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| Easter Story II |
| 03.27.05 (9:35 am) [edit] |
Ali wrote this as part of an assignment at school on her birthday. I thought that it was a good message for Easter.
November 16
How has knowing Jesus helped me go through hard situations?
When I saw "The Passion of the Christ," it made me realize how scared Jesus was when he was waiting in the garden to have people take him away and kill him. Ever since I have been diagnosed with cancer, I have been saying a similar prayer for God—as Jesus did in the garden. Just like Jesus, I was praying for God to take all of this away from me and just let me live. But I realized I wasn’t saying something Jesus said. Jesus told God to do his will, because his way is the best way. Now in my prayers I try to start asking God to do his will. Watching the party when Jesus was just sitting there crying made me be like, "Wow, Jesus is so brave and he is going through all of this pain for me." It made me want to be braver and just cry to God when I am scared just like Jesus did. God had a plan for Jesus that gave us salvation. And I just have to think he has a plan for me also.
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14 Comments
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| An Easter Story. |
| 03.25.05 (10:09 pm) [edit] |
I’m lying in bed with one of those achy colds with chills and a cough. Caught it from my sister but I can’t get irritated because she was here peeling wallpaper and painting for me. There are a million things that I should be doing but I keep ending up back in bed with the heating pad and my trusty computer.
It’s Easter weekend, although, it hardly feels that way. It snowed this morning and now it’s turned to a cold, beating rain. We don’t have a very good track record when it comes to holidays. We always seem to get bad news.
Last Easter, we found out that Ali’s cancer was back. I remember her in the bathroom of the Ronald McDonald house in Rochester, throwing up and wailing. It was a sound that came from the center of her being, the place where the demons of your worst fears come to feast and fester, where there are no words, only groans and cries of anguish. It was a sound that I never want to hear again.
I could not make a sound. She was looking for me to reassure her.
I’m not superstitious. I don’t feel like God has it out for me, but, my innocence is gone. I no longer assume that it will turn out for the best… but I am always hopeful. Hope is a ladder that allows you to crawl out from even the darkest hole. Not until December 28th, did Ali ever see fear in my eyes. By then, we all understood that the ladder had been taken away.
I haven’t thought about Easter. I haven’t thought about much. I am not used to making plans ahead of time. For two years everything has revolved around blood counts, hospitals and chemo and I can’t seem to break the habit. I wish that they still did, but that is a selfish thing to wish for.
The rain is still coming down. CoCo has been sitting at the foot of my bed barking at the dishwasher running downstairs for about 45 minutes. It’s a new dishwasher. I bought it so that I could sell my house. I am starting to get attached to it but I’ve lived without one for five years. It just seemed simpler to wash them by hand. It reminds me of grandma Ellie’s house in summer, a breeze blowing through the window above the sink while the glasses lay upside down to dry on pretty cotton dishtowels.
Remember when Easters were warm and little girls wore yellow dresses and a spring coat with white gloves and a hat? The Easter that I was nine, I wore a royal blue coat with white trim and a hat that looked like Juliette Mills’ in Nanny and the Professor.
It seems like there was a time when everything was dainty and pretty; even dishtowels.It’s hard to imagine a time when a hat would be flattering on my round face. Maybe I was just braver then. This Easter, I will be wearing a parka or perhaps I will still be here, in my bed, with flannel pajama bottoms and a worn out blue T-shirt.
Fashions change, but the message does not.
‘Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here, He is risen.’
This has always been my favorite verse in the Bible. Jesus told them the grave would be empty but they didn’t understand.
One night Ali told me she was afraid of being in the ground. I guess that she was looking for a ladder. I told her that she wouldn’t be in the ground, she would be walking again and making people that she hasn’t seen in a very long time, smile. God leaves the body for those of us left behind--so we understand. If people just started disappearing there would be all sorts of confusion. Her body would be left for us to grieve; but her soul would be for Him to delight in.
