Rachel, we’re grateful for the love, laughter, and miracles, you’ve shared. We’ll never stop missing you. If tears and grief were the price to have had you in our lives, we’d all gladly do it again.

Within hours of your diagnosis, you said, “I just want to spend as much time as I can with my husband and kiddos. And no matter what happens, I want to smile and be happy.”

You did it. You succeeded, just as you succeeded at everything you pursued in life.

Since you’ve passed, some have felt your peace and nearness. Some have sensed your presence and heard your voice. And some have looked on your physical remains and received an assurance that you’re not there, that you’ve moved on.

Thank you for returning and witnessing that you are in all those varied experiences, and for telling me, “Now I’m helping people I couldn’t help before.”

You said you’d learned and grown so much since your diagnosis, if you could go back and change things to have not had cancer, you wouldn’t. Thank you, even in those final months, for showing us how to extract every opportunity, lesson, and blessing from life.

And thanks for bringing your Life Flight family to give you such a brilliant send off. We all felt the miracle of your love.

Fly, Rachel, Fly.

p.s. And thank you for bringing your rainbow to the cemetery and for placing it in two older pictures of you I just found.