Julie

Taken Spring 2016 when Julie came to visit

There was never going to be an easy or right way to post about this I realized.  Either I don't post about it and it's weird that I go from talking about my birthday to Thanksgiving without having talked about it, or I post about it and it's weird because it's a blog and what can you really say that would do any of this justice.  In the end though, it seemed stranger not to post.
















10 days after my birthday, October 18, that bright wonderful lady, my mother in law, pictured above, passed away way too soon from cancer.  In early summer, shortly after her trip to visit us, she went in to the doc to investigate lingering fatigue, coughing, and a low grade fever, and was already stage 4 upon diagnosis.  Many things were tried, and we all remained hopeful.  Julie and Terry had already purchased tickets to come see us for Christmas, and that was still the plan.  As the summer progressed, Jon and I planned to go see them during Thanksgiving, and even into fall that seemed feasible.  Katelyn went for a long weekend visit on a Thursday red eye flight October 13.  It was decided during that weekend that we shouldn't wait till Thanksgiving but should fly out on Tuesday or so, after they've moved her home for palliative care.  We'd stay indefinitely and spend time with her there at home.  We skyped on Sunday during the football game and she seemed very tired, but still smiling and talking.  Things changed quickly that day though, and by Sunday evening, we and Grandma (who was also coming on Tuesday) were told to come asap.  There were a lot of blessings during that time.  The fact that Katelyn was already there and could spend time with her before she got worse.  Also, not knowing how long we'd be gone, we decided to take Gromit with us, even though the idea of flying with him made me nervous (he's just a little too big to be in the seat area with us).  Our friends were great and had offered to watch him indefinitely, but we decided to take him.  So that meant we needed to order an airline approved crate (ours was missing one thing to be approved), thank goodness for Prime 2 day shipping.  We also needed to take him to the vet on Monday to get his health certified.  However, when we got the phone call to come sooner than Tuesday, plans quickly had to be changed.  First priority was flights.  Our airline proved incredibly difficult to work with in changing our flights, despite the circumstances, so I called upon the aid of our travel agency and they were great and provided amazing help despite my scattered state.  All this flight changing was happening was Jon was at one of the evangelistic meetings he was helping with.  We finally got flights sorted out for first thing that morning, getting in to Seattle around 10am.  But now we had to figure out how to arrange all of Gromit's travel plans that we had planned to do Monday.  We called the emergency vet, and they were kind enough to come in and get him certified, we called amazon and cancelled the crate that was coming and went to a store and got one, all this around 2am.  Our kind friend drove us to the airport around 4am.  A family friend picked us up at the airport and took us straight to the hospital, and the hospital was kind enough to allow Gromit to stay there.  He did great all day, probably exhausted from his lack of sleep and scary airplane ride.  Grandma came in a couple hours later and the family friend when to get her as well, which was awesome.  We're standing around trying to figure out who will get Grandma, and she volunteered, which was great since that let the rest of us stay in the room with Julie.  She'd never met Grandma before though so we sent each of them a picture of each other and hoped they could find one another :)  They did, and came back with lunch for everyone.  It was a strangely day, both agonizingly long and short at different points.  There was a lot of singing, and stories and smiles and tears.  Shortly after midnight she passed away and is now waiting to be woken up by her friend Jesus.

We stayed in Auburn about two weeks.  It was a quick and blurry two weeks and a long two weeks, a lifetime away from life in Berrien.  Friends and family came, Michael and Shay  (Jon and Katelyn's cousin) and baby Winter, Uncle Mark, my mom and brother, Grandma, Kim, and many other friends.  We spent many hours poring over photos, from the many left on her well-used camera, to the countless folders on her laptop, to the dozens of photo albums around the house.  Slideshows were made, songs were chosen, videos recorded, walks were had, a little bit of studying, lunches with family friends, and of course a few games here and there.  Julie would have liked that.