For One More Day...

I just finished reading the book For One More Day by Mitch Albom, and if anybody has read his books before they're really good, and they're usually about death. Wow, that makes them sound depressing, but I promise that they're not. They're actually quite inspirational. He wrote Tuesdays with Morrie, and The Five People You Meet in Heaven, just in case anybody wants to check them out. Anywho, so in just finishing the book and with the 2 year anniversary of Tasha's death around the corner, I stumbled upon a couple of quotes in this book that I really liked. The first one reminded me of Tash, hence why I'm sharing a second post related to her:
"Sharing tales of those we've lost is how we keep from really losing them."

So, here's a little story about Tash. Melinda might be embarrassed a little bit, but oh well. She'll get over it. When we were in high school, Melinda had a ceiling fan in her room and so the three of us collected every bra and pair of undies we could find, hung them from the fan, turned it on full blast, ran to the bed, and then layed still and laughed hysterically as we watched them fly off the fan and scatter all over the room, including all over us. I know, we're weird.

Tasha would remember why this one is so funny, and nobody else will, but I don't care. We had a sleepover at her house one night and stayed up super late playing "Twisted," a really funny video game. Anyway, something happened right before we were going to go to bed and we got the major giggles for like 20 minutes and almost peed our pants.

When Tasha was in the hospital for a while after I graduated from college, I was working stock in the mornings at the GAP, so I would come to the hospital every afternoon and hang out until I got kicked out. We would watch Ellen and Passions, sneak down to the cafeteria trying to hide all of the IVs and wires attached to her, listen to music, play cards, and mostly talk. The Aunts and I even snuck her out and took her to Applebee's one day. Shhh, don't tell. Anyway, even though it was in a hospital, we had a really fun time. She even made me a video on her laptop one day. I used to tell a horrible story when I was babysitting the cousins and they wanted a bedtime story. It went something like this, "Once upon a time there was a princess. She lived. She died. The end. Now go to bed." I have never lived it down, and so Tasha made a sweet video of it for me. We don't know where it is now, sadly, but it was hilarious and adorable. She had a fun sense of humor.

Little things that remind me of Tasha - quotes all over her bedroom, Mary Englebright, purple, playing barbies and house and whatever else for hours in the room under the stairs, that night down on the strip with Melinda and her hair school friends, swimming in their above ground pool and she would get so cold her lips would always turn purple, no matter how hot it was outside, our little pink matching dresses with the big white flowers, playing in the Belly River, her scar from her heart surgeries and how Brit and Steph would say she had the best cleavage out of all of them, and how she wasn't embarrassed of it. Her laugh, her smile, and her eyes.

See, we haven't really lost her.