Before leaving for Master’s Commission, on September 21, 2005, Katie wrote the following:
This is my hot pursuit for you, God. You pursued me for so long. Now it’s my turn to pursue you in the hopes that I might find you, though you are not far from any one of us. Now may my heart’s desire be only for you, God. You are all that matters. Help me to put aside any distractions. Help me to seek you first, and everything else will be added, instead of doing it the other way around.
Help me to have a heart more for other people than myself and to encourage others the way they have encouraged me. Help me to know how you always answer my prayers. Prepare my heart, God. Keep my attitudes in check. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.
I can’t wait to spend eternity with you. Please help me to put everything in perspective. You are all that matters. You are all I want. You love me so much and care about me and it is good. I’m yours for the rest of my life as long as you give me breath. Give me the strength to take up my cross every day.
Love, Your child, Katie
Please feel free to make copies of this or any of the other writings to share with others.
This part of year is always complicated for me.
In 4 weeks time I’ll be sitting on the damp cold grass of Katie’s grave trying to bend my heart into the ground with empty words that can no more console my loss than bring her back. This thought, though it is constantly out of place in the steep velocity of my life, seeps in constantly. I dread it longingly. Something about the season struggling to change makes this moment more acute. She becomes the first tulip every spring.
Recompense is impossible, of course: the past is always irrevocably terminal, but the irreverence of the present is always shocking. Breathing almost feels like an affront to memory the last weeks before her death day.
This year, life’s failure to reflect feels more abrasive than it has in the past. Everyone is letting go. She’s slipping through the cracks. I can still hear her voice in the background of certain songs. I can still hear her reading Sunday Morning in a whispered voice that smelled like oranges. She still charges into my thoughts anytime I smell Happy or wheat grass, or see red polka dots.
I’m glad of her memory, but fragile in her absence. I don’t think I’ll read any more T.S. Elliot till April.
“We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.”