing the best we can. There have been lots of times in the last seven or eight months when I did not get up and move. I just laid in bed many days and cried. This is so hard and it seems all of us who loved Katie are grieving in different ways. It is hard to talk to each other about it. We are doing the best we can. Roger and Ashley and I are involved in a grief support group. It seems to be helping some, how ever a lot of it does not apply to us. Grieving for a grand child or a niece (In Ashey's case) is different that grieving as a parent, and our grief just is not as talked about as parental grief or grief of children for loss of a parent. All these losses are different. It is almost Christmas and I find it so hard still to get in the Christmas Spirit. Although I have to for my sweet Laura Beth. It is just so hard. So many memories of Katie's Christmases and Katie's last Christmas. I know my Katiebug is having a blast in Heaven, and she will have a Wonderful Christmas with Jesus, but I am missing her so much. Will there ever be a Christmas when I will feel like I used to about this season? I don't know. I still feel physically ill every time I forget for a moment that Katie is gone, and then I remember. She was such a wise, interesting child. I miss our conversations. I miss her excitement, and her ecentricies. I miss our picnics at the park in the summers, and I miss eating circle sandwiches with Katie. I just miss her.Thanks for reading.

The Long Winter of Nana's grief hopefully followed by the spring.....Where is the SPRING?

Well it has been so so long since I posted on this blog, but this Nana's grief has not lessened. It has become deeper and more raw if anything. It will be nine months on May 5 since Katie left us, and yet I miss her more each day. I am aware that I was not my sweet girl's favorite person. That would have been her mom tied with her dad, and after that probably Ashley, her auntie Ashee that is. Perhaps I miss her more and feel an even deeper sense of grief than I would have if she had loved me best. I know she loved me and I loved her beyond words, but the closeness she had with her parents and with Ashley, was different. Right before Katie died I dreamed that I died and went to heaven and Katie came right up to me and sat on my lap....this is something she did not do often here on earth. Once in a while but mostly it was mom's lap or Ashley's lap. She was the most intelligent child I have ever known or will probably ever know. She was an "old soul" with a maturity far beyond her years. Don't get me wrong, she could throw a tantrum with the best of three or four year olds. But there was something so different and mature about her that is beyond human description. How many four year olds, sick or not, would ask Jesus into their heart and have a deeper understanding of the significance of that act than most adults? Katie did, and if she had not gotten cancer, I am certain she would have accepted salvation at a very young age. She just had a deep understanding of the world and God and other "grown up" things. If I live to be a hundred I will never understand why God had to call her home so quickly. I know each of our days are numbered by the Lord long before we were even concieved in the womb, and I know God knew exactly what Katie's fate was to be long before she was born, but we did not. We grew to love and cherish this beautiful angel on earth, and giving her back to God was something we were required to do, but it was the hardest time in all of the members of our family's lives. I do have some regrets.....maybe I should have tried harder to get closer to Katie, maybe I should have gotten down on the floor more with her, but I know in my heart that would have just meant more rejections for me. Katie loved me but she did not want me for a playmate. She did want me to be her conversationalist. We spent literally hours talking about all kinds of subjects, ranging from her daily activities and friends, to Jesus, and God and how much she loved her Lord. Sometimes we just talked about colors; she definately had her favs....pink and blue. She knew my fav color as well and would point out things she saw that were purple which is my fav color. She knew my favorite color, my favorite movie, my fav friends, and all kinds of insignificant other things about her nana. The ammount of knowledge she aquired in her short four years and remembered was as vast as the different subjects she either had knowlege of or an opinion about. She had LOTS of OPPINIONS! And if she didn't want to do something she would Yell "Double NO".
You knew she was serious then and any coaxing you might do to change her mind would NOT WORK.
We shared a LOVE of Learning. I loved endulging her obsessions, such as circle sandwiches. You KNOW that they taste better! She demanded an order to all areas of her life. She was like this even before she got cancer, but she became more so because things like the order of things or the cleanliness of her hands or the color of her clothes, was something she could control in a world of cancer chaos where she had no control.
I am going to close this post because it is late, but I will try not to post again in the near future and try to tie some of this fragmented information together.

