Our Girl

Her husband reached out to us and said, “Tell me anything about “our girl”.

Maybe if we each typed a memory of how profoundly she has impacted us, it would somehow shake the universe hard enough to wake her up.

And so we did. In our little group of 9 friends, we generated the outline of a super human. We started with the accomplishments that would make everyone other than her take a step back and marvel. She was a star tennis player, she was a magnificent pianist, she was a brilliant scientist (still is!). Her ability to contribute to the world is not only multifaceted, but it is steeped in such a sense of humbleness that some of us didn’t even know that she had ever picked up a racket, or tickled the ivory.  And we each know her very well. But what she chose to share with us, was not the great accomplishments that other people would use to judge the worth of her life, but rather seemingly insignificant moments to any outsider.

Our girl is silly to the core. If there is an opportunity to laugh, she will take it. In line with our text, her husband sent us a reminder of silliness in it’s purest form. A picture of our girl using the lines of her IV to try and make plastic mustaches when she was too sick to talk. Even though she couldn’t produce words, she could still giggle.

What? Who does this in the midst of agonizing pain?

I already knew the answer as I was asking these questions to myself. Someone who doesn’t think they’re suffering. Someone who knows that they are sitting in a moment of time with the opportunity to make someone else smile. Someone who made a choice long ago that other people’s happiness trumps all. Simply put? The most selfless person I have ever met.

I may not know which songs she has mastered on the keyboard, but I know without a shadow of a doubt that she can’t pass a stranger on the street without thinking, “I hope they are having a beautiful life”. What a spectacular way to go through this world. 

These words don’t even scratch the surface. There's no way to arrange a series of words to describe completely such a profound person. But I’m hoping so badly that they can help her husband take shelter inside of a reflection of our girl.