This year, my hope is that there will be no more bad news. There will be no groaning or wailing.
I put a dozen red roses on her grave, yesterday; but I have never felt that she was there.
Why do you seek the living among the dead? She is not here, she is risen.
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18 Comments
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| Precious Noise. |
| 03.23.05 (12:18 pm) [edit] |
Our trip to Chicago was fairly spontaneous. I had been away since the funeral. People who knew better than I did, whisked me off to save me from being alone. When I left, I thought that it was all nonsense, but, after a few hours at home, the desolation was more than I could bear.
One week later, the numbness was wearing off and I could literally feel my heart aching. I came home to a place that felt foreign to me. It was no longer the house where I lived, it was the house where my daughter had died. Every step that I took seemed to amplify the silence.
When Megan came home on Saturday, I suggested Chicago. There is no better place to go when avoiding silence, than a city of three million people.
Monday morning, we threw some things in a bag and left the house at 7:00 a.m. to catch the train, leaving enough time to pick up a latte and to drop off CoCo Chanel at Megan’s dad’s house for the night. Megan, reluctantly left her precious CoCo, along with kennel, blanket, toys, stuffed animals, treats, food, dishes, and Rhinestone leash…all of the necessities a 4-pound toy poodle from Third Street needs to survive an overnight away from home.
One hour later we found ourselves sandwiched between a bevy of chortling ladies from the Red Hat Society and a group of six mothers, who between them filled the train with 13 screaming children, 5 strollers, 11 diaper bags, 17 choruses of "I’ve been working on the Railroad", 28 anecdotes about bowel movements and enough cracker crumbs to coat every chicken breast from here to Sicily.
Thinking myself a "child person" it didn’t occur to me to immediately find a seat elsewhere--one of those regrettable decisions that makes you question your sanity—like the time I bought sushi in a food court from a little Japanese woman who I found sleeping in a cupboard under the cash register.
Be careful what you wish for.
Somewhere around Gary the train broke down. Needless to say, we had no idea what happened because by that time we were all but deaf and had pretty much given up our will to live. The little boy behind us was periodically grabbing our hair over the seat and gave new meaning to the term ‘breathing down my neck’. After 25 minutes, I shared with Megan my covert plan to hang a sign out the window offering $20 for any type of alcoholic beverage. For her part, she pulled out a pen and began jotting down a very moving vow of celibacy.
By the time that we arrived in Chicago, I had a newfound appreciation for the benefits of risking your life on the Dan Ryan expressway.
Ah, precious noise.
Sirens and jazz, car horns and sidewalk singers, busses and conversations overheard in a hundred different languages. Despite the pace of life going on around us, we did not feel inclined to rush. We lingered over coffee and indulged in cream puffs and cannoli. We stopped by Borders and spent an hour-and-a-half looking for the perfect book. We talked over dinner and braved the wind on the way back to the hotel. We made the morning trek to the Original Pancake House on Bellevue where we were wedged between two construction workers and a couple from Ireland. We played cab roulette.
Being in the city—passing thousands of faces—I realized that while it is a very big world out there, the human experience is basically the same. We wake up every day and hope that something good will happen. We go to work and try to make our way in the world. We pray for our children and send them on their way. We love, we laugh, and sometimes we hurt. Life goes on, even when we feel like we cannot.
Sometimes, we are not meant to be alone and sometimes others see that better than we do. You don’t need to go to the city or board a train filled with ladies dressed in purple and red. You just need to find some precious noise.
We lingered over coffee and cannoli. We remembered and we forgot…if only for a moment.
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17 Comments
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| Video |
| 03.19.05 (7:55 pm) [edit] |
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I have added a link to the video that was played at Ali's funeral. It may give you a small sense of who she was and why we miss her so much. I will keep it on the Links to the left also. http://www.dvfsite.com/aliweb...
