New Reasons to Remember

In February 2013, I posted on the anniversary date of Kelly’s diagnosis: "One Year Ago Today".  Anytime someone asks about Kelly and her story, I like to point him in the direction of this post.  It’s a good starting point for both its retrospective view of the first 12 months of her struggle, and for an understanding of the phenomenon of Team Kelly.  It’s also a testament to just how brave and tough she was.

I cherish every memory of Kelly, the best and the worst, and there hasn't been one second since June 1 when I wouldn't have been willing to relive even the very toughest moment all over again just for the chance to hear her voice and touch her again.  But I won’t keep reliving February 13, 2012 for the rest of my life.  I want to bury it with this thought – recently up until that moment, Kelly and I searched our hearts often for a new direction in our lives.  We were blessed beyond measure with four healthy children, incredible friendships, loving family close by, a new church family, and a great job with a great company. We had, up to that moment, lived an almost charmed life.   It wasn't dissatisfaction so much as restlessness and perhaps even a little guilt.  Irony is indeed the key ingredient to a great story.

What I’d rather do than focus on this turning point in our lives, is celebrate a different one, and try as best I can to give new meaning to February, for myself and those closest to me.  I went back and checked the dates, and I was quite startled to realize just how quickly things happened in those first few days following the results of that first CT Scan.  On Wednesday night, February 15, 2012, Gayla Cruikshank literally created this blog with the first post: "We Gather Together".  That post chronicled a significant event – a prayer gathering at my house where more than 50 of our closest friends and family members came to support us and ask for God’s blessings on Kelly, me and our kids.  So I think it’s fair to say that Team Kelly was in fact born on February 15, 2012.  Over the following few days, things happened rapidly, and I think it’s worth looking back over those first few blog posts to appreciate how far this blog and TK have come.  I posted for the first time, by proxy, on February 19: "Some Thoughts" that sum up my frame of mind at the time.  But even then, I still had no way of appreciating how powerful that Kellybridge and Team Kelly would be in our lives, and in the lives of many around us.

The newly incorporated Team Kelly Foundation recently was able to grant $10,000 to the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network, strengthening the bond between TK and PanCAN that was formed in November of 2012 with our team’s strong turnout and fundraising at the annual DFW Purplestride.  Additionally, we provided camp scholarships to two full cabins of kids, one for Camp Sanguinity and one for Camp Esperanza, for this upcoming summer at Camp John Marc.  Camp Sanguinity and Camp Esperanza are week-long summer camp sessions at CJM for kids with cancer.  I’d encourage you to learn more about one of mine and Kelly’s favorite charities (www.campjohnmarc.org).  So already you can see the profound impact of Kelly’s journey and its story chronicled through this blog.  We look forward to many more years of service to men, women, and children suffering from cancer and the effects of its treatment, and we look forward to a day whenever we all remember cancer as a disease without cure.  In the meantime, we want to help cancer patients and their family members “Fight Like Kel!” 

So next February, we’ll celebrate this time of year as a time of promise and change.  We’ll celebrate the birth of Team Kelly.  We’ll celebrate the beginning of a new chapter in Carol’s and Blake’s lives as they launched their new business, ringing up their first sale, on February 13, 2014 (I think I was their first official customer).  I encourage you to stop by Crave Popcorn in Plano to get your bag of “Team Kelly” flavored popcorn, and support TKF!  Once you walk in, you’ll be hooked – I promise!

We’re so thankful to God for new reasons to mark these dates on our calendars, and for great new memories to come!

Story - Part II

A few weeks ago I posted here (Story), soliciting stories from Kelly's friends and family, and since then I've been blessed with stories from several of her friends, old and new.  It's such a joy to hear new tales and learn new things about her, and I especially love the stories from our Baylor days when I was first getting to know her.

Over the last couple of years, so much of our energy and focus was consumed by care and worry that it's difficult to hurdle over those times, to the years before when we first fell in love, got married and started our family together.  I know for the kids it's even worse.  The really big memories for them - the vacations and birthdays and personal achievements that stand out in their memories - are all from the last two years, as if there wasn't a time before their mom was diagnosed.  For me, the fog slowly lifts day by day, though, as I know it will for them eventually.

I am obsessed with story - those close to me know that.  I can't live without it.  And it's maddening whenever you can't piece together your own, most important story.  So I spend quite a bit of time jotting down the fragments as they some back to me - as I look back through boxes of old photos and read old letters (remember those) we wrote to one another - and I laugh and cry and most importantly remember.

What I remember best, oddly enough, are the earliest times - my pursuit (in vain) of Kelly while she was still at Baylor with me (it took me a little longer to finish up), our brief courtship, and the first few years of marriage.  I remember driving to Plano in the summer of '94 to see her at night after I got out of my evening summer school course at Richland, still stinking from the day's work covered in concrete or asphalt or mud, unable - unwilling - to leave, well into the early morning hours, knowing I had to drive back to Ovilla and get up at 5:30 to do it all again, knowing that the minute I woke I'd already be thinking about heading up there again.  Sometimes she'd cut me some slack and actually meet me in Richardson at the campus after my classes.  She'd take me to dinner because she knew I was broke.  Once we made out like teenagers in the Richland parking lot until we noticed a campus cop rolling by slowly - probably the highlight of his night!

