3 Months to live

That's her actual prognosis. It's some rare form of brain cancer, a real mouthful of a disease, I can't remember it exactly. Wow.

She has three young children, 5, 3 and 9 months old. She is young, her birthday is in a few days and she'll be 31.

When they lived here we always joked that they had such a "charmed" life. They both (she and her husband) grew up in member households, went to BYU, served missions, he became a school teacher, they moved to Bakersfield at just the right time to buy into the housing market here and when they sold their Bakersfield home to move to Utah to be closer to family they made $200,000 profit, that they were using to build their "dream home" in Utah. The only real pain that she ever talked about was a miscarriage she had before getting pregnant with her oldest daughter, other than that, life was gravy for them. Wow. And they're both spiritual giants, the kind of people who could give impromptu talks off the top of their heads. When my visiting teaching companion couldn't go with me, Mindy did, and she would make the most thought provoking comments at the appropraite times during the conversation. Every Monday we would go for long walks for a few hours through our neighborhood, these were where I learned the most about her, Mindy is the best listener! She has infinite patience too. Serving as the secretary to her as the Relief Society President showed me alot of her spiritual strength. RS Pres is a HARD calling, she handled it with grace. Since Mindy lived 2 blocks over from me we'd carpool to alot of activities, enrichment and stuff like that. In the car her daughters would have something to say and Mindy NEVER snapped, she always looks at them and says "Yes?" and listens patiently to whatever her children have to say before finishing her own conversations. She teaches them so well, her younger daughter is Justin's age, older only by a few months, and WAYYYYY before Justin understood the Brother _______/Sister _________ designation, Claire was saying, "Sister Parnell?" We did a little music group for our kids, I got the opportunity to co-teach with her, she is creative and fun and gets the kids attention like no one else can! When we moved into the ward she sat with me, brought me into the circle at every meeting, made sure I knew about park days, playgroups, music groups, and exercised. She's always up for a walk, she's such a fit person.

So, I'm sitting here thinking of what I should write to her and tell her and say to her and I think my answer is most of the above, with more, indepth, personal things between her and I during our friendship. In one way I'm sure she's glad that she gets to hear everything everyone feels, and she gets to tell them how she feels too. I mean I'm sad that she's going through this, and I imagine that it's not even 1% of the pain her family is feeling, not even close. I hope I find a way to tell her what her friendship has meant to me, and how much I appreciate everything she's taught me, and of course, that I'm praying for her.