April, for you.

It's a warm, windy spring day at Cowfeathers, feeling like summer, but without the number of bugs that summer cultivates. My peonies and iris are blooming, but will suffer greatly today in the heat and drying winds. I know that, so I took a picture of the peonies this morning while it was still cool. They wanted to be cut and brought in to the house, but I just didn't feel like it.
I'm slogging through invisible mud.
So are many of my friends, as this Monday April's body was found.
I won't be cryptic about what happened. I always want to know how someone died, as if that knowledge could somehow save someone else I love. Maybe it can.
April was murdered by the man she loved, with a gun, in their home. He then drove to a nearby park and killed himself.
I haven't wanted to say anything about it. I haven't put anything on Facebook, or really responded much to the huge amount of grief pouring out from all of us, her friends and colleagues. I have not felt like I have the ownership of the grief like so many others. Her son, her family, her best friends. I am too peripheral to have a voice in this.
But, as I continue to move through the bare necessities of the day, changing sheets, dishes, stall cleaning, photo of peonies to remember them by, I realize that I was not her best friend, but that doesn't mean I did not love her, and I am not deeply sad. And angry.
April read this blog. She would've loved the last entry with the before pictures of the ruin that is now Cowfeathers. She followed the sagas of our horse dramas, and kid achievements and laughed at my ridiculous illustrations, both in this blog, and the ones I regularly scribble on paper towels in exam rooms to explain anatomy, or seizure thresholds or surgical repairs to my clients.
April was smart. She was a devoted young mother. For 15 years she drove me absolutely batty by telling me how much her stomach hurt, then sitting down to a lunch of Taco Bell, or chicken fingers. For the first few years, I sympathized with her about her angry digestive tract. For the next decade, I just sympathized with her angry digestive tract.
And she would have laughed at this token humor.
She laughed a lot.
No, I didn't see this coming. I don't know if anyone did. Unlike so many other women who tried to save themselves with useless restraining orders, if April had known this was about to happen to her, I think she would have saved herself, not with paper. She was that kind of woman.
When we started working together, she was a kid. I remember her painting the staff bathroom a soft blue and not enjoying the task. I expected her to find other employment after that, but she stayed and continued to work. Year after year, for the last few years often times as my assistant. She said that I had a keen sense of when she stepped away to do something else, that is when I would need her help!

I miss you, kid. Your dark brown eyes and dust of freckles, your swimsuit model body that belies your terrible food choices, your tenacity with your job, your love of your boy, your silliness, your devotion to that lemon of a Cane Corso- sweet, very sweet, but so defective! I love that you bought my expensive pasture-fed, fresh-from -the-chicken eggs for your dog, but ate icky store-bought white ones for yourself. Your laugh I will miss terribly. And, I can't believe that the time I creeped us both out on purpose, cracking us up, somehow became a treasured memory instead of just a funny joke.

How I wish it could have stayed a lark.