I remember on December 23, 1994 when I asked her to marry me at a spot on Lake Grapevine - a spot where we'd visited the summer before in Carol's convertible with a six pack of beer and looked at the stars and talked (in case you were wondering, you're not supposed to drink beer in a Corps of Engineers park, as we were informed on that summer night by a ranger - what was it with us and security!).  She said yes that day in December when we went back.  I remember when it dawned on me, as I'm sure it does on many a newlywed, that I barely knew her - you know the way you need to know someone to share a small apartment with them.  I remember coming home from work and seeing the trail of shoes and clothes and purse and keys just thrown down, starting right at the threshold of the front door and leading into the bedroom, while she was already in her sweats, munching on chips in the kitchen - I wanted to scream!

I remember the time, in the same small apartment, that she put a bag of popcorn - dinner for her in those days - in the microwace, but instead of 3 minutes she set it on 30 minutes - then forgot all about it.  I came home to a smoke-filled apartment, alarms blaring, and the awful smell of incinerated popcorn.  When I retrieved the bag from the microwave it was completely empty but for the thin black layer of something in the bottom, burned beyond recognition.  It took weeks to get the smell out of the apartment, and several trips to the drycleaners to get it out of our clothes.  We never got the smoke stains off of the microwave and vent hood.

What I remember most is that she could never get close enough to me.  While she would, years later, acquire a voracious appetite for books, in those first few years she was not a reader.  I, on the other hand, would spend every evening trying to read.  I say trying because she would have none of it.  She would start asking me questions or telling me stories, and after a while when she noticed I wasn't paying any attention to her, she'd place her head directly between my face and the page, with a big smile on her face.  She couldn't get enough of me and I have no idea why.  Ironically, after we had kids, she fell in love with reading.  She'd start a new book and for all she knew the kids could have been kidnapped and the house burned down - she didn't care until she finished the story.      

For our first anniversary, we drove 7 ½ hours to Corpus Christi to stay on North Padre Island at the Gulfstream Condominiums.  Not in a condo we had rented, but in a condo where the current president of my company (where I had only worked for 18 months) and his wife and two kids were staying.  We slept on what amounted to a fold-out sofa that had a curtain partition to make it a “bedroom.”  We stayed two nights, then drove to San Antonio, where we stayed a night – not in a nice hotel I paid for, but at Duncan Clowe’s parents’ house with Dunc and Amber, while his parents were out of town.  We had dinner and then went to see the Nutty Professor and laughed like 10-year old boys at the dinner-table fart scene – “Hercules! Hercules!”

We climbed Enchanted Rock when it was 99 F outside (which she griped about ever after), visited Pedernales State Park, floated the Guadalupe in Gruene with a third tube for our cooler.  We were both drunk at the end of the 4 hour float, but she was bright enough to use sun-screen.  Not me, though.  Our romantic riverside cottage at the Gruene Mansion Inn turned out to be none too romantic whenever I couldn’t do anything but lie on my back with no covers as my buzz wore off.  We always talked about going back for a do-over.  We spent one night at a bed-and-breakfast in Fredricksburg and realized that they rolled up the sidewalks in that town after 9 PM on a weeknight, so all there was to do was see Independence Day at the old Palace walk-in theater.  The next day we went to Willie’s 4^th of July Picnic in Luckenbach, then, motored on back up to Plano in my ’94 Ford pickup (the raspberry and grey one) undoubtedly with the windows down and her sitting in the middle seat, snoozing like she always did the minute the car started. 

From then on, that trip was our compass needle, reminding us that it’s ok to piddle, to waste time, to wander aimlessly as long as we were together.  We always said that’s what we were best at.  

In another week, it will have been 2 years since her diagnosis.  I don't think I'll commemorate it this year.  Of all the posts I've gone back and re-read, few have been as difficult for me as the one from February 13, 2013 - One Year Ago Today.  That time was so full of promise still.  No, I don't want to think about diagnoses right now.  Like the rest of Kelly's family, my only concern for pancreatic cancer now is how to end it - for everyone!  Right now I want to remember Kelly the way she always wanted to be seen - beautiful, funny, sexy, alive! That's the Kelly I want my kids to remember, too, picture by picture and story by story.  

It might seem trite to cite the lyric from a song at this point, but remembering that first-anniversary road trip puts me in mind of the Shooter Jennings song, 4th of July.  If you know the song you'll understand why.  There's a line in the song, though, where he says, "She was out of the blue to a boy like me."  That was a fact - I never stopped feeling like I had won the lottery knowing that she wanted to be with me.

Please keep sending me your stories.  Email them, if you'd like, to kellystewartstories@gmail.com.