It is almost unbelievable to me that it has been 7 whole years since the day that Brenna died. Somehow 7 seems like too small and too big of a number at the same time. It feels like it has been 100 years since I last saw her, and it feel like it was only yesterday. It is hard to believe that since I last saw her, I have moved 5 times, earned 2 degrees, and made completely new sets of friends at two different universities. It is hard to believe that the high school friends who went through this with me are now working, coaching, teaching, or raising families of their own. It's almost as if a part of us will always be stuck on this very day 7 years ago - maybe that's just me. But that feels like magic. Living at home again during OT school has felt a little like magic - where I often drive by the chunk of concrete in the median by Sonic she took out with her car just days before she died, or the tennis courts where we spent so many summer nights, or the coffee shop we spent many afternoons in. Magic, time travel, or something like that.
The day that Brenna died, the wonder for the world I had around me seemed to die too. At 17 years old, so much of the world is still ahead of you, and there's something fun and mysterious about getting to tackle it yourself. That day sucked the magic and wonder out of many of my friends with it's yellow caution tape, the sound of a search helicopter, and watching my friends collapse as they got news no 17 year old should have to get. I saw it in the way that my very favorite teachers from all four years of high school knelt weeping in front of a casket four days later. The magic was gone almost in the same way that the hot May night sucked up every ounce of water from the fields, and the way that the day sucked up every ounce of energy I had for several weeks. Life became dry, and scary, and a daily battle.
Slowly, God has built magic back into our world - one piece at a time. I used to think that once you were an adult, magic didn't exist. But I've realized over the last few months, that it does exist - but it's God's way of sprinkling blessings towards me. The things others might label as fate, as coincidence, as 'weird' ... they're that way because if He did it in any way that DIDNT seem like magic, I probably wouldn't notice Him there at all.
I'm currently 5 weeks away from "officially" finishing my doctorate, finishing up at a clinic in Manhattan. It has been both amusing and joyful to watch God's plan unfold over the last five months. There were a LOT of tears shed about leaving Dallas in March (like, at least half the car ride home), the place I felt so, so sure I was called, but somehow it has turned into being somewhere where I wake up excited every day - and for the first time, feeling teeny, tiny glimpses of competent at the job I've always wanted. (That's a first) Just under three months since I got home, I think I would be tearful now at the thought of going back. Maybe just another example of the lesson God started teaching me 7 years ago on this very day - that His plan is always bigger than mine.
I have begun to discover over last few months and years that the magic I held about the world around me is coming back. I'm sure it never left, but I think it took me awhile to find it again. Sometimes it comes during just the right song at church on Sunday, a phone call with a long distance friend, or the way Emma snuggles into me when she's tired or we haven't seen each other in awhile.
It's the type of magic I felt on the very last day of my first rotation when the child I had worked with 5 days a week for 12 weeks made eye contact with me for the first time. The kind of magic I felt at concerts I have been to since her death, where I feel more in touch with God and at peace with the situation than I ever thought possible. It was the kind of magic I felt standing in a school gym in Hong Kong, listening to Christian radio in Cantonese, realizing God had literally crossed oceans to heal pain I never thought would be healed. It's the feeling I got in Nicaragua as I played games with children who didn't have electricity, running water, or for many, even a roof on their homes, and I realized that none of that even mattered. It came back as I sat on the shore of Lake Ponchartrain in Louisiana almost every night for 12 weeks - sometimes it felt big in the form of a 25 mile lake, and sometimes it felt small in the tiny crabs I would watch come in and out with the waves. I felt the magic in December when I went to Tampa to visit Leah, and we took a spontaneous trip to Disneyworld. We met up with a friend of mine from high school, and Taylor and I stood in the middle of the Magic Kingdom fireworks show as the songs from the Lion King played, and I realized my face was wet with tears, not sweat, remembering my senior prom and watching Brenna serenade all of our friends with songs from her favorite movie.
The magic made it's appearance the first time I saw the movie Tangled, and I cried and cried at the scene with the lanterns. It showed up when we started a whiffle ball group at my current rotation and I am reminded every single time I go to group of the one that sits on my shelf and how much has changed since I got that whiffle ball at her funeral, and how I used to not be able to be near them without crying. It came back at graduation last weekend as I was seconds away from crossing the stage and one of the nursing students turned around and I realized her hat said "the best is yet to come". The magic came when we hosted two students from Hong Kong two summers ago and I got to watch them see their first lightning bugs, have their first water balloon fight, and catch their first fish. It came three weeks ago as my family said goodbye to my great grandma, the glue to our family for 96 years, and we stood in the sunshine singing Amazing Grace as we said goodbye.
Yesterday at work, my supervisor brought her daughter to work since she got done with school for the year at noon. I was eating my Chinese food and halfheartedly typing my notes while I listened to Ayla ask about why the slime she was playing with smelled the way it did, why mommy had a meeting right now, and what kinds of games could we play with my next patient. Could we do an obstacle course? What kinds of things were we going to work on? Have you smelled this slime? We eventually went down to the gym so she could swing, and I leaned against the wall to keep typing notes while listening to her chatter. There is something incredibly relaxing about listening to the way a child processes the world, and you don't even have to talk back. I really don't know how God made everything, or where He came from, or what the world looked like before God made it, but she sure made me think that I should start figuring it out. She was spinning on the swing hanging upside down (with me wondering every so often if she was going to puke), her blonde pony tail hanging off the swing, every once in awhile taking a break to look at me and see if I could answer her 'simple' questions. Out of nowhere, she stopped swinging and said "Do you believe in God?" and there was an element of magic in the way she asked the question that I have only begun to feel again very, very recently. I never could have imagined that an 8 year old could have brought that back.
My last memory before Brenna died was driving home from my last graduation party around 2 a.m. the night of my graduation. The sign at the church near my house simply read "Congrats to the Grads" with no punctuation and two crooked letters. And in reading it's simplicity, I realized that at that very moment, I felt completely content with life, with no idea the drastic turn things would take just four days later. But 7 years later, watching a little blonde girl on a swing process the world around her, I feel like I'm back - I found the magic again.
