A crazy couple of weeks

The last few weeks have been sort of crazy around here. My young cousin - 27 years old - died of lymphoma. His battle was fierce and short. He was the daddy of two little boys and while he was in the hospital, his wife found out that she was pregnant with another little boy. His wife is an amazingly mature young Christian. Her posts on their caringbridge site were an inspiration to many.

My family has not been close. Something happens to families when the mom and dad die. The threads start to ravel and connections loosen. I love my aunt and uncle. Uncle Henry was my mother's brother. Aunt Fay and Uncle Henry had two daughters - Cindy (just a little older than I) and Cathy (just a little younger than I). I can remember sitting on our Granny George's steps when we were little girls. Cindy married Frank and they had two sons - David and Steve. David is the one who died. Since Cindy was my first cousin, I think David was my second cousin once removed or something like that. My sisters and I went to visit Uncle Henry and Aunt Fay after Christmas and were able to visit with Cindy and Cathy during that time. I wrote about the visit in another post. It was so good to renew those bonds and we've been keeping up on facebook. I was able to slip up to UAB and see Cindy and Frank during one of David's hospitalizations. They had the family visitation at this large beautiful new contemporary church in Hueytown. Mark and I arrived at 5:30 and waited for over two hours to speak to them and there were at least two more hours worth of people waiting. His life and death touched many people. I went back to the funeral the next day to a sanctuary full of people who where there to celebrate David's life - but not just to celebrate his life - to celebrate his victory of a life lived in Christ.

One of the things that was most amazing to me was the pictures of David. They had prepared a slide show of his life and the "family resemblance" was amazing. Our son, Glenn looks a lot like me. In so many of the pictures, I could see "Glenn" not David. This was very emotional to me. His death has made me want to spend more time with my family. We are surrounded by Mark's family (and they are indeed MY family now, too) but I need to make more of an effort to spend time with my relatives.

During this same time, I had the lung x-ray scare (which is evidently ok - I go back to the allergist in a couple of weeks). Then last week, we had the full lockdown at work which was crazy (you can read about it in the margarita post).

Yesterday, we had the most amazing thing happen. Our sweet future daughter-in-law's mother is Ann. Ann had a colonoscopy a couple of weeks ago and they biopsied a place and it came back malignant. She was scheduled for major surgery at UAB yesterday. They called her and asked her if she would participate in a study. She said, "yes." Another UAB physician did an aggressive colonoscopy to see if he could retrieve this large "mass" that was seen in the first colonoscopy. After an hour or so, the doctor himself came out into the waiting room and waved for us to come with him. We followed him into the hall and he informed us that there was no presence of cancer. Clean. They did send off some tissue for further biopsies but he feels the results will be good. She went into the hospital expecting to stay about 5 days . . . and instead was able to go home within hours of the procedure with the wonderful news - no cancer. I imagine that it is a treat for those doctors to share good news rather than bad! I feel like she experienced a miracle and we are a family who gives all praise and honor to God our Father.

We have many more exciting events coming up. We are hosting a couples shower this weekend for one of our favorite young men - a tool shower - will post pics after Sunday!! Our daughter is a bridesmaid in one of her sorority sister's weddings on Saturday night so we will be attending a wedding. We have another wedding to attend in August and Glenn will graduate with his Master's in August . . .and he will be looking for a job in Mobile. Hopefully, we will have our annual beach trip with two other couples in September and then we roll right into all of the holidays and then we have Glenn & Lauren's wedding in January - life rolls on - life is births and deaths and everything in between and thank God, that each day is filled with a new helping of God's grace! Life as a middle-aged mom doesn't slow down :-)