Peach Ice Cream

Angie was an ice cream-aholic.  She always had several kinds to choose from in her freezer.  We made countless u-turns in various cities to go back and have a wee bite of ice cream at a shop we almost missed.  Angie didn't need a special day to have ice cream.  Just drawing breath was reason enough to have a cone or bowl.

I'm working long hours trying to finish this book.  I'm filling in plot holes, adding conversation, and enhancing descriptions.  If I had known how difficult this would be, I might not have attempted to write my first novel at fifty years old, especially considering where I was emotionally when this project started.

When I started seriously writing this book, Angie had been gone just over a year.  I was suffocating in the depths of sadness.  C.S. Lewis once wrote, "Why did no one tell me that grief feels so much like fear?"  Indeed.  I was terrified in this new Angie-less world.  I began doing what I always do to work through things.  I wrote.  In the beginning, writing would bring up grief in tsunami sized waves that felt like a rising fever threatening to consume my body with the infection of despair.  Nausea caused cold sweat to linger on my neck. My eyes would burn from crying.  Some times I wrote blind because tears hid the computer screen or journaling page.   I couldn't catch my breath as my lungs moved against the jagged edges of my broken heart.  I never imagined that I would respond in this way. A dear friend who has gone through too much grief advised me, "Go through it.  Don't go around it.  If you go around it, you'll just have to work through it later."  

I've worked through my grief in all the ways one should:  With a counselor, through prayer, with my family, journaling, etc.  And still after 3 years and 2 days shy of 6 months, my heart breaks afresh on some days. Today is Angie's birthday.  Yep, my bestie would be 50 today.

This morning I've tried to imagine what we might have done today.  Shopping?  That's what we did on my last birthday celebrated with her.  Have supper?  We did that many times.  Talk on the phone?  Yep, most likely so.

I've decided today I will celebrate my friend's birthday with some ice cream.  Seems appropriate don't you think?

Angie, I miss you so much.  I think I always will.  I hope when Jesus calls us up into the air, I can be there to meet you with an ice cream cone.