When I was 17, my nine year old cousin was killed. It was July the fourth and I'd been out doing unsavory teenaged things with my friends. I stumbled home sometime around my allotted curfew to find a note that read simply, "Elizabeth has died."
I stared at the paper, assuming it was a joke, a typo - certainly not MY Elizabeth, certainly not dead. But as I stood at the counter with the note in my hand, I heard a buslte in the garage and my mother burst through the door followed by my bleary eyed aunt and uncle. It was true. Elizabeth had been in a boating accident and had been hit by a jetski. She died at the hospital of massive head trauma.
For the past fourteen years, the fourth of July has been Elizabeth's holiday. I haven't had a year go by that I don't watch each explosion of red and white in the sky without attributing them to my cousin: a celebration of her short life.
But tonightt, as I sit here sunbaked and slighly buzzed, procrastinating, as always, strapping into the vest and attaching the neb hose, I'm thinking of another celebration. A couple hundred miles away a girl I only peripherally know through this site is lying in a hospital bed having been given a second chance at life - from the very very brink of death, she lives. And while I really don't personally know her, I know that she represents strength and tenacity and will in the face of this disease - as dear FOP states, her prana is strong. Tonight I think of Pepe and her famlily and the people who love her so very much and I know that the bursts of color aren't just a celebration of a life lived but of a life yet to be lived.
This year, I will sit on my porch and I plan to send up a litle prayer with each boom, for Elizabeth, for Pepe, for my kids and husband and family, for all of us struggling with Cf - with life in general - that there is always hope and love and that we may continue to be able to believe.
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