Tomorrow marks 8 years since Krista died. She would be 25 now if she were still with us. It is so difficult to imagine what she would be like today had she the chance to grow up, to have been a healthy teenager, hanging out with her friends at the Card Shop in Ashland, WI. I loved her Ashland stories. Ashland was her world. It was all she had known for most of her life.
Ashland is at the top of the State of Wisconsin, smack dab on Lake Superior where U.S. Highway #2 and State Highway #13 intersect. It is a very small town with about 8,700 people living there. I only saw it one time, when we buried Krista on one of the coldest, windiest, grayest days of the year. It was vicious out, as if protesting the putting of this young girl into the frozen ground.
She had just turned 17.
She was too young to die.
She lived every moment of her life right to the end. The day before she went into a coma, she made her dad push her in her wheelchair to the grocery store up the street from the hospital in Minneapolis that had become her home over the past 30 months. Winter in Minneapolis and she had to get out, no matter what. She had tubes, ports, hickmans, lines, extending the reach of her body into the infinity of all those chemicals. Just getting out of bed required major strategy. That never stopped her.
I still feel an ache for my girl - it was so painful to be with her and so painful not to be. Acceptance of god's will was hard to come by. But I was blessed to be her aunt and to have spent much of those 30 months with her. And I remember the laughter! We had the best of times and made everyone laugh with us. We had nurses rolling on the floor, doctors trying so very hard to be "doctors" and not laugh with us. It did not work. By the end of the first week, they were hooked, laughing and joking, being the butt of many of Krista's practical jokes. Like the note taped to her toe as she went into another surgery - she labeled the note "footnote." Hard not to laugh even when the message in the note was so very sad. "Please do not intubate me, you do not have my permission."
Krista stood up for herself, asked difficult questions, pestered the medical team, refused to listen, made her own way. It was all she had left, the ability to be her own person, to get up and live, in spite how how the definition of "live" had changed for her. I love her dearly and I miss her. That will never go away.