Recap : the day the bottom fell out of my world

I am starting this blog because my life has come to a crossroads and I can't see the light at the end of this tunnel. A year and a half ago, I was a content home school teacher with my bright, but very hyper 16 year old as my student, and somewhat contented mother of a grown daughter, who made me  the very happy Nana of two BEAUTIFUL granddaughters, the oldest being my three year old Katiebug, and my very busy six month old, Laura Beth, later to be termed "monkey". I was somewhat content as a mother because my oldest daughter and my teen daughter do not always get along. That was my biggest problem back in those days.... I did not have a lot of serious problems, and I was pretty content.... However my world suddenly and unexpectedly changed on May 14, 2009. The world as I knew it and as my grown daughter knew it, and also as my 16 year old daughter knew it changed forever that day. We were blindsided by  a BEAST Called childhood cancer, and our lives were irreparably fractured that beautiful spring day when we heard the words" Katie has neuroblastoma stage IV cancer. This was so unexpected and so mind numbing, and so frightening.  But there you have it, that is the monster that took our naive sense of content and blew it to pieces. Since that day my life has been on a downhill roller coaster toward heartbreak and ruin. So much has happened this last sixteen months or so that I really don't know where to begin or even if I can remember all the facts of what exactly has happened but I sure remember the pain it has caused me, my daughter who is Katie's mom, my husband of 22 years and my teen age daughter. Even Laura Beth, henceforth called {"monkey" has not skated by with out her fair share of pain and confusion.
Katie had been ill for a couple of months and the local pediatrician said that she had mononucleosis. A three year old with mono? That never made sense to me.... but they could not figure out what was wrong. She first had trouble walking, out of the blue one day. Then she seemed to have contracted some kind of virus; she became pale and did not want to eat much, and she was just really tired. That was around the end of February. By the first part of May, I went up to see my beautiful grand babies, and to attend a Mother's Day tea with my Oldest Daughter. The minute I saw Katie I knew something was very wrong. Of course it was more obvious to me since I had not seen her in a couple of months. By the way I don't ever plan to go that long again with out seeing my "monkey", for she is the only granddaughter I have now. But I am getting ahead of myself.  
My daughter and I talked at length about Katie's illness and she once again said the local pediatrician said Katie had mono. We both agreed that she should follow up and try to get Katie referred to Texas Children's Hospital ASAP. If we had only known how much time we , as well as Katie, would be spending there in this past year and a half, and how the whole thing would play out and how the ending as well as the path to the ending, well we would have most likely been frightened to death ourselves. I wish I had started this blog then, back in May of 2009, but since I did not, I will just have to catch you up a little at a time.
Well back to this segment of my story..... My beautiful little three year old granddaughter started on a chemotherapy plan in the hopes of destroying this beast called Neuroblastoma within her tiny body. She was always tiny and petite, but she became even more tiny as her body was ravaged by the harshest of chemo in the hopes of killing this monster inside her that would kill her if we couldn't stop it. The first change came when the doctors suggested we get her beautiful blond hair cut short in a bob so she would not have as drastic a shock when the chemo made it begin to fall out. Then her hair actually began to fall out, and it became so wiry. However this brave little grand baby of mine didn't seem to be phased by it. She refused to wear the hats we tried to put on her, and she refused to be worried by all her pretty hair ending up on her pillow, a little at a time. She just kept smiling, right through the throwing up and the diareah and the fevers. She was her very own person and she didn't change much, at least not at first, and then when she did, it seemed as if she only became wiser.... and more brave. She underwent six rounds of front line therapy, one complete resection of her main tumor,which took more than thirteen hours of surgery,  and then high dose chemo and stem cell transplant with more grace than most grown people ever could muster.  There were late night emergency trips to the hospital, for fevers, and many many hospital stays during the past sixteen months, and those of us who are adults got very grumpy and very frustrated and very tired, but Katie was a trooper.  She got grumpy, sure, she was three years old! But all three year- olds get grumpy. She became really afraid even at times, but through the first year at least , she did not ever ever give up. She just knew Jesus was gonna heal her, so she just did the best she could, and believe me that best was remarkable. There were times when she was in the Pediatric ICU and times during her stem cell transplant where we were not sure if she would live. She had a septic infection more than once. That is where the infection gets in the blood. She was very critical. But she pulled through. Now that is all I am going to cover in this segment. Tomorrow you can come here and read the "rest of the story" tomorrow. Thank you for reading. May God truly bless you tonight and may you know that you are recieving a blessing. This Nana is signing off now.