It starts in the springtime, a heaviness that whispers “It’s coming again.”

As things start to bloom and the days grow long, I think of her last months, when her body was fading and her time, always short, ran out. 

It’s different this year, maybe because I’m separated from her by both time and distance. We’re out of our home, hundreds of miles away from the pink petals of her Korean dogwood and the glittery walls of her princess room. A room that has witnessed your purest joy and deepest pain is more than just a room, just as June 14th, the day that marks the anniversary of something sacred and terrible, is not just a day.

I wonder if there’s been an hour, even one waking hour, during these last five years when I didn’t think of her. 

I doubt it, this year especially. Time and distance mean that some memories fade and there are less physical reminders of her time with me. The work I’m doing though, caring for people with failing bodies and shortened time, makes me think of her more. 

She’s there, in the hard conversations and the held silence when there are no words. She reminds me that patients are people with dreams and imagination and stories and that these things need tending. She makes me want to do more for their loved ones, because being a caregiver is harder than anyone can imagine. She helps me bear witness to suffering — because it gives meaning to my own. 

And so we’re here again, another June 14th.

I’m at another crossroads as my fellowship ends. A new job in a new city will take us away again from the home we made with her. The thought of leaving it (permanently this time?) feels overwhelming, so I avoid it. 

 I know, though, that a physical home does not contain her, no more than her physical body ever could. I’m grateful to her body for the five years it allowed her here, and grateful that she is free of it now. 

It happened five years ago today.

As COVID-19 changes the world, my thoughts are a jumble.

Everything seems different now, but the themes are oddly familiar. Fear, isolation, uncertainty, lack of control, disruption of carefully laid plans – these are things I know well. Boredom and frustration too, along with a sense of incredulousness. How could this have happened?

We live in Washington state, one of the hardest hit here in the US, but in a county that has, so far, been largely spared. Our schools and most businesses are closed, and we’ve been urged to practice physical distancing, all in an effort to avoid the devastation that other countries have endured. My heart goes out to those communities and families. Though we are separated by oceans and tightened borders, we are connected by our vulnerability. It could have been us, and it still may be us.

Those of us blessed with health and security tend to think that it will always be this way. If we work hard enough, are nice enough and responsible enough, our lives will continue on a comfortable trajectory. This mindset, whether it comes from a sense of entitlement or just naïve optimism, becomes laughable in the face of reality. All of us, if we live long enough, will experience something that flattens us. It could be a novel virus or a novel gene mutation, a natural or manmade disaster, the death of someone you thought you couldn’t live without. Invincibility is a myth, frailty the human condition. This is the truth.

I learned this eight years ago, when I diagnosed and foresaw the thing that would flatten me, and it is why I know fear, isolation and uncertainty. But I know other things too, important  lessons learned from a girl who, in her physical body, was the very definition of frailty. This girl had a breathless voice that barely registered above a whisper, but she taught a master class on the things that really matter.

She taught me so much, more than can be recorded on this blog or anywhere else. In this strange, unnavigated time, these are things I try to remember:

1)The best prayers are simple and honest:

J’s prayer, April 2015:Dear God, I love you. You are good. You are very good. Will you make me strong?

 2. Prepare, but try not to fear:

“I have learned that control is mostly an illusion. We must try our best, of course, to protect the blessings we have been granted – but if our plans are obsessive and driven by fear, we can’t really live.”

3) You don’t have to leave home to have an adventure. 

4) Humor can be found in even the darkest times, and it is a blessing. In the history of time, has anyone else quoted Vanilla Ice on her deathbed?? 

5) It will be OK. 

The winter after Julianna died was bitterly cold. It snowed and sleeted, iced and froze. Winters are usually mild in this part of the Northwest, but the winter of 2016 was an aberration: harsh and unrelenting, but also fitting  for my own season of deepest loss.

I worried about Julianna’s little dogwood tree, the one that received farewell messages of love during her tea party. We made it the centerpiece of our front yard and it stood unsheltered from the biting wind. Would it be OK? It had to survive, I told Steve. It just had to.

It did, and when spring came, I wondered if it would bloom. Young dogwoods, I read, may not bloom for a few years, especially when stressed.  That April, the neighborhood pear trees unleashed their usual arsenal of stunning pink flowers, but our dogwood stayed bare. It’s OK, I thought. It’s just a baby tree; we mustn’t expect too much.

And then in June, a week before the day I had been dreading, Julianna’s baby dogwood tree gave us this:

Julianna’s dogwood tree — blooming at just the right time.

It was a late bloomer, but for us, the timing was perfect.

Julianna’s tree is a toddler now, and like a growing child, its size sometimes catches me off guard. Could this much time really have passed?

Three years. She’s been gone for three years today.  It’s unbelievable except for the fact that I’ve lived it.

Time dulls, it doesn’t heal.  It’s a blunt instrument that creates distance, from things we want to forget and that which we want desperately to remember. I am further away from the searing pain of fresh loss, but it’s harder to remember the sound of her voice. It’s another way of losing her.

On that morning she left us, I just wanted the world to know that there was a girl named Julianna.

Three years later, it’s the same. Julianna. She struggled, she soared, she laughed and lived and loved. She put things in their proper place and dared us to do the same. She let us in and we could experience, for a little while, a fantastic and colorful world powered by her imagination and heart, the strongest, purest and loveliest of hearts.

She occupies the most tender and fierce part of my own heart. It let me love her with abandon even as I knew I would have let her go. And now, it mourns her– always, it will mourn her, even as it rejoices in the pink sky.