Oh my dear blog readers,

I have been coming to this place for nearly ten years, sharing mostly about happy things and positive outlooks, and today I’m here to tell you that something terrible has happened in my life, my entire family’s lives.

On March 27, 2018, I got my first soul-shaking, devastating phone call.  My beautiful older sister, Angie, had passed suddenly in her sleep.

Our dear Angie, just 38 years old, leaves behind her own beautiful family.  A loving husband, and three wonderful children.

My oldest sister has been my constant rock throughout my life.  Being ten years younger, we shared a room when I was an infant and she would get me up in the night and take me to my mom to feed me.  I was her own personal baby,  and she was my own personal role model through my entire life.  She tolerated me trying to dress exactly like her growing up, including but not limited to, stuffing my bra at the tender age of 4 so I could resemble more closely my post-puberty older sis.  Ang was a stinker like most teenagers, and she would have never let my parents know what a good big sister she was.  Often she would invite me along to cheer practice with her, she’d invite me along with her friends to run to get slushies or treats (them being 16, me being 6), I’ve even been on a handful of dates with her.  I grew up wanting to be exactly like my big sister.

Angie moved out just before her 18th birthday, and that worried me that I wouldn’t see her as much.  But my sister was a good one.  I couldn’t count the sleepovers and movie nights with treats and snacks we enjoyed.  She grew up and got married, but still kept our close relationship strong.  Angie made my life when she got pregnant with our first nephew .  Some of my favorite memories were watching episodes of friends on DVD while I got to be the first to feel the baby move, get hiccups, and talk about baby names and what it was going to be like when that baby arrived.

On August 24, 2002, my life was forever made with the arrival of Angie’s precious son, Brakken.  I loved that baby like I had never known love before.  Angie was the best at sharing her motherhood with us, and we enjoyed being Brakken’s bonus mamas/aunties.  Ang let me and my sisters tote him around highschool football games, keep him for sleepovers, and literally spend every free moment we had at her house doting over our sweet boy.  As a teenager, I moved in with Ang as my first step to the real world, and there we spent every single night up giggling into the wee hours.  I kept Brakken at my new apartment the night she went into labor with Maizee and was among the first to meet that glowing baby girl.   And when Tage was born, I drove up to visit him on day 3, before my sister’s milk had come in, but my milk supply was bursting being away from my own nursing baby.  “Perfect!” she said “I was just going to fix him a bottle, but now I don’t have to.” as she handed her hungry newborn to my leaking chest.  We are sisters in every sense of the word.

Angie has always been the one to have the hard conversations with me, the one to lend me my first car loan, taught me to be the overly responsible adult that I am, and lead by ferocious example.  So much so that I feel lost in the world without her to run my every adult decision past.  I was a lucky baby sister, and boy do I realize it now.  Never have I had to live with such a hole in my heart before.  I have no idea what the healing of that will look like, and I ask for prayers that I might be able to start.

Words can’t express how devastating this news has been to our family, and to literally hundreds of friends who loved my sister.

We have also seen her in the details in a thousand different ways.  We have felt her beautiful spirit close to our hearts, and I have started to learn more directly what it means to have my own very special angel in heaven.  The Gospel is one of everlasting life, and while that has always been a sweet and dear thought, I am learning what it means to cling to that as absolute truth, and the steadiness that brings as I try and grasp this new phase of my sister’s life; this new phase of my own life.

We have so many prayers and well wishes on our behalf, I am so grateful.  These selfless acts have lifted me and my family up in this heartbreaking time.  I ask for your continued love and prayers and we piece our lives back together after this tragedy.

An account has been set up to support the financial aspect of this tragedy for those that feel lead, HERE.