Anna - a Year Later

Its been just over a year since the world lost a wonderful person and heaven got a beautiful angel.

I still can't believe that Anna, my college roommate and best friend is dead. The word "dead" just doesn't even seem like an appropriate word to describe someone who was so full of life.

Anna left this world on April 4th, 2011, very suddenly and very unexpectedly. I've been doing a lot of reflecting over the past few days, because as the anniversary of her death and funeral approached, the sad feelings began flowing again. I certainly haven't forgotten about her, but it is true that time heals people. After her death, as the year went on, other things began to consume my thoughts. Normal, every day life took the place of the feelings of sadness in my mind. But every now and then something would happen where I just needed a friend, and the realization that I couldn't pick up the phone to call Anna would hit me like a ton of bricks and my tears would start all over.

After Anna died, I wrote this. And everything that I wrote there still holds true. Anna was such a genuinely GOOD person, and a fiercely loyal friend. If you look up the definition of the word "loyal" in the dictionary, her picture should be there. Her death opened up my eyes to a lot of things, mainly the way I act and treat people. I had vowed to become a better person after losing her. I wanted to stay in touch with people more and be a better friend to people and I have to sadly say, that I didn't succeed at that goal. I know I'm not a bad person, but I didn't make much more of an effort to stay in touch with people and I had wanted to. I wasn't always there for my friends and I should have been. It makes me wonder how Anna did it so easily. Being nice and being "good" just came so naturally to her. Aside from the fact that losing any person so young is a tragedy, its also such a tragedy that the world lost a person who was so "good".

This past weekend was hard. It was Easter weekend, but my mind was elsewhere. Last year at this time I was back in North Carolina, watching and crying as my best friend was lowered into the ground in a coffin. The next day I tried to make sure that my friend Alice wasn't forgotten as she celebrated her 30th birthday. It was essentially a celebration of life and death in one single weekend, and sadly, I think that this weekend, for years to come, will always hold those memories for me.

I'm happy that my memories of Anna are still so strong, but sad that its already been over a year since she left us. Time really does move fast, and I hope that as the years go on my memories of her don't become more distant.

I find myself getting angry sometimes when I think about her. I find myself thinking "Its not fair." The reasons I get angry are selfish reasons, but I can't help it. Anna and I spent 3 years as college roommates. When I was growing up, I met my mom's college roommates and their children. I heard the stories my mom told me about college, and I met the people who went along with the stories and I met their children, who were around the same age as me. And now, I find myself getting angry that my (non-existent) children will never get to meet Anna. And as much as she wanted kids of her own, it never happened for her. So my kids will never be able to meet her kids, and hear the stories that we tell together about our time together at Catawba. Its a stupid thought in a way, but its also a really sad thought. I wanted to go to college homecomings in 20 years, and meet up with Anna and introduce people to my old roommate, and I will never be able to do that. I wanted to spend more time with her. I wanted to be a better friend to her. I wanted to be able to always call her when I needed an ear to listen to me or a friend to cry to. But I can't do that. And I'm angry about that.

I know this post is kind of rambling , but I don't know how to fully connect all of my thoughts right now. I'm just sad. I miss Anna. I hate that someone who loved life was taken out of this life so young. Anna was very religious and loved God so there is no doubt in my mind that she is in heaven right now. But at the same time, as much as she loved God, I also know that she didn't want to die this young. She had plans for the rest of her life that she will never be able to complete. She had hopes and dreams that will now never come true.

So in her memory, I thought I'd post some old pictures of Brooklet (because let's not forget that she is the first person who ever called me Brooklet) and Anna. These are in no particular order, and none of them have captions right now. I may go back and caption them if I have more time one day. For now though, I think the pictures themselves speak for our friendship. I don't think they need to be in order or captioned for people to understand that.

Our Move to Corpus (in pictures) Part 6...Days 15-17

Once again, I've realized how much I suck at blogging, since I still haven't managed to finish posting about our move. So in the interest of another post I want to write, which I consider to be much more important than a trip re-cap. I am just going to quickly toss up pictures of the final days of our trip and then move on to my important, non-trip post.

Day 15 - August 9, 2011

(Another "Welcome to" sign that was taken on our way OUT of the state and not into it. We never saw a Colorado sign on our way in, so this was taken on the New Mexico border. But as usual, in the interest of trying to keep things in order, I'm putting this picture before all of our Colorado pictures, even though it was taken after we left the state.)

(Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado - probably one of the coolest National Parks I've ever been to. Its ancient history (history circa 1100-1300AD) right in the United States. I tend to forget that that kind of stuff exists because the country itself is so young.)

(Mesa Verde is a place where the National Park service has preserved a bunch of ancient cliff dwellings. I can't remember the exact number offhand, but the park has about 7 or 8 dwellings that you can tour, plus some smaller ones that you can see, but aren't accessible to the public. This was fascinating to me because these dwellings were literally on the sides of cliffs. I can't even imagine how people climbed in and out of them on a daily basis without dying. Each dwelling functioned as its own town, and they were really interesting to see! Visitors could sign up for guided tours of certain dwellings or tour a couple of them on your own. We took a guided tour of the Long House dwelling - and this picture is of the sign explaining what Long House was.)

