Dark Days

Tuesday, June 28, 2005

Little new had happened that week, though it was only Tuesday morning. And Collette surmised the week would pass quickly.

The previous afternoon she had not felt well. And while Joe took Francis and Linnea to their swimming lessons, which were inevitably canceled due to storms, Carrie-Bri worked on her papers at home and Collette fell asleep on the couch as heat lightening cracked around the house.

Dad was at the Wells Fargo Bank for the first day of his new contract, working bankers hours for once, which Dad hadn’t done in years. He had always been gone by around four-thirty or so in the morning, and returned often at four-thirty in the afternoon.

OLeif had just finished designing a logo for a clothing company, using Joe as the model of a man carrying a cross over his shoulder. And then Rose and Mom were at Rose’s first 5-Day Club, which she taught two of that week. Everyone was busy…

That day was hard, everything about it. But the worst part made everything else quite insignificant. Collette received a phone call from OLeif at around one. Shepherd had just heard that his mom was given three months. It was such a sad moment. Collette didn’t really know what to think. They all had known for awhile that it was a possibility, but it wasn’t until then that they knew the cancer had spread to both lungs and her liver. Collette knew Mrs. Pretzel was a Christian, and so she was happy to know that much. She knew that Mrs. Pretzel was prepared to leave at any time. Everyone took death differently, and it was hard to say how it would all go about. It was a very sad day.