It’s not all about me - Val's Story, Chap 26

I’m not the only one who struggled with the events of August 22, 2025. 

          Since she died around 7:30 that Friday night and we weren’t notified until nearly midnight, I’m not sure of the exact order of events during that time. And maybe it’s best I don’t know, but I do know a lot occurred that night.

          Her boyfriend was home alone with her that night, and whenever it was that the police arrived, it sounds like they immediately suspected him. They tested him for gunshot residue and it came up negative. They did find residue on Val.

          The police still told her boyfriend he had to leave the house, with the dogs, and that he couldn’t come back until they told him he could. They also confiscated his cell phone, her cell phone, and her laptop.

          The next day, as we were notifying everyone else, I was becoming more and more distressed when we couldn’t reach her boyfriend. He finally called us on Sunday, from someone else’s phone, and let us know what was going on. My heart ached for him. The nightmare that we were all going through at least wasn’t staring me in the face, changing every single aspect of my life. I still had my own bed to crawl into at night, my own cell phone to make those dozens of calls.

          On top of all of that, there was still a roommate living in Val’s basement. I didn’t want to kick him out on the street, but we all knew he had to leave. It got to the point where I had to tell him we would have the police remove him if he wasn’t out by a certain date.

          As if I didn’t have enough to take care of.

But that wasn’t all.

          Val had all of her bills set up for automatic payments, but without her laptop, I couldn’t look up her bank accounts to make sure there was enough money. And the police told me they were still looking into her laptop.

          “For what?” I kept asking them.

          “It’s just part of the investigation,” was all they would ever tell me.

          It was equally as difficult to deal with her financial institution. Every time I called them, I was on hold forever, transferred multiple times, told they couldn’t talk to me, and sometimes hung up on. And when I physically went in to talk to someone, they were pretty much just rude to me.

          And then there was the lawyer’s office. When we arrived for the appointment with them, my husband and I were ushered into a conference room to wait. Finally. three young men came in and tried to explain everything that had to take place before the state could settle her estate. After we left the office, I called them Larry, Curly, and Moe.

          Words like domiciliary, probate, and fiduciary mean absolutely nothing to me. I never even asked them to try to explain those terms because I knew they would just use more words which I would never understand.

          But then, the ball wasn’t going to get rolling until I had the final death certificates. But since the police were still “investigating”, the first death certificates we paid for and received stated manner of death as “pending”.

          When the police finally announced they had “closed the case”, the end of October, I had to pay again for the finalized death certificates. 

          Everything seemed like a battle. EVERYTHING.

          And this isn’t even all of the garbage I had to deal with in the months after she passed away. And it wasn’t just Val’s things; I was still taking care of my brother. Even though he was in assisted living, I had to pay that bill monthly, take calls from the facility, the pharmacy, and the VA, and run in when he was being difficult and try to settle him down. 

          But you know what? God had it all figured out. And why would God pile so much more on my plate at that time? He knows me. He knows how I am wired.

All those calls to the police department, visits to the bank, emails to the lawyers’ office? That did two things to me.

First, with juggling all those twenty-some balls at a time, I wasn’t able to think too much. I couldn’t think about the future without Val and I couldn’t dwell on mistakes I had made in the past. I knew that all I could do was take it one day at time, sometimes one minute at a time. And just let go of what I couldn’t control.

The second thing was that when I did start thinking about everything, I got angry. I was angry at the lawyer, the bank, the police, my brother, and mostly Val.

Anger is a strong emotion, and even though it could tear me apart, at least I was feeling something. When things were quiet during that time, I would stare out the window, into my yard, and not see a thing, not feel a feel a thing.

Then I’d get another phone call and at least feel something, even if it was frustration or wrath.   

The first picture is the Wisconsin State Assembly Chamber in Madison. I thought I had one of the State Supreme Court, but I guess not. The picture just above is the former Illinois State Police Headquarters just south of Pontiac. Built in 1941 and in use until 2003, the building is in the shape of a handgun. Why would they do that? 

"It is Finished" - Val's story, Chap 25

 Jesus got them all to sit down in groups of fifty or a hundred—they looked like a patchwork quilt of wildflowers spread out on the green grass! (Mark 6:39-44, The Message Bible)

(I don’t use The Message translation of the Bible very often because it can be wordy. But when I ran across this verse, I was stunned. A quilt and Val’s wildflowers in one passage. God has written this just for me.)

