I wrote this Wednesday evening, and I saved it and left it, and cried, because I couldn’t make it make sense:

The summer before last, the little sprite of an 11-year-old Makenzie was running around calling me Aunt Ash, playing, and laughing, and today she’s lying, unconscious, in a pediatric intensive care unit in North Carolina.

Things change.

We talk about how they’ll change, but then they do. And it’s so quickly, that there’s nothing to talk about or to say, because it’s done. It’s all done, and there’s no taking it back. One day you’re driving, or you’re talking, or you’re 12 years old and trying out for track, and it all changes, forever.

And on Thursday morning, Kenzie was gone.

Her myspace profile still has sparkling hearts, and cherries, and a cow. She’d asked to have her birthday present early. The valentines she and her brother and sister personalized for their cousins arrived in the mail this week. It was sudden, and it wasn’t ever expected.

It all changes. And we say it change—we talk about how it changes. But then, it does. And we can’t go back. And I can’t go back. And she can’t go back. And this just isn’t what we have in mind, when we talk about change. It can’t be. Until it all does.

I can’t stop hearing her call me Aunt Ash, and I can’t stop seeing her in the hallway in her grandmother’s room, grinning at me without her glasses on. I can’t stop hearing her sleeping with her cousins, all intertwined and wrapped up in the same blankets. I just keep feeling her, and missing her.

Tonight, I wrote to a friend, one of my few constants in life:

It’s been so, so hard and in so many ways, I feel so deeply that this family is my own, as I have spent most every day with them for the past three years. It’s just been so sad, and is only going to get more overwhelming as the week goes by. I feel like I have no tears left, until it starts all over again.

I cannot attempt to know the depth of the loss that her mother, her sister, and her brother will face. I can’t know the hurt of those who held her and rocked her and felt her in her infancy. I do know the hurt of having known her, only briefly, and having her taken away. And it is just so sharp, so needless, and just so deep.

I can know what I feel. I feel like the loss I have experienced and felt in the past two years has weighed on me. I feel, overwhelmingly, like I have the past few days, with the tears. I feel like I have no hurt left, and I feel like I can’t miss them any more, until it starts all over again.

I don’t know. I don’t understand. I don’t want to understand. I don’t need anyone to try to make me understand. I just want to understand that it can’t be understood. It just can’t.

I may not have mentioned in the most conducively lucid way possible before, but my mother’s cousin died last week. She was 41. She has two young children. I am sad.

For the most part, I’ve gone back to work and gotten settled into my good old ridiculous routines of self-destruction. But sometimes, I pause and it all floods back and it just hurts, so badly.

I found out at 8:00 a.m. on Thursday, 16 March. She’d been in the hospital sometime (a day? a week? I don’t know) after contracting pneumonia. Or something. Ninety percent of what I know at all is from my brother’s communications from overhearing anyone talking. Or my overhearing things. We don’t ask questions. Never have.

She’d been feeling tired. Spent. Worn out. She’s never been healthy.

She’s always been kind. And fun. And loving. And faithful.

She was tired. She went to the hospital Wednesday night with chest pains. She died on Thursday morning. In the hospital. At 4:30.

While her husband was in Afghanistan.

And her babies were asleep at home.

And I was in Utah, pleading with my dog to please just go to sleep.

And I am struck with the normalcy & blandness of my own life the time at which it happened. And I’m struck with the inability of my soul, so inextricably intertwined in hers by some strange bond of blood and experience, judgments and distance—and those times when she’d hang on Daniel’s arm and grin, “Smile if you love me”—couldn’t know. It couldn’t prepare me for the reality of it all. And I’m a little offended. Hurt, if you will.

The last time I talked to her was Monday, 26 December 2005. I was sitting at the back corner booth at the McDonald’s off of Interstate 85 in Lavonia, Georgia. Mom, Nana, Daniel, and I had driven halfway to meet Mama and Papa so I could see them before I went back to Utah the next day. We sat around the table and laughed. Leigh called on Papa’s cell phone and he passed the phone to me. She asked how it was to be at home. I sighed, “Oh, you know, it’s … ok.” But she didn’t know. She sounded nearly taken aback when she responded, “I love to be here. I love it at home.” I hurried through goodbye and passed the phone to the next person and it continued around the table. While Mama was saying goodbye, I took a picture of Nana with everyone’s food piled around her and we all laughed.

