Bucket list #2 📚 GO TO COLLEGE

Happy Easter!  This is going to be a year of firsts: first Easter, first birthday, first family celebrations without Kendra in our lives.  I do pray for peace and comfort for me and our family because, wow, greief can be so consuming.   You go to bed thinking this still can't be real, you wake up in the night and you lay there trying to imagine how your life is going to be without her in it.  Then you wake up and you are sad because it wasn't just a bad dream.  To me grief has a physical feeling, like my body is frozen on the inside.  It also wreaks havoc on my eating habits, I only want fattening comfort foods, there's really a reason they are called comfort foods!!!  So I am navigating this foreign territory in the only way I know how,  in faith, trying to help others and writing out my feelings.  And working on the bucket list.

Number 2 was Go to college.   She did this but unfortunately did not complete this.  She was so smart, but she let life sidetrack her.  She only had a semester or two to be able to graduate and the day before she died she had made an appointment with her adviser to get enrolled back in school.  She was so excited and she wanted to look into becoming an addiction counselor.  She would have been great at that!!!  She even went and bought all her school supplies which I sadly returned a couple weeks later.

I told her one time about a dream I had where I was holding a child and we were cheering for her at her college graduation.  We thought Ethan was that child, but then she was still in school and had Gia, so we joked and said ok we just didn't see two kids.  I'm very sad that I will never get to see her complete her dreams of graduating.  A friend of ours suggested using "flat Kendra" instead of flat Stanley for our bucket list adventures, so Kendra will be graduating with her sister Stephani, pinned to her cap.

I am cheering for Kendra because she did graduate to the highest institution possible!!!   She never has to study for and pass anymore exams or worry about her GPA.   She went right to the top of her class, her favorite place to be!!!   Way to go, GRADUATE!

                                                                           Easter - 1995

Kendra, Danielle and Stephani in front