This morning I am having a bowl of instant oatmeal, peaches and cream flavor. When I was a child, I never had such a thing. The only oatmeal I knew was old-fashioned, cooked on the stove top with raisins and a bit of brown sugar. We didn't even have a microwave!
The year the microwave arrived was also the year my cousin Chelsea came to live with us. She introduced me to instant oatmeal, among many other things. It's amazing how a simple bowl of breakfast can stir up so many memories. Chelsea moved in with us when I was in about 7th grade. She had a few years of highschool left, and wanted to finish them all in the same place. Her stepfather had a job that moved them around a lot, sometimes every few months. My brother had been gone a while since joining the Air Force, so my mom got his old room ready and along came Chelsea!
Chelsea became my sister, my best friend. We would sit up until all hours of the night giggling, and squeezing each other's feet. She never treated me like I was "younger", our bond paid no attention to age. One of our favorite pasttimes was to eat a roll of chocolate chip cookie dough and drink rootbeer floats. We did this once while watching Gone With the Wind, because she had never seen it. Then we played Monopoly and ran outside to play in the rain. She could french braid like nobody's business, and she had an eye for fashion that was ahead of her time. She was genuinely good and sweet. Everything about her was kind . . . . and SILLY! If I got grumpy, she would do the "lizard face". Trust me, you cannot stay in a bad mood and not collapse into fits of silly giggles when you see that face.
Chelsea grew up and got married. I say "grew up" only because she progressed in age. She wanted, like so many people, happiness and security and thought she would find that with her husband and his family. Most of all, she wanted to be a mother. Her daughter Amberly came along shortly after marriage. Unfortunately the marriage was a brief one, and she became ultimately a single mom. When Amberly was three, Chelsea was in a terrible car accident that she never recovered from. I had only been married a few months, and was living out of state. I came home, and my poor husband had to break the news to me that she was on life support and not expected to make it. I don't remember that night, but he says I sat and screamed for a while. That doesn't surprise me, because I often still feel like sitting and screaming when I think about it.
Chelsea's death made me so very angry. I was mad at God, mad at fate, mad at people, mad at myself for not being around her more before she died, mad at people who LIVED who I didn't think deserved it, while someone as beautiful and wonderful as Chelsea was taken. It took a while to work through that. Want to know what helped? Chelsea left us Amberly. We rallied around her, determined that she know who her mother was. Little did we know Chelsea had already made such an impact on her child in just three years that we didn't have much to do! People came out of the woodwork . . . her friends, her coworkers, very old boyfriends even! They wrote letters to Amberly. My Aunt Linda had them made into a book for her. Chelsea's school (she was a teacher's aide) planted a memory garden in her honor. At her funeral, I was moved by the flowers. These were not your typical funeral service flowers. They were bright and youthful. You could see the extra effort that people made to select things just for her. Her favorite yellow roses were on display, along with splashes of color in some of the most beautiful arrangements I have ever seen.
Am I still angry? Yes, sometimes. Am I sad? You bet. My heart breaks all over again every time I think of her. She was my Chelsea. She was my family, but I've never had a better friend. We were truly soul sisters, and there has been a terrible void in my world since she left. I know that it will never be filled, or even get any smaller. I try to just be grateful for the time that I had her.
And the coolest part? I have a little girl of my own now. She and Amberly are just about the same age difference as Chelsea and me. They have a bond that is magical. They live on opposite sides of the country from one another, but it doesn't seem to affect them at all. When they see each other, the world stops and they might as well have been next-door-neighbors for all this time. The two of them . . . . that is what helps me heal.
