Purple with Tears

What a day this has been!  It was supposed to be a day of a lot of cooking to get ready for a big dinner tomorrow night fit around a consultation with my hip surgeon, a piano lesson, and choir practice.  Instead the main event of the day was a funeral for someone far too young to die.

It was the girl of the now 6,000 cranes who had waged a fierce battle against an even fiercer form of cancer for the last 6 months or so.  In the end the cancer won.

Hundreds of people of all ages gathered at The Congressional Cemetery for a graveside service to tell her goodbye and to begin to comfort her family, who are left with a gaping hole where their daughter used to be.  We came in purple and beads since those were among her passions.

We recited the mourner’s kaddish for someone under 30 who should have had the rest of a long life to enjoy.  We shoveled dirt into the grave and threw in cranes to keep her company on her journey.

Then we gathered to share food and stories of this girl, known for her ability to help people make connections, just as she strung beads together.  

I managed to keep the appointment with the surgeon, who has ordered an MRI to lend more information about my lower back curve that seems to be more pronounced.  I postponed the piano lesson.  And I managed to cook a Tunisian eggplant appetizer, Jewish cholent, and poached pears with chocolate sauce.  And there was choir rehearsal, which found me wanting to yawn and sing sitting down.

But my memory of today will be the fact that the sky cleared and the sun came out shortly before the funeral and the next few hours were filled with a mixture of tears and stories about a person who was so good and so innocent, a person who was unfairly taken from all of us.