A Brief Moment

One moment she was here...the very next she was gone.

It seems as though her 8 years were so brief, so short, that it was only a moment that she was here with us, part of us...the biggest part of us. 

But now the moments without her here are dragging by so slowly I wonder when will it ever stop.  She filled so much of my day to day moments to overflowing that now I struggle to get from one to the next.  

For a brief moment I saw her...I looked into her eyes...and it  caught me off guard.  There is only one person on this earth with eyes like Ashley Kate's and when I turned around I saw her there.  

There are images in my mind from her last moments on this earth that only I witnessed.  I am haunted by those images when I close my eyes.  Some nights I can't escape the moment and I'm so grateful it is my burden, my pain, and my moment to carry alone.  I couldn't bare the thought of Dave having to live with it.  Or Blake or Allie carrying it for the rest of their lives.  It was my eyes that opened and realized she was leaving us.  She had held on through the night...she had waited till morning...she had wanted us to be with her... In those awful moments I knew... I knew what I had realized just a moment before...and we surrounded her and held her and loved her through her last moment.

Time is a funny thing.  The  moments that make up this life are so brief.  "A vapor" is what we are told...and yet each moment since she left has felt as though I'm living through an eternity without her.  

As I sit and sort through files and files of images and pictures and clips of video for Blake's senior banquet I realize how amazing, how wonderful, and how incredibly happy our lives once were.  Ashley Kate's smile, and her twinkling eyes, and her laughter, and her beauty are weaved all throughout the very best moments of our lives.  

For a moment she was really, really beautiful...she was really, really happy...she was really, really here.  She was.  If only for a moment.