Letter from Orlando

Letter from Orlando

I got the surprise of my life this evening.  One of the daughters of my best friend from Orlando had found her Mom's misplaced cell phone and was using it to call me. A bolt out of the blue, this call certainly caught me off guard. The young lady, it turns out, actually sent  me the equivalent of what guys in the Military called, "A letter from home." Good News! For many of us, a watermelon also translates into  a letter from home. Yes, the green or green-striped fruit that many of us from the South consider a delicacy.

 Allie's daughter explained that she was calling because in looking through an old purse, she had stumbled up on her Mom's cell phone.  Continuing through a voice clogged with tears, she described nursing her Mom during a very difficult, tragic illness.  She had just about fallen apart while mourning the inconsolable loss of "Mama" over the previous 18 months.  Her mother's well-meaning friends could not break through the dam that, like industrious beavers,  grief constructs.  She had wanted to call me, she explained, but didn't have my number.  It was stored in her mom's phone.  I thought about David, the warrior-king, whose psalms described how Jehovah interceded in his life at the "opportune time. "  Finding the misplaced phone had indeed been an "opportune time "

I too had mourned my friend. She was the first person I met when I relocated to Orlando. A"Prayer Warrior" who led the prayer ministry at the church I later joined, Allie had wholeheartedly accepted me. We kept in touch even after I returned to Denver years later.  I'll never forget what she said one day while we were in prayer for our children:  "Lord," she said, "Don't let us limit You!"  Almost a decade later, I still pray that prayer; many times those are the only words to my plaintive pleas.  "Lord, don't let me limit You!"

It had been difficult putting Allie's death into a fitting perspective because I was also grieving my Daughter's sudden death.  And while the two had never met on this earth plane, although each knew of the other, I wonder if their paths have intersected in Heaven.  They've both been walking the "Streets of Gold" for a while, but  my preoccupation with my Courtney had prevented me from speculating  on anything other than my pain.  Wouldn't that be marvelous!

It turns out that Allie's daughter and my surviving daughter have a surprising connection; they both are Vegans.  Both chose plant-based lifestyles because they see it as a healthy, less costly way to address universal environmental, nutritional, and cost issues.  Both boast of friendships gained from meeting men and women via the Internet throughout the United States. These friendships beget others and result in the world becoming smaller and smaller. I've introduced them through by phone, and what looks like a burgeoning friendship  will result.  There's a certain irony in life.  They talk via Veganism (and Vegetarianism), and because of common interests, they can address the wounds of loss through different, yet same in so many ways, similar vantage points.