In my spare time, I’ve started sewing quilt fronts for our church’s Lutheran Women’s Ministry League. All year long, these ladies sew and put together quilts. Every fall, the organization ships them out to communities living in poverty or recovering from disasters worldwide.

My mom worked on these quilts for years. And when I went to Kenya in 2019 and visited my Compassion child, the ladies donated one of their special quilts for me to deliver to Mueni.

Earlier this year, I was working on putting together another quilt top. It’s always a much slower process than it should be, and I really give those ladies credit for sewing as many of them as they do.

          One night, I had a dream where I had just finished sewing a quilt top. It was in varied colors of blue and reminded me of the ocean. I had made it for my daughter, Val.

          Val was at my house in the dream, and I showed it to her. I apologized that it wasn’t quite done yet. I asked if she’d like it finished by tying it together with yarn, which I could do myself, or by stitching it together, which I would ask a friend of mine to do who has a sewing machine specifically for quilting.

          Val looked at the fabric, deep in thought. And exclaimed, “Look!”

          I looked at the quilt, and it was complete, both tied with yarn and machine-stitched. It was more beautiful than I would have ever thought, and I take no credit for it.

          Then Val said, “It is finished.”

I woke from my dream, my heart racing. “What had Val said?”

          You may remember that as Jesus was hanging on the cross, he was given some sour wine to drink. At that moment He said, “It is finished!” Then bowing His head, He gave up His spirit. (John 19:30)

          As you probably know, those were the last words Jesus said on the cross, before he descended into hell for three days, before rising again on Sunday morning. A while later, he was lifted to heaven to sit at the right hand of God the Father for eternity. 

          And why did I hear my sweet baby girl say those exact words in my dream? I feel it’s confirmation that she is in heaven for eternity as well. 

(The first picture is the baby quilt I sewed for Hubby's nephew and his wife and their baby in 2022. My friend mentioned above did the finishing stitching on it. The second picture is the one I sewed for his niece and her husband when their baby was born just last year. The same woman did the quilting on that one, but - long story - no time for a picture as within hours of getting the finished quilt back from her, the mom and dad arrived in town for Val's visitation. The final picture is the Peanuts quilt top I made years ago and have yet to finish. A lot of stories just in those three projects.) 

Deer in the Yard - Val's Story, Chap 24

As a deer thirsts for streams of water, so I thirst for you, God. (Psalm 42:1, New Century Version)

I’ve said it countless times – I am so blessed to live on my four-acre plot with mighty trees just outside my window. Some mornings, a cacophony of bird voices greets me when I go out my back door. Squirrels, chipmunks, and two renegade rabbits roam my yard at will, much to the consternation of our cats and, most recently, our dog, Hannah. Last summer, a toad took up residence on the front stoop. A few bears have even wandered through.

          But the most graceful and beautiful of the wildlife is the whitetail deer. Over the years, I’ve had different does with their precious, spotted fawns feeding on the grass. A few bucks have nobly joined them. Our old dog, Dino, mostly ignored them, and they saw him as no threat.

          For two years, a lame doe tried to join my loosely organized herd. I was able to get a close-up picture of her and could see where she had been shot in her shoulder, with that leg mainly hanging limp. Watching her hobble through the woods broke my heart.

          I was feeding the deer in my woods at the time, and she knew I was her only hope of survival. When I put the food out, the rest of the deer hung back twenty feet or so. I’d wait for Gimpy to approach first; the others would try to run her off, but not when I was standing my ground only ten feet away. She’d gratefully eat her share while I stood guard, quietly telling the others that it wasn’t their turn yet. By the start of the third winter, I never saw her again.

          But here we are many years later. We had to put Dino down in early 2023, and two years later, I couldn’t stand not having a dog any longer. So, we brought home our adorable two-year-old corgi, Hannah. Since she joined the family, we haven’t seen as many deer coming through the yard. Only occasionally that summer, we watched a doe and her two fawns walk the path through the back yard and into the woods.

          On a different morning, though, in early September of last year, a doe and her single fawn picked their way through the front yard. Her coat was grey from shedding her summer coat, and the fawn’s spots were nearly faded. Yes, autumn had arrived.

          The week before, a fawn had met its end on the road about a half-mile from our house. It dawned on me that it must be the sibling to the fawn I was seeing now.

          Foremost in my mind was that it had been two weeks since my own baby had passed away.

