Kelci Ever After, the beginning

This story begins on July 24, 2012 a little after 10 pm with a knock on the door.  It's really not a story at all, but a nightmare, my nightmare, my family's nightmare, and it's true.  This is my life since my beautiful 22 year old daughter, Kelci, passed away in a car accident.  It is the story of how we are trying to cope and trying to find a way to live differently without her in our lives. It will also be the amazing story of Kelci, who lived more in her 22 years than many people live in a lifetime.

I didn't intend to write about this, but as I'm learning through all of this,  what you intend doesn't always matter.  I started to write about it on Facebook, and it seemed to help me, and it seemed to help others, so I continued to write.  I've been wrting to Kelci in a journal, and I've been posting more and more on Facebook, and I'm responding to emails from other who are grieving.  I also wrote a tribute to Kelci that I read at her Celebration of Life (we chose to that instead of something more traditional, because there was far too much saddness and suffering already, but I'll be writing more on that later). Four almost four weeks, four of the worst weeks of my life, I have written, and I've tried to cope, understand and make sense of this.  There is no sense in it.

This blog is for me more than anyone else, and I'll continue as long as I feel it's helping. It will be about my feelings, it will be about Kelci, it will we about whatever I need it to be in the moment.  It might not make sense to others, it might not make sense to me, but maybe it will help.  That's all I can hope for.

The name, Kelci Ever After, came to me as I was mowing the lawn and struggling to keep my composure.  Chores, that were once bothersome, are downright torturous in grief (more on that later), and I guess I was trying to distract myself.  I thought about writing a blog and wondered what I'd call it and then I was thinking about stories and thinking we were never going to get our "happily ever after", because our story was forever alterted.  Then it hit me, this is life after Kelci, this is my Kelci Ever After, and so it begins.

Kelci was a twin, and her sister, Michelle, will be part of this story, as will all of our family, me, my husband, Ray, and Kelci's older brother, Brian.  We are all in this together.  We are all dealing with this differently.  We are all doing the best we know how with what we have been given. We are all learning to find our way without Kelci.