I am a blubbering mess today. It all started with two tiny leaves.

Actually with 6 leaves 5 months ago.

A resident at the senior retirement home where I work has an amazing collection of African Violets on the carpet near her patio doors. They were all blooming in the spring and I was reminded how I used to have good luck with African Violets.

She brought me 6 leaves from her violets, so I could start my own plants. I bought African Violet soil, so I would be doing it right, planted them in a plant six pack and put them near the skylight in my bathroom so I would see them often and not forget to keep them moist.

Every few weeks she would ask me about my cuttings. I would tell her they were perky, shiny, bright and looked very happy. But no new growth was appearing.

I took a photo to show her how perky they were and she agreed they looked healthy.

After about 3 months with no sign of progress, I broke a gardeners rule and took one out to see if it had any roots or any signs of growth. I figured I would sacrifice one for my curiosity. Instead of lifting it out of the soil I broke off the leaf.

So much for satisfying my curiosity.

I simply could not throw the leaf away, but embedded the base of the leaf in the soil, feeling very sad about what I’d done and hoping it might somehow survive.

Still no progress with the other five leaves, although they remained perky and bright and healthy looking. The leaf I broke off even continued to look perky to my surprise.

When my friend would ask about them I would shake my head and say, “Still perky but no sign of growth.”

Finally, I decided to try moving them to my kitchen window where I used to grow my violets with northern exposure to light. That has been over a month and no sign of change, although they still looked healthy and happy.

This morning getting ready to go to my grief support group I thought I would go take a peek and see if there was any sign of them responding to the different light setup.

At the base of the leaf… the broken leaf, were two of the tiniest green leaves you could imagine. Smaller than a pencil eraser. Maybe the size of a barley seed. New life! New growth! Two!

I immediately thought one for Danny and Cherie… Danny, my oldest son who died of AIDS thirty years ago and Cherie my youngest child, my daughter who died of a ruptured aneurysm 18 months ago today.

Suddenly the tears came. Tears of thankfulness for new life. Tears of missing my two wonderful children. Tears for those two tiny leaves that broke through the soil for me.

I cried through my support group, learned from the others, as always, and cried as I shopped at Walmart later.

I think I am finally beginning to come out of the functional fog that is grief and realize that my precious daughter is gone. Really gone, like her brother, and my mother, and my father and my mother-in-law and father-in-law. Like so many I have loved and lost.

Somehow, life continues in spite of pain and new friendships are found and relationships formed with others who understand raw grief, loss and mourning.

Somehow life blossoms and grows and we grow through our pain and reach out to others in a new deeper way than ever before, like those two teeny, tiny leaves.

I have an ongoing love affair with clouds. I think it started when at only 4 or 5 years of age my cousins and I would lie on the grass and look up at the big Phoenix sky and search for shapes in the clouds… A lamb, a tree, a puppy dog. ever changing, leaving room for imagination and to pretend.

Life happens, our focus lowers to the necessary, critical and mundane. We forget to look up at God’s ever-changing art display above.

When my beautiful daughter suddenly died two years ago, I found myself searching the skies in my pain, wondering if she was now free up there, beyond the clouds, looking down on us. I began to take photos with my phone when a group of clouds impressed me. The glorious Tucson sunsets, the monsoon clouds taking my breath at times.

I took photo after photo, scrolling through them on dark days reliving their beauty, finding comfort in God’s handiwork.

Recently a vivid sunset, fiery with pinks and oranges, forced me to stop my car to capture their beauty. After five or six frame-worthy snapshots, for some reason I turned around to see what the sky behind was doing during all this brilliant display.

Oh my goodness, it was grey, dark, gloomy and no sky between their cloudy billows. I could not believe this was the same moment, standing in the same place, and totally opposite the flaming beauty of the western skies.

The same sky, same street corner, same moment in time, but the view totally changed by the location of the sun and where I chose to look; my perspective making all the difference.

So very much like our lives…the position of the Son and where we choose to focus our view.

There may be dark, gloomy cloudy days, but there can be hope and glorious beauty if you look around and change your perspective.

