louise

july 21, 2012

we left at 5:25 am last saturday. it's painful to get up that early. but we drive for about 2 hours before we stop and eat breakfast and the kids are in a kind of stupor until then, so we have 2 hours of quiet :-)

we drove to raleigh, nc.
to visit louise.

she is my great-aunt. she was the wife of my dad's dad's brother. he passed away about 4 years ago. none of those descriptions encompass who louise is to us. i'm not sure words can. but i'll try.

all of my grandparents died young. i had no living grandparents when pat and i got married. cecil and louise lived next door to my grandparents (my dad's parents) in spring lake, nc. we saw them as often as we saw my grandparents. and we LOVED them.

once my grandparents passed away, we continued to visit cecil and louise and they immediately became kind of like our grandparents. we celebrated christmases with them, wrote them letters. we had a good 10 years of that with them. cecil passed away 4 years ago. and louise is still with us, but her age has now put her in a "home" in raleigh, nc. she can no longer live on her own.

so, we stopped to see her!

we were about 30 minutes ahead of the rest of my family, so we went on in and let her know we were there.
i'm not going to dwell on where she lived. but it was sad. and made me question why we work so hard to live so long?? also made me want to have her come live with us...

it was hard to see her aging to clearly. most of the time we were there, she was not the louise i "know." i'm not even positive that she knew who we were. but i DO know she knew we loved her. a LOT! and that's all that matters!

it was lunchtime for louise (and you don't mess with that. trust me.) so, we decided to go get our own lunch, and come back.

we took over a deli with our WHOLE crew!

then went back and spent a couple hours with louise...

more on bailey and louise later...

she was so sweet meeting lincoln and levi!

our family

my brother, phill, and his family

hannah and john

my parents

it was a really special time. it made for a LONG day, but we were all glad we did it!