          Was God trying to tell me something? That I still had another child to live for, to care for – even if he was forty? Was God reminding me that life goes on, no matter what tragedy we are dealing with?

          I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think it was more of a reminder that a mother’s love never ends, and I know it won’t for this mother.

          And also that I still have more to be thankful for than to be unthankful for.

Snowman - Val's Story, Chap 23

 “Come now, let’s settle this,” says the Lord. “Though your sins are like scarlet, I will make them as white as snow. Though they are red like crimson, I will make them as white as wool.” (Isaiah 1:18, New Living Translation)

I’ve had trouble sleeping for years. Some nights, I can curl up in bed and drift right off to sleep. Other nights, ping pong balls are bouncing all over in my head, and as much as I try to imagine them falling to the floor and rolling under a piece of furniture to never be heard from again, they don’t stop.

           A few years ago, I added the app for Turning Point with Dr. David Jeremiah to my phone. He gives some good sermons. So after lying in bed getting more frustrated instead of relaxing, I’ll pull up one of his messages, and I usually drift off before it’s over. Perhaps not what any pastor wants to hear, but if it helps someone in any way, that should be a win.

          The first two weeks after Val died, I hadn’t slept much, as you can imagine. Sometimes a sleeping pill worked, sometimes it did not. Nights when I turn on David Jeremiah, sometimes that helped.    

          The first of September that year, he started a sermon series on Joseph, the young man who had eleven brothers who were jealous of him and threw him into a well. He is the guy whose father gave him the multi-colored coat. He was also able to interpret dreams.

          Around that time, I fell asleep to David Jeremiah’s message on Joseph. And I had a dream.

          In my dream, I was building a snowman. The snow on the ground all around me was melting and full of dirt, but somehow my snowman was white as - well, white as snow. I hadn’t finished giving it a face when my snowman tipped over onto the dirty ground. It didn’t fall apart, though, and it stayed pure white.

          I woke up wondering what that was all about.

          Then I remembered about Joseph being able to interpret dreams. And I heard God’s voice say to me, “You can interpret this dream.”

          So, in my dream, my sweet, precious daughter was the snowman. Even though the snow was pure and white, my daughter wasn’t always that way. She had a whole lot of impurities in her words and actions. Yet, there she was, pure and white, but not completely finished.

          And then she fell over and left me. She didn’t break, and she didn’t become covered in dirt. She just left me, peacefully and wholly. Maybe even holy. Left to be with those angels all dressed in white. And with a beautiful face, one that was smiling.

Wildflowers - Val's Story, Chap 22

 Look how the wild flowers grow: they don't work or make clothes for themselves. But I tell you that not even King Solomon with all his wealth had clothes as beautiful as one of these flowers. (Luke 12:27, Good News Translation) 

On Monday, August 25, we met at the funeral home to make arrangements. We all agreed we wanted to keep things simple, short, and quick. But fitting. I don’t know. People said we did a beautiful job presenting a fitting tribute to Val. But, again, I don’t know. It was Val’s life, not any of ours.

          But sitting in the funeral home office, we had to decide what to put in the little card they have available for people to take. Jim has to bring one of those home from every visitation or funeral we go to, and it sits on the kitchen counter, bugging me for weeks before I finally throw it away.

Karri, the woman at the funeral home, offered suggestions from the standard funeral card book. Not one was even close to Val.

          Her boyfriend suggested we use the words from the Tom Petty song on the tattoo on her back. We knew it was something about wildflowers and could all picture it, but none of us could pull the words out of our brains.

          We finished our business, and I told Karri we’d figure out the lyrics and get back to her.

          That night, when I couldn’t sleep (as if I thought I would ever sleep normally again), I went on my laptop and started looking up the lyrics for all of the Tom Petty songs.

          Duh! The song is literally named “Wildflowers.”

          That week, I worked on cleaning up my computer by deleting some of the thousands of pictures I’ve stored from all my travels. In 2017, Val and I were on one of our many trips to Kenya when she got sunburned while wearing a shirt with straps in a pattern across her back. And there were those words, with flower petals, blowing along her back. Did she ever think those words would become a tribute to her life?

         Life doesn’t always make sense. We’ll never understand it. I’ll certainly never understand what happened to Val that Friday night in August, 2025. All I can do is keep muddling along and turning my worries over to God. He understands everything that we do not.  

