Wheresoever She Was: Remembering Lana One Year Later
by: Jon Crane

Saturday Ramblins, Vol. 2, No. 8 (April 17, 1999)

There are events that are milestones in our lives. Graduating from high school or college, buying a first home, or taking that dream trip to Paris might fall under this category. Then there are those events that divide our life into "before" and "after". Marriage, births and deaths become the candidates here because these are the things that change our lives forever. Nothing is ever the same again. Nor should it be.

As I write this, the one-year anniversary of Lana's death is less than a week away (she died April 16). Approaching this anniversary is harder than I thought it would be. I've been remembering since the 1st of April the days that passed before she died - days we did not know were our last together.

I keep asking myself, what would I have done differently had I known that those days together were our last? Nothing, I suppose.

We both knew from early April that, at best, Lana had only six months to two years to live, given the nature of her cancer. When a blood clot formed in her leg and traveled to her heart killing her in a matter of seconds, seven days after her surgery, I was outraged -- furious with God and with medical science, because I was promised six more months with her. At least.

I wanted to break something. I wanted to trash something. I wanted to destroy a room, tearing the very sheet-rock from the walls before I was finished. I wanted to go up to every couple I saw laughing in a restaurant or walking down a street hand-in-hand and scream at them, "It's not fair! You've got her and she's got you and I don't have Lana anymore!"

Nearly a year has passed between those moments of rage and nights of despair, of crying till my pillow was soaked and calling out her name. Nights of begging God to give me just one minute more with her - just sixty seconds. To kiss her and tell her "goodbye." After all, what's sixty seconds to God out of a whole eternity? He'd never miss it.

I still have those moments. My faith still gets shaky. I still want to question why and to rage against the rising of the sun or the coming of Spring. I still feel the pain. But I've accepted that, as Hannah Whitall Smith wrote, "[w]e are not wise enough to judge as to things, whether they are really joys or sorrows. But we always know the Lord is good, and everything He provides or permits must be good."

A few hours before she died, Lana called me at work. We only spoke for a few minutes. We ended our conversation by exchanging "I love you." Those were the last three earthly words to pass between us. She took them into eternity with her and left them here with me for all my time on this earth. In the end, if we must say goodbye, that's the way to do it, I suppose.

Life is short, they say. We are not promised tomorrow, they say. We only have today, they say. A year ago, not knowing those days and hours together were to be our last in this world, I have to say - no - I would not have done anything different.

Lana taught me one thing - even before she got sick: we only have today and what we can do for each other today. Each moment we have, including those we cherish who fill that moment, are God's great gifts to us in this life. And for that one, special person - the one who fills us up, it is as Mark Twain wrote in The Diaries of Adam and Eve: "Adam at Eve's grave: Wheresoever she was, there was Eden."

(Author's note: My thanks to Judi Amey, former managing editor of Saturday Ramblins and currently news editor for The Living Church, a weekly magazine for the Anglican church in the United States, for agreeing to serve as guest editor for this article. It is the sixth and final article in the series on grief and faith in the wake of Lana's death.)