Looking at pictures...chasing memories

How do you look at pictures of your baby and accept the fact that she's really gone? How do you accept the fact that you will never touch her again? Never hear her giggle? Ahhhhh.....that giggle...I loved the sound of it so much. Tash's giggle was an amazing sound. Even as she got older, that giggle never lost its magic. Fifty-nine surgical procedures, seizures, congestive heart failure, failed kidney transplant...nothing kept her down for long. I think that's what makes all this even harder - she fought so hard - for so long - just to die in her sleep. How could that happen? I'm not sure I will ever understand that. Are you smiling now? That's the question that haunts me. Is that giggle gone? That would be so terrible - just to extinguish that giggle forever - that would be the cruelest of answers - after all she went through, I would hope that the giggle continues tearing through the skies of Heaven - vibrating the clouds and heightening the joy of Heaven. What I wouldn't give to hear that giggle again - that giggle was often the light of dark days. On September 30, 2002, we found out that her transplanted kidney couldn't be saved. They called me to the nurse's desk to take the doctor's call. Tash loved Dr. Campos! But, he had called with the worst news I could have ever imagined. The results were back - the kidney couldn't be saved - the transplanted kidney had necrosis - in essence, it was dead. The transplant had failed & a life we had fought so hard to avoid had roared into our life with a vengeance. Now, it would be dialysis treatments - one health crisis after another. Gone was the normality of life - the life we thought we had in place when I gave Tash a kidney on December 10, 1999. And, it was up to me to carry the news back to my eighteen-year-old daughter and destroy the new life she had just started when she walked onto the FSU campus a few months later. After the phone call, I slid down the wall of the nurse's station - that was the time and place to cry - not in front of Tash. I would have to wear the face of bravery, to guide her into this terrible world - a world she would suffer through for the next nine-and-a-half years, until she slept the sleep of the angels. As I stood up and walked to her room, which was full of friends and family. I could hear Tash's giggle above everything else. If she could laugh through this, I had a hope that she would make it through it all. Her giggle was the last thing I heard before I ripped her heart into little pieces, took her dreams of the future and connected her to a dialysis machine, the last sound I heard before we left a life of normalcy behind - in those few words, I felt like it was me - not PKD - destroying her life. I miss that giggle...