(The view from the Long House cliff dwelling)

(another view from Long House)

(Long House cliff dwelling)

(Long House cliff dwelling)

(ancient drawings on the cliff walls - this was pretty interesting to me because these are actual handprints. It just made it seem more "real" to me. I was able to imagine people actually living there when I saw their handprints that have been on the cliff's walls for about 800 years.)

(Thomas by some of the old paintings. This is one of my favorite pictures of him so I had to include it :-).)

(me in the Long House cliff dwelling)

(Long House cliff dwelling)

(This is the most famous cliff dwelling at Mesa Verde - known as Cliff Palace - because it is the most preserved. Its also the one that everyone wants to tour, so we weren't able to get last minute tickets to take a guided tour of it. This picture was taken from an overlook. I'm jealous of the tour group in the picture!)

(Welcome to New Mexico! The final state that I checked off of my list of "states I've never seen" on this trip.)

Day 16 - August 10, 2011

(Roswell, New Mexico - since we were passing through the area, we couldn't resist the cheesiness of the town. We full advantage of the alien fun in the town.)

(Roswell's UFO Museum. I have to admit that Roswell is a very cheesy town. There are aliens everywhere to the point of it being funny and somewhat ridiculous. But this museum was actually really interesting. Its the one "serious" alien thing in the town. It tells the story about the actual Roswell crash, and the evidence and coverup that followed. I was interested in it because I never really knew the story of what happened here - other than the fact that something crashed in a farmer's field. This museum really gets you thinking though, because after looking at all of the evidence and reading all of the newspaper articles from the time, I'm actually pretty convinced that there really was an alien spaceship that crashed here....)

(inside the UFO museum)

(one of the many interesting facts in the museum that really make you question if the government is lying about what happened here...)

(more interesting facts about the coverup of the Roswell crash)

(a fun cartoon depicting the ridiculousness of the government's coverup. If you go to this museum and read all of the information, I'm honestly not sure how someone can think that this WASN'T a coverup of some kind. Maybe it wasn't really an alien spaceship that crashed, but something happened here that someone is trying very hard to coverup. It was all very interesting.)

(outside of the UFO museum. People leave their admittance stickers on the aliens outside when they leave.)

(Even the Coke machines in Roswell have aliens on them!)

(Alien Zone in Roswell - the place where one can fully embrace the cheesiness of the town....which we did.)

(Inside Alien Zone - they have scenes set up so that people can take pictures with aliens in the various different scenes. And yes, we stopped at Target for some random stuff and found $1 alien hats that we, of course, bought, to wear in the pictures we knew we'd be taking inside this Alien Zone place.)

(Thomas with an "illegal alien". I don't care who you are - you have to admit thats kind of funny.)

(eating lunch with an alien)

(Thomas in the outhouse with an alien)

(Motorcycle ride with an alien - this one was taken for my mom)

(Thomas, the pilot, piloting an alien spacecraft)

(beer with aliens)

(inside the UFO)

(Thomas fighting an alien)

(OK we're huge nerds obviously, but you kind of have to appreciate and laugh at the "ET phone home" scene here.)

(alien street lights in downtown Roswell)

(Even the McDonald's in Roswell is shaped like a UFO)

(Almost immediately after leaving Roswell, we saw our first sign that Texas wasn't far away. Not my happiest moment.)

(Goodbye to New Mexico and hello again to my least favorite state :-(. I loved the "hasta la vista" on the New Mexico sign though :-).)

(aaaannd...we're back...for 3 years.)

Day 17 - August 11, 2011

(Our last stop before making it to Corpus Christi, was the teeny tiny little town of Big Spring, Texas. My dad was in the Air Force years ago and this is where he and my mom lived for a few years. My mom LOVES Texas. She's actually pretty obsessed with it and her entire house is decorated in Texas/southwest style. She has talked about Big Spring for my entire life, but its a REALLY small town, thats even smaller now that the Air Force base there is now closed. I've never had a chance, or a reason to go to west Texas before, so since we were driving through west Texas, we decided to take a slight detour to check out Big Spring. I wanted to see the town that I had been hearing about for my entire life.)

(I promised my mom I would look for her old apartment building when we were in Big Spring, and this is what we found. A concrete slab and an empty lot where she used to live. The town is pretty much a functioning ghost town. Its almost empty, and very run down.)

(an old abandoned hospital across the street from where my mom's old apartment used to be. It was a pretty creepy building that was apparently still in use when she lived there.)

(This definitely isn't the clearest picture but we pulled over on the side of the interstate to quickly snap this. After almost 3 weeks of traveling, we finally made it back to Corpus Christi - my least favorite place on earth. This is the view that greets you as you drive into the city. Its an oil refinery. Beautiful huh? The people of Corpus Christi think so because they refer to this city as "The Sparkling City", which just amuses us to no end, because the only thing that sparkles is the oil refinery. And I'm not sure why that is something to brag about...)


And that concludes our trip!