All the guests have gone home and today I am trying to figure out what life is going to look like now. No worries. I am not demanding a lot of myself and am taking it easy but still realize that there needs to be some normalcy for the sake of my kids. What normal looks like? I have no idea. We are taking this week easy and will get back to school and activities next week but in the meantime I am trying to get my ducks in a row.
First, I want to give a big shout out and thank you to my dear friend, Leslie. She came down from NY a few days earlier than everyone else and jumped in and took care of so much for me. She was my list maker and enforcer. She even had on her list, “Keep on task.” I feel like she knows me or something. I really don’t know how I would have done this past weekend without her pointing me in the right direction and lovingly being bossy and telling me what to do when I needed to do it. Like go to bed. She was my Lola this week. I don’t think I could have kept it together this past weekend if it hadn’t been for her. A big thank you to her husband and mom (Mom #2 to me) for making it possible for her to come down here.
Thank you to Amanda from Amanda’s Farm to Fork for catering the refreshments and my friends from NLHG who jumped in to help her. To my friend Stephanie from Dancing Hearts Homestead who hunted high and low for dogwood branches for the arrangements. Jeremy didn’t have a favorite flower but he loved the dogwood tree when it was in full bloom. Thank you to Laura Jensen from Jensen’s Reserve for helping us find them and donating the branches so Stephanie could create them. Thank you to my sister Teri and brother-in-law, Ray, for everything they did to help prepare for the service. Thank you to Pastor Mike and those who volunteered at The Fountain Church in Lawrenceville. Thank you for all that you gave and all that you did.
I also want to thank those of you who came out to Jeremy’s celebration this past Saturday. Thank you to his IR Wives who came out to honor the man they so lovingly took care of and to come out and love on me. Ladies, no words. It was so wonderful to see people that I haven’t seen in years and hug your necks. Thank you to Troop 750 for coming out in uniform and honoring Jeremy and supporting all of us, but especially supporting Eli in this act. Thank you to those of you who came out from Danfoss, Standridge and ZF. Jeremy had some pretty incredible co-workers. Thank you to longtime friends of both me and Jeremy for taking the time and effort to be there with us. It was so good to see you and I wish I could have spent more time visiting with you all. Thank you to the teachers at Compass who came out. My kids saw you and it meant a lot to them to see you there. Thank you to my NLHG community for coming out and supporting a girl when she needed it. Thank you to my family who traveled down from the north to be with us. It meant a lot to me to have you here with us and supporting not just me but my family. Thank you to Jeremy’s family who travelled from the Midwest and Southwest to be here and to celebrate him. Especially to Jeremy’s cousin, Heather, who contacted me and asked me if she could do the music for the service. She did a beautiful job and I am so proud of her. I gave her a very hard task. Not everyone knew this but she did… that the last song that she sang during the memory slideshow was actually the song that was playing when Jeremy’s heart stopped beating. It was the song “We Dance” by Bethel. I didn’t plan it that night but I know Someone who did. It was a gift.
I also want to thank my family for helping me keep everything together the last couple weeks. Really the last six months. I couldn’t have cared for Jeremy the way I did if you hadn’t jumped in and taken care of everything else.
I wanted to take a moment and specifically address and thank everyone who has supported us financially over the last 6 months through gifts. The thing is no matter what things you may have in place, cancer is expensive. First, I want to thank his job that made sure that his position was held and he retained his benefits. Jeremy had good insurance and I cringe to think what the bills would have looked like without it. Thank you to everyone who contributed to the GoFundMe, to those who spearheaded fundraisers and to those who contributed to them and to those who sent gifts to us directly. Those gifts helped immensely with not only meeting deductibles and out of pocket bills but it also helped with consistency for my kids. Despite being on a reduced income, I didn’t need to worry about pulling my kids out of their co-op/school in order to shuffle money around. It helped with unexpected expenses, like my meals during his hospital stays or on treatment and procedure days. Or the amount of gas used to go to the never ending appointments, treatments and procedures. Occasionally we also used some of those gifts for food to bless other patients that were doing their own hard around us and the nurses/medical team who fought to give him more time with us. It was a way to bless them, but really in the end blessed us. In fact, I found a note on Jeremy’s phone after he passed regarding this under what he called God Stories. Thank you so much for blessing us in a very difficult time.
I My goal is to take the next year and focus on making memories with my kids. So many things got put off because Jeremy and I said, “Oh we will do that next year.” Like going to New Mexico. I asked Jeremy in the hospital back when they knew where the cancer had spread to but not where it had originated from, what the one thing he wanted to do was, his answer was to take us to New Mexico. This was something that we had continually put off but had on the radar to do in the next year or two. Knowing how bad things were back then, I made it my goal to get him in a good enough place that we could do that. Unfortunately, he was never well enough for us to make that happen. All that to say, I want to take opportunities to make memories with the kids. I don’t want to put things off because the reality of there is no guarantee hits too close to home for me.
Thank you for showing up on here over the last 5 or so months and taking the time to read my words. As I shared on Saturday during Jeremy’s service, he had told me in the beginning that he did not want his pain wasted. I honestly believe by you all allowing me to be raw and honest and share with you this part of his story, it wasn’t. And for that I am grateful.