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7 Comments
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| Never Ending Story... |
| 03.19.05 (1:35 pm) [edit] |
Michigan Avenue in March. The wind attacked our faces like steel wool. As we rounded the corner of Deleware my ears were completely numb--like when your best friend sandwiches your earlobes between two ice cubes in order to pierce them.
Our quest for a Starbuck’s venti caramel latte found us adrift in a sea of faces, dark colored suits, and cell phones. I felt plain and drab, like Minute rice.
The clothes in the windows are crisp and polished…with matching shoes and shiney accessories. The mannequins shame me by blatantly boasting the hips of a twelve-year-old. Sixty-eight dollars for a tank top. I can’t even afford the tan and Slimfast that it would take for me to try on a $68 tank top.
Still, it is beautiful.
A venti skim latte with caramel syrup and only two shots of espresso please. All men are created equal at Starbuck’s.
I strike up a conversation with a beautiful young woman. She is confident, charming, and funny. Her name is Megan and for the first time in a very long time, I look into her eyes, listen carefully to her words, and try to discover just who it is that she has become in the past two years.
It was our first "grown-up" trip together. We talk about economics and how many tank tops we could buy at the Goodwill half price sale for $68. We have come a long way since back-to-school shopping at Lord & Taylor. We smile over the top of our paper coffee cups. Of all the things to miss in life, that’s not one of them.
A song comes on the radio. I like it. The strings make me want to weep; but, the notes move higher and higher up the scale and I feel invincible and strong. Maybe it is the background music to a movie. A movie about two women in the windy city getting to know each other over a hot cup of legal stimulants.
At first I thought that in order to move forward, I must start writing an entirely new book.
As we walked past Prada, tears well up in my eyes. Megan and I exchanged a glance and smiled.
"Remember", Megan said, "when we were little and Ali screamed because the view out the hotel window was a three-story GAP?" I smiled at my daughter and kissed her cheek. I'm glad that I got in line behind such a beautiful, sensitive and brave young woman.
There will never be a trip to Chicago where Ali is not along.
There will never be the need for a new book.
My entire life...every page that has already been written, is a preface and introduction for the blank page ahead of me. It is simply time to begin a new chapter. Simply, painfully, excitingly, mournfully, hesitantly, and joyfully.
...and there they sat, these two women in the windy city, one beautiful and one dressed as plainly as Minute Rice, sharing stories and getting to know each other over the melancholy sound of strings and a Starbuck's venti caramel latte.
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5 Comments
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| Ali and CoCo Chanel Photo |
| 03.18.05 (11:36 am) [edit] |
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[image]LoriSchuster_88601 4241.jpg[/image]
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2 Comments
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| The blinding light of mourning. |
| 03.13.05 (11:52 am) [edit] |
My mind is so cluttered. It is blurry. I cannot wrap my hands around the reality of what has happened. Have you ever had a dream where you are trying to do something but the sunlight is blinding you? You reach and you stumble, you duck and crouch, you try to shield your eyes but nothing helps and you are frozen in place.
You cannot get from point A to point B because you are blinded by the light of morning.
Mourning.
For the most part I have been able to get up and carry on. Most days, I feel that I am doing very well. But then something creeps into my head…it slithers and hisses and pins me against the wall. Will you ever really understand the depth of this pain?
All that we will share is in the past. I understand this rationally, but when I stop to actually consider it, it feels as though my heart is coming out my throat. I cannot breathe.
Last night I had a dream that Ali was coming home from the hospital. She was still sick but walking. I said to her, Ali, it’s not the cancer--you are dying because you are not eating, if you start your metabolism moving again we’ll have more time.
There it was…hope--cloaked in the safety of a dream. Hope for a reprieve, hope for a miracle, hope that I had been burying deep within myself for many months but could not say out loud. Too late now, but, I guess my psyche imagined it would be easier to get past the disappointment in a dream. In the blinding light of morning it wasn’t easier at all. Her room is still empty.
