I started writing here a few times, more than a few probably. I just couldn't bring myself to write in a tense that didn't fit. Writing in the past made everything real and I'm sure those of you closer to Katie have a "more real" way of dealing with her loss - I'm further away and have not had a way to process this in a way that makes sense.
Today is the day I begin down the road that so many of you started down a month ago. It makes no sense, I'm sure, but then again I'm writing about Katie and let's face it - a lot of what she did was spur of the moment, made no sense to many onlookers and was steeped in either some generally simple purpose or she arrived at the way she thought in a way that was much more complicated than any of us would have got there, but it ended up making sense.
Last night I got home around 2:30 in the morning and I realize that for many people that is an hour where the party gets started - I know it was with Katie and I thought about a time when she and Gina were riding in a shopping cart together at that exact same hour. The foreigners we were with thought it was cute and we'd just left a club and had a great time. I'm not sure who had the idea that the way back to the hotel was best served by shopping cart, but when I got home I looked at that picture and realized that it was something that would stay a memory forever. I hate that it is a memory today rather than a memory much later, but it is a memory today.
Anyone who knows Katie knows that her love for all things ghost or haunting related are fun, for her, and terrifying to those of us who are subjected to them. When I looked at the picture early in the morning and had a sudden desire for Neil Diamond. So, I played it. Over and over again I listened to the same song - didn't matter which one - and I "felt" that Katie was there. You see, I didn't say good-bye the way I should have. The last contact I had with Katie was an email a week or two before I heard that she left us. I think it was that good-bye, the one I talked with someone about not having, was the thing that forced me to have a heart to heart with myself and Katie to do it.
So - to Katie's friends and family who were much closer than I all I can say is that I know what you're going through is hard and what you want and need is right there - each other. Without that nothing matters and as Katie lived life so fully I think what I learned last night was that we have to do the exact same thing. I don't know how I process all of it yet, but I have been able to go through the most difficult part of grief and been able to say that Katie is not here today, but what is is her memory and to a lot of us her soul - not the soul that is surely raising cain in Heaven, but the soul and breath for life that she lived so fully.
For as long as it took me to be able to talk about Katie in the past tense it will take me that long to get to the next "stage" (whatever it is). BUT, the good thing is that I know Katie is out there taking care that everyone she ever touched, every baby she held, every person she was friends with and every shopping cart she pushed or rode in is well aware that Katie is not gone - she is just as much here as she ever was. Only we cannot talk to her, cannot email her, cannot touch her and cannot do anything more than remember and love.
To her and to her family - that should come as a comfort and to her friends I think that is a good thing because it proves to me one inalterable truth: we are never alone. Katie's love for ghosts will attest to that and all the rest of us will know when the desire to do something out of the blue hits us - something that only Katie would know or something you did a long time ago - that she is probably pulling the strings from wherever she may be.
Knowing her - she is waiting for Jennifer Love Hewitt to channel her to scare the hell out of everyone, but I wasn't scared when I listened to Neil. I was thrilled. I'm not ready to talk in the past tense about Katie, but my writing this was my way of having a therapy session with the only people who would have ever known what in the world I was talking about.
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