A Gift On Her Way To Heaven

With each passing day, I am closer to being alive more days without you than I had with you in my life. Sometimes when I think about you, I can’t make out the exact features of your face. The sound of your voice is also slipping away.

What has never faded is the feeling of you. Your aliveness and the pure radiating joy of your laughter. Offering a hand, a smile or a hug to any human that needed one. You are as familiar as my reflection and there has never been a doubt that you are with me, always.

She was born the oldest of twelve and a caretaker of humanity since she was given the chance. Although there are most definitely a million ways to tell her story from so many who loved her, this one belongs to me.

She never had children of her own. I would say it was because we all needed her, selfishly I think her life was spoken for. She lived to not just help anyone or organization she was involved in but also to bring joy and understanding to people of all walks of life.

She devoted her time to being compassionate and making it her purpose to treat people equally. She chose to be a teacher, a fitting role for someone who’s destiny would be to leave so many footprints on the lives she touched.

Diane is her name, we called her DiDi. She loved butterflies.

Everything changed when she got sick. We all watched her brave face as she fought the disease that ravaged her body. She insisted in finding the humor of wearing the most characteristic wigs and making as many moments joyous ones. Nobody deserved it less but Cancer doesn’t discriminate.

I never got to be with her in the darkest days, when the battle was nearing the end; regardless I felt connected to her every single day. She and I had a special bond, I was the oldest of my family and also a caretaker. Although I lived away from home, I prayed for her comfort every night.

It was December 2004; she was fading quickly at that time. I was managing a business and it was the busy holiday season. Retail in December feels like a giant wave when the days blend together and crash around you in the chaos of the festive season.

Some of my staff were rock solid, the foundation of my business. I had one employee who made my job really hard at times. Mind you she was young, always late and goofing off with her carefree attitude.

Unknowing to her, I was suffocating in the stress of work and personal life and it would have made such a difference to me if she could just step it up. Instead, I found myself frustrated and annoyed with her disregard.

One day in mid December, I came into work to find a small gift bag on my desk. I opened the card, it was from her, the one who was causing me all the grief. The one who was least expected to get me anything.

Inside the bag was a small glass candle with a yellow butterfly wrapped around it. In one instant, all of my frustrations faded away. This person, this almost stranger unknowingly gave me one of the most special gifts in my lifetime.

That evening I came home, took my butterfly candle out and lay it on my coffee table in the middle of my living room. I stared at it. There was an overwhelming message inside me that it wasn’t time to light it yet.

Christmas came and went along with a New Year; my candle sat in my living room. Each day I would look at it, acknowledged it and went about my life. It wasn’t time.

I can’t fully put it into words but I Knew with everything in me that the day I lit that candle she would be gone. I don’t mean that I had the power to end her life, I just knew there was significance on a spiritual level that I had never known.

The evening of January 4^th 2005, I felt this calmness in my presence. It was time. I found a lighter in my purse and lit the candle. I sat and watched it as the butterfly glowed from the flickering light and my heart overflowed with love.

Not long after, my phone rang. It was my dad, she was gone.

To this day, I don’t even try to understand what I had I experienced. There was no reason for that girl to buy me that gift, let alone any gift. You could say it was coincidental or that I wanted there to be significance.

Regardless, I believe with every fiber in my Being that there was something larger than my human existence happening and that it was on purpose.

This experience with death brough with it an awareness of the power of our souls and a greater relationship between life and death. I don’t think for one second that we just live and die and it’s over. I believe we are all connected in ways we aren’t fully meant to know during our lifetime. Needless to say, I have new perspective in my faith.

I feel gratitude for the gift, the love and comfort I felt when she went to Heaven.