You belong among the wildflowers

You belong somewhere close to me

Far away from your trouble and worries

You belong somewhere you feel free

(from “Wildflowers” by Tom Petty, 1994)

This picture is from her trip to Kenya in 2019 with her brother and her husband.

This one is at Diani Beach in 2022. I challenge everyone to find a picture of my back!

Break #3 and Break #4 – Minn Ren and Dorm Girls Reunion

Still celebrating the Brewers’ World Series win, but I’m gonna try to get back on track. I have two more trips to tell you about, and then I’ll return to telling you about Val, because, for some reason, you really want to hear that story.

Thursday, October 1, Hubby and I headed over to Shakopee, Minnesota. Met my friend, who lives near there, for dinner that night.

 Then got up early Friday morning and were off to the Minnesota Renaissance Festival.

Haven’t been there in many years, but it was the same as we remember. A lot of fun, some great people, and cool stuff to look at.

The following weekend, I went west again, this time only as far as Eau Claire, for my dorm girls’ reunion – some of the women I lived with in the dorm when I was in college my first two years. We stayed at a beautiful historic home this year.

We started getting together for our fortieth anniversary and each year the weekend has grown. One thing, though. Because we did get a little wild, we vowed we wouldn’t share many of the pictures on social media. Like the pictures of us dancing with the 21-year-old college boys. Us old hens can still party like it’s 1981.

Distracted Again

The summer of 1982, I was between my second and third year of college. My mom got me a job as a housekeeper for an elderly couple. They had a simple home on the lake, and there wasn’t much to do in the house. Clean the bathrooms, vacuum, cook dinner. A couple times a week, the husband would bring home a piece of meat – a beef roast or pork steak – and I’d call Mom to ask how to cook it.

Mostly, though, I was a companion to the wife, who used a walker on good days and a wheelchair on bad days. Her husband still worked, sometimes out of town for a few days straight, so she just needed someone there around the clock.

On Friday nights, the husband would drive me home for the weekend, and Sunday night Mom would drive me back out there.

When the weather was nice, I’d sit on their dock reading. And in the evening, after we ate supper and I cleaned up, we’d sit in the living room, with the lights dimmed and watch Brewers baseball. And if they weren’t on TV, we listened to Bob Uecker on the radio.

I fell in love with them all. Paul Molitor’s striking blue eyes. Rollie Fingers’ Snidely Whiplash mustache, the equally impressive mustaches that Gorman Thomas and Pete Vuckovich sported. Cecil Cooper, when he stepped up to bat and it sounded like the crowd was booing him, but they were yelling, “Coop, Coop, Coop!”

But I had a crush on Robin Yount. He was drafted by the Brewers when he was only 18-years-old and played his entire with Milwaukee. He stacked up a long list of awards and accolades during his twenty-year career, but no matter how good a player he was, I just thought he was adorable.

Then there was that game against the Twins on July 20, 1982. I hunted all over the internet to find a video of the play which made Robin a hero in my eyes, but no luck.

In the bottom of the fifth inning Twins player Kent Hrbek barreled into second base, sliding hard and high into Jim Gantner. Gantner was sent sprawling and had to leave the game with a deep thigh bruise.

Brewers’ manager Harvey Kuenn was furious about the slide and immediately charged the field to come to his second baseman’s defense. He later said that the Twins player was a “no good SOB for taking a cheap shot.”  

The Brewers would get their revenge in the sixth. With Paul Molitor on second and Robin Yount on first, Cecil Cooper hit a double play ball to second baseman Juan Castino. Castino flipped to shortstop Lenny Faedo for the force and Yount went far outside of the baseline to take out Faedo and knocked him on the temple with his forearm. (Taken from https://brewers1982.com/07/20/brewers-twins-brawl/)

Well, that started an all-out brawl between the two teams, with two players - one from each team - getting ejected after throwing punches.

But to my innocent little eyes, Robn was the hero of the whole thing – defending his players and his team, telling the world not to mess with them, doing whatever it would take.

Then there he was, in Bob Uecker’s jacket, last Friday night, throwing out the first pitch of the World Series in Milwaukee.

There has been so much in my life over the past 44 years. I know I’m not alone; haven’t we all been too busy. And it doesn’t help, with all the TV channels now “streaming” somewhere at a cost, that I don’t remember the last time I watched a Brewers game.

The last game I went to was nine years ago.

We know how their 1982 run at the World Series ended. And we wake up this morning, not knowing yet how this one will end.