It is too big…just like the cancer and she was my beacon.
I couldn’t find her grave the other night… I was mixed up and I started to panic. I drove around and around until it was dark… apologizing to her for losing my way.
It was too big. But, she can’t be my beacon any longer. It is her turn to rest.
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16 Comments
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| The Circle. |
| 03.12.05 (1:41 pm) [edit] |
I woke up this morning to the sound of birds singing in the tree outside of my window. I kept my eyes closed for a while thinking that perhaps I slept through this darkest of winters and would wake to see shades of soft green resting on the landscape.
Two young children were yelling back and forth and I realized, after a while, that they were building a snowman. I listened to them for a while until tears welled up in my eyes. I pictured two little girls in snowsuits, red-cheeked and giggling… their faces toward the sky catching snowflakes on their tongues. For a minute, I wished that I could start over. To know what I now know and raise my little girls all over again.
It didn’t take me long to realize just how senseless that would be. There are certainly things that I would change, but I could never love them more than I do. I could not tell them more often. I could not touch them more, protect them more, have more parties, go to more places, or do more things that would have changed the reality of anything that is happening today.
We imagine our lives as a movie of the week...with a clear beginning, middle and end. We have our cast of characters, we fill our lives with melodrama and suspense, and look forward to a happy ending. We plan, we fuss, we dream, we work our fingers to the bone, and build everything around the payoff at the end. We start to believe that life will happen in a particular way and we whine and complain when it doesn’t. And all the while, the clock is ticking, and we can’t hear it.
I have had to stop myself several times this past week from living out Ali’s life in my imagination and then grieving over it. It is faulty thinking. It is wrong and it is painful. I need to change my frame of reference and reprogram my mind. For me to think that you cannot fit a lifetime into seventeen years is nonsense. Ali’s life is no longer an open-ended circle. It is complete. I held her as she took her first breath and I held her as she took her last.
Everything between that time—the waking up, eating breakfast, playing in the sandbox, brushing her hair, losing her hair, dances, shopping, chemo, transfusions, gradecards, soccer games, sleepovers, every kiss and every cup of coffee--every laugh, every tear, every joy, and every sorrow--that is the scope of her life. There is nothing to be added or taken away.
The miracle is that, for a time--much too short of a time--our circles intersected. We were part of each other. We share the faces and milestones that made our lives together uniquely our own.
When I feel cheated, I need to remember that, every single day that we had together was a gift. We do not sign on to this life with the promise that it will be long or painless. Some stories just don’t have happy endings. Sometimes the miracle that we hope for, does not come. But, there are always miracles. Most of the time, they are found in the moment that has already passed.
Life will come as it will. I miss my blonde haired girl. I miss her smell and the sound of her voice. I miss the way she brought a party to every room she entered.
I did not wake to see shades of soft green resting on the landscape but I did have a vision of two red-faced, giggling girls catching snowflakes on their tongues.
Throw away your script and improvise. Add everything and take nothing away. We are part of each other. That is the sanctity of a circle completed.
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8 Comments
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| Going Home... |
| 03.01.05 (9:30 pm) [edit] |
Tuesday, March 1, 2005 6:54 AM CST
Our sweet Ali finally got her wish to go home. She passed away at 12:01 this morning in her bed surrounded by people who love her dearly. It was peaceful and quiet... like she took a breath and jumped into the arms of God. I cannot really explain it but last night when I laid down I got an overwhelming sense of her spirit and it calmed my heart. I will give further details as they become available on the Caringbridge page. Thank you for your love and support during these many months. God Bless You.
PLEASE SEE LINKS TO THE LEFT. ONE IS HER OBITUARY AND THE OTHER IS AN ARTICLE FROM THE NEWSPAPER.
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10 Comments
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Grace, beauty, humor, strength.
Alison Haley Cloud
Nov. 16, 1987-March 1, 2005
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
