Ladybug Landing

As I reflected on my journey yesterday I was brought back to that painful part of my past. Not just with Mckenna’s death, but everything before her death. My marriage falling apart, having to find a place to live, not making enough money to support Mckenna and myself, taking care of my mom after her surgery, packing up the house by myself, doing everything on my own because that life was no longer what he wanted. I lost everything in a matter of 3 months. I felt alone, lost and broken. Looking back I can see just how broken I was, how out of my body I was, and feeling a little bit more compassion for that 24 year old Ashley. After Mckenna’s death I felt as if I was drowning, slowly dying inside and trying to pick up the pieces of my life. The one place I felt safe was no longer safe, I distanced myself from my family, I distanced myself from my friends, I was in a dark world where I was slowly being deprived of air and suffocating.  My life seemed to be spiraling out of

Mckenna  has been gone 6 years, 6 years. I just don’t know how that happened and yet this year it feels like it hasn’t been that long. I yearn for her, long for her, and when I look at her pictures I cry, yes even 6 years later. Sometimes it is hard for me to fathom that Mckenna died, that she is buried in the ground, and that I held her when she died. Just does not seem possible. Dead and died were not a part of my vocabulary in the beginning because those words hurt my soul, they didn’t feel “right” (as if saying my daughter is dead would ever really feel “right.”) And still sometimes when I say those words my breath is taken as it is hard to believe that my child died. How she could wake up one morning and 3 hours later be fighting for her life, how 9 hours later she was in my arms as her heart stops beating, how I could go to bed that night without her? I listen to those words coming out of my mouth and they feel as if I am telling someone else’s story, a story from a