I had a Love Thursday planned today, had it all written out in my head, and then I got a phone call yesterday morning that changed my path for the post today.

When I was in the Fourth Grade, a new family moved to town. They had come from Nebraska. I remember they had a dog named Husker. They had a daughter that would be in our class. She was really shy, but an incredible athlete and an even better than incredible artist. We became fast friends.

Yesterday, her sister-in-law called to tell me Julie's mom had died this week. She had to leave it on my voice mail. I checked the messages as we were getting ready to board the airplane from Vegas yesterday.

Apparently, her mom had gone in to the ER three weeks ago with a nasty sideache. Turned out the ache was cancer, and the tumor had affected her colon, ovaries, liver. Within a week, the tumor spread to her lungs and brain. She was only 56.

My love today is being sent to Nebraska, to a little town I haven't heard of, where at this exact moment, my childhood friend is burying her mother.

I hate that I cannot be there with her now. When my dad died, she hitched a ride with a guy from our class that she hated more than life itself to get to the funeral. When I sit down to write her a card later today, I hope she'll know how hard it was for me that I couldn't be there with her. It's killing me.

I have no pictures to post; I can't find one suitable. I have a friend right now crying, and it breaks my heart I can't be there to hold her up.

This will be the passage I include her card today. It was read at my father's funeral, and I think it's incredibly prolific:

"I am standing by the seashore.
A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze
and starts for the blue ocean.
She is an object of beauty and strength,
and I stand and watch
until at last she hangs like a peck of white cloud
just where the sun and sky come down to mingle with each other.

Then someone at my side says, 'There she goes!
Gone where? Gone from my sight - that is all.

She is just as large in mast and hull and spar
as she was when she left my side
and just as able to bear her load of living freight
to the places of destination.
Her diminished size is in me, not in her.

And just at the moment when someone at my side says,
'There she goes!
there are other eyes watching her coming,
and other voices ready to take up the glad shout :
'Here she comes!' "

~ Henry Van Dyke
1852-1933

I love you, Jules.

Labels: love thursday, passage of immortality