January 10, 2018

Heading to Phoenix for Ray Northern’s Memorial.  Ray is the husband of Neva’s younger sister, Sherry (Nada Cheryl Northern).  I booked a room in Littletown and Julie told me not to stay there (it was 2**’s) … Yikes!   Then I booked a room in Peoria (3 1/2 stars, I think)… but twice the money.   Then Burla called and told me I could stay with her!   Thank you, Lord.

I’m waiting for an oil change at BrakeMasters… I’m at El Potosino eating chips and cheese and guacamole.   Very heavy clouds all day… They are expecting lots of rain… I’m not!   I’m praying for a safe trip to Phoenix.  This is the first I’ve taken my Kia on a road trip (I think).   Left Tucson about 5:15pm.

Heavy clouds and warnings all the way to Phoenix, but not ONE DROP of RAIN and no wet roads!  Praise God.

Arrived at Manuel’s to meet Tim and Jessica, but they had already eaten.  I wasn’t hungry, but just wanted to see them before going to Burla’s for the night.

I slept at Bob & Burla’s, in Bobby’s room.  Great bed!   The next day she drove to the memorial, but we had been sent the wrong address, my phone was dead so I couldn’t GPS it, and I’m not good on her GPS (iPhone).  So, we were 45 minutes late for the memorial.  (Maybe bad information is the reason Livengood’s are always late.  I’m just saying…)

We did, however, make it in time to eat and visit with Sherry, Neva, Roxanne, Diana, Gudrun & Tim and Bill Cohea, David and Shelley, and meet Sonny, Sherry’s son and family.

I stayed three nights!  The only time Aimee could see me was on Friday morning.  And I just hated to leave and go home, when I finally had some time with Burla.   She is soooo sweet, like my Mom was, but maybe even more sincere.  Just precious.

Good visit with Burla, Bob, Bobby and Elexa/Lexie/Elsa/Joy… still in name transition.  She seems so much calmer (medication) and more kind, not so demanding or babyish as I remember from before.  Very sweet.   She taught me to play the train game with Dominos, and a cute buggy Jenga game.

Got up early to meet Aimee at IHOP on 44th St. before she went to work.  She is a sweetheart.  She is dating someone from her church.  I went back to Burla’s after breakfast and crawled in bed and slept until noon!

Burla took me to the cemetery on Friday with a lot of flowers she had already bought and we put them on Aunt Mae and Uncle Billy’s grave, Michelle’s, and my Mom & Dad’s.   Beautiful clear day for this.  My Mother’s birthday is next week and Aunt Mae’s too.

Came home Saturday morning, took an hour nap and then went to work feeling like I had been on vacation, very refreshed!

Mycobacterium avium intracellular. MAI. It was throughout Danny’s body. In his testicles, in his toenails. In every cell.

That is what killed him at the end. A bacteria that would not affect you or me. Something only a person with compromised immunity could get. That is why his toes turned black.

And he was so debilitated at the end that even the bacteria had nothing left to live on. That is why some of his toes had started turning pink again. Similar to cancer, if we could allow the patient to get so malnourished that the disease had nothing to live on, the disease would die, but in the process, we would have killed the patient too.

The lymph nodes by his spine were so distended with the bacteria it had cut the circulation to his feet causing his toes to be horribly painful and turn black. The doctor had told me that if the hair on his toes went away, he would then lose his toenails and at that point his toes could fall off, This is why pink coming back into his toes was such a good sign.

We learned this after the fact from the autopsy.

Amazingly, Dan’s band members, Darrel and Spanna have reached out to me this last few weeks and they have released a digital album “If… Forever” on a newly created Dan Hill Memorial Facebook page, and on my Facebook page.  I am overwhelmed by their words and actions in this process.   What beautiful young men they still are!  Nothing blesses this mother’s heart like hearing her son’s name, music, memories or praise.   They have given me (and the world) all of that and more.   Dan always felt that selling music was like prostitution, somehow, so for this to be a free download for the world is absolute perfection!

Yes, I miss him terribly.  Yes, I play his music often.  Yes, God blessed me with amazingly gifted sons, Dan’s gift being music, Ron’s ironwork and Tracy’s endless creativity.  And the most tender, loving, funny, beautiful daughter. Yes, I believe his sister, Cherie is in heaven with him enjoying the glories that we can only imagine.  Yes, Darrel and Spanna have proved and provided that we will never forget him.

I love you, Danny and always will.