While I was preparing to fly to Atlanta, I thought back on our conversation and analyzed it as our last. At first, I was nearly offended. How could she judge me the last time I talked to her? How could she take what I said and disagree with it? How could she not understand how hard it was for me to be at home? It wasn’t fair for her to judge me for the choices I’d made and for the consequences which were inevitable—but understandable—right? And how could that be fair, that it’d be the last time, and I’d offended her and made her upset with me?

As I traveled, and as I spent time with these people—these proud, faithful people who have lived in the same small town and known the same people all their lives and who, meaning well and more by reflex than sense of duty, had filled two refrigerators to capacity with fried chicken—I realized what it meant for Leigh to be home. And how, as I replayed the tape of our conversation in my mind, it must feel to these people when someone leaves the sense of comfort and security they know they can always have.

It wasn’t until the plane ride home when I realized what had happened and I repented, for being so judgmental myself. And I understood what she meant. It was so very good to be at home. To have a history, and to find comfort in its sweet unchangeability. I realized that for the first time since I’d left three years ago, I wasn’t banging down the door to hop the next plane out of there.

I lingered in the kitchen in South Carolina before my mother and I left for Atlanta, the night before I flew back to Salt Lake City. I took in the scents and hugged the people and came to terms with the differences in where I’ve been and where I am. And I took comfort in being home. Not where I was raised the majority of my growing up years, but where it mattered. Where it felt like home should feel like. Where days of the week aren’t pronounced with that final ‘a’ and where they play music while you pray in church. And where the people are so good and so full of good intentions and so much the stability I cling to as the goodness of my childhood.

So yeah. I guess you could say it isn’t all bad—and why dwell—because there were all those moments of transparent self-realization. But I don’t buy it, yet. I’m not at the point where the last conversation I had with her was worth it for the end result. Because it feels wrong to have even had the opportunity to grow through the sorrow I and everyone around me felt.

It’s so easy to console someone when you can’t feel the grief. And I’m really great at rephrasing the clichéd standbys. But when it’s this close, and when our family is so dichotomously combative and fiercely close all at the same time and when her seven-year-old stood at her casket and stroked her mama’s hair, “She’s better off now,” just couldn’t cut it.

I Am Stressed.

I leave in 9 1/2 hours to claim my very pretty dog.

Those 9 1/2 hours are going to somehow have to include my being awake and coherent and working much harder at packing than I ever have in all my life. Also, my neighbors are old and crotchety and do not want to experience any noise whatsoever, and even their own coughing is too much noise so please, couldn’t they just quiet themselves down, what with all the coughing and breathing, the residential leasing agent really should consider providing earplugs to all prospective residents for all the noise pollution on this floor.

I found the last birthday card my Grandma S ever sent me.

It’s a cheery yellow with a yellow rose. The border around the yellow rose is yellow and white glitter. There are little yellow-and-white glittered flowers on the background.

Hallmark wrote, “For a Wonderful Granddaughter: Watching you grow has been like watching a flower blossom. With every year, you’ve changed in so many beautiful ways.”

And continues, “This just comes to let you know that one of the best things in life is and always will be having a granddaughter like you to be grateful for, to be proud of, to love. Happy Birthday.”

She wrote the date (26 Nov 04) and greeted with, “To my Sweet Ashley,” and continued, “Have a Wonderful Birthday, Honey, and buy something special for your 21st Birthday - Much love Grandma + family.”

I sat here for a moment trying to figure out if my 21st was the last birthday card she sent. It was. The tears came and I heaved this giant sigh of relief-mixed-with-intimate-sorrow-mixed-with-why-can’t-I-just-call-her. I told her, audibly, how much I miss her. How much I want her to know I think about her and wish I could call. I asked her to help me today (was that overly Catholic of me?), because Wow, this is a lot for my bipolar-and-thank-you-Mom-for-that soul to handle right now.

Maybe you ought to not grow quite tired of hearing about my Grandma. We weren’t particularly close. We talked maybe once a year. But when we did, I could feel her like she were sitting right next to me—maybe even a little too close for normal social comfort, but never close enough for Grandma because wow, she loves me. She’d take my cheeks in her painfully arthritic hand and squeeze my lips together as she kissed me. “Oh Ashley, honey, I love you. I’m so proud of you.”

I need help today.