Remembering Mandy

Two years ago today, my sometime roommate and budding friend Amanda Annis was killed in a bike/car accident by a reckless driver. I miss her, but equally, I regret that I didn't get the chance to fully know her.

The grieving process is strange. It acts differently in every situation, in every person experiencing that situation, and even on every day of each person's experience. In this case, I wasn't able to fully feel the impact of missing Mandy until nearly a year had gone by. It just seemed so surreal. I had all the usual reactions: waiting for her to walk in the door, to hear her laugh, to smell the bread she used to bake. It took a good 6 months before it fully dawned on me that Mandy was gone.

I didn't get to know Mandy the way so many people in her life did. I regret that. But I cherish what I did know of her. Mandy was, more than almost anyone I've known, fully alive. Never hesitating to share her heart, her thoughts, her frustrations. Not holding back from telling you what you needed to hear. Never afraid to try something new (the science experiments that took place in our kitchen were...adventurous, to say the least). She left it all on the field. And more than anything, as I've come to terms with her death, I've been grateful for the abundance she brought to my life, even for a little while. I don't want to be maudlin, just to celebrate the 24 years of "life more abundantly" that Mandy lived.
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