Dear Liz,

I am so used to sending you emails now. For three years we sent unlimited texts, a blog and emails from home and work. Then, for 4 months we talked about life in Oz through emails and skype. Hence, now the habit to share my daily thoughts with you is ingrained in my psyche (which is close to the name of your favorite show, Psych – your TV love for Sean Spencer and pineapples). I always think, “Oh, I have to tell Liz that.” Now there are trivial things I didn’t tell you that still need to be shared. Like that there are now four dryers in our laundry room and it makes my laundry so much easier to complete. Back in the days I never had the time to wash and you would help me by taking my laundry out of the dryer when I went to work early in the morning. Now, I actually can do the laundry by myself. This is important news to share with you. The other things I didn’t share were all gossipy things about our friends. At this moment I can’t send you the detailed email and my brain is in a repeating loop because I’m so used to emailing you and no matter what this email has to reach you. And I don’t care that you are in heaven, I just want our emails to resume. It’s not like I need to know the secrets of heaven, I just want the gossipy pieces of your day-to-day. If I can’t have the day-to-day then I want a little snippet of what you are doing. Is that a bizarre request?

What’s more strange is that in May you sent me an email: “On May 5, 2010, at 6:46 PM, Liz Jensen wrote: How about I was dancing in the bathroom at uni and some lady walked in on me! Yeah I smiled and walked into a stall and laughed and laughed at myself! Pretty sure I made her day, hey I can't help but dance when I listen to my iPod!” I wrote back trying to guess what band you were dancing to. I thought it was Backstreet Boys, but you replied it was Bob Marley. Well, that same email was automatically sent back to me on June 5^th. It was the exact same email that was totally randomly sent again. I thought perhaps the event had happened to you again and that you had resent the story, but I looked and it had the same date as the original, May 5^th. I thought about the fluke that an email was sent to me again and so I deleted it. I think the process of your computer reaching out to connect with mine was another piece of your plan for this life. I figured out that the email was probably sent while you were getting ready to go to the beach with Ian. Where you trying to remind me of a funny story that spoke heaps about the love you had for life, so that I could rely on your stories of laughing while I spent the next few days crying?

I don’t think there are things that I didn’t get to tell you, but it’s the trivial things that I want to tell to someone who cares. I feel like we did a fantastic job communicating the things that are the most important to each other. We shared out testimonies; we shared heartbreaks, adventures and joys so there is nothing left unsaid that I have regrets about. It’s just that I miss the little parts of our shared day. Instead, Emily sends me little texts, which make me think of you. I think that when we see each other again in heaven it will be awesome. I was driving home over the bridges between San Pedro and Long Beach after babysitting Shannon, right after I found out that you were taken off life support and that you had become an organ donor and instead of crying while driving I smiled when I thought about seeing you in heaven. That is going to be so cool because I’m going to raise my arms high in the air and yell, “Liz!!!!” and I expect we’ll have a tender reunion. These are my thoughts and feelings, but there are the normal events of my life that I’ve wanted to write you about. If I wrote you an email about my life right now, this would be it:

I think our friends here in Huntington Beach have an evil plan against me. They have kept me out of apt#6 super late every single night for the last week and a half. For me, late is 9:30. But we are talking extremely late each night, like 11:30 at night. So I go straight to sleep and wake up at 5:30 in the morning to go to work. Even on the weekend I woke up at 5:30 so I could complete the HB Pier swim that I signed up to swim on Saturday. Janet came to cheer me on and yell my name from the pier, just as you would have done. I just don’t know how these friends do it. Is this some technical conspiracy through text messages to plan events that keep me awake for so long? Or is it a natural occurrence in the universe that makes me constantly busy and I don’t even have time to sit down and write an email? Until now I had not written at all because I couldn’t start or stop my thoughts long enough. I know I should write since it is my creative outlet. Tonight, this is my attempt to grieve a little more and start writing again. It’s almost as if I have so many emotions that I was scare that if I faced them through writing it would hurt too much. For now, I’m just too busy to allow that to happen. There are so many things that I have to do. I have to finish working and close up my classroom for the summer. I had to be there for Lili and her kids when she got married (which was lovely by the way). I could have said “no” to all the events that our friends were inviting me to do, but I felt they were too important and I always said “yes”. Like, Dr. Dibble’s going away party with her whole family there to celebrate her accomplishment. Another day I went to Julie Hall’s dinner party where we played the Scotland Yard game and Larysa pretended that she was a KGB agent and everyone made dinner and I didn’t have to bring anything because they knew I just needed to show up. How did they know to do that for me if this isn’t a big conspiracy? And how did they get my parents involved in this conspiracy? They came into town to ordain Scott as a high-priest, but also to grieve with me. You know my Mom found out about your aneurysm before I did and she was the only who had to tell me on the phone? She felt that she needed to come and visit me for her own grieving as well. Even Michelle and Amanda grabbed me for a few hours before the FHE Angels baseball game to look for the Mickey Mouse All-Star team statues that are hidden all over SoCal. They were funny banshees that climbed and kissed the Mickey’s in Downtown Disney again on Tuesday when we went to celebrate the last summer night at Disney before we are blocked out. That’s when John and Brandon joined us for a big competition on the Toy Story Mania ride. Even Pete joined a team, you don’t know Pete, but he’s a good guy who told us more hidden secrets of the ride. I wish we knew those secrets when you and I used to try to beat our scores on Toy Story Mania. In all this I didn’t have any time to stay home and do something for myself. Right now, I feel so tired but so incredibly blessed because I have not been alone, except for the few hours that I sleep. Although the lack of sleep is taking its toll, I think my friends know better than me and are keeping me busy. Tonight I have slow down because I realize that I need to write you one last email. Now I know that this is how grieving works. As soon as I start this email to you I will comprehend that it’s the last one I write. I don’t want to write this because if I never type it then this wouldn’t be the last one and I could keep a running list of things to email you when I get home from work, just like always. Your last email to me had lyrics from Jack Johnson: Let me leave you with some inspired words from Jack:

"Oh, you're such a pretty thing

I'll take you and I'll make you all mine

I would steal you from this patient world

Let it chase us

It could never take you back

We could watch it from the clouds

We can't stop it anyhow

It's not ours"

Those words in your last email gave me a chill because I feel like they were foretelling. As if you knew you were moving into the clouds, out of this patient world.

In a like manner, here are my inspired words from Jack that I want to dedicate to you:

“I see you slowly swim away

Cause the light is leaving town

To a place that I can't be

There's no apologies

Just go on

Just go on

There're still so many things

I wanna to say to you

But go on

Just go on”

I’ll catch up to you later Liz. In a time when we don’t need emails to share our gossip, adventures, testimonies and pictures of high scores at Disneyland. I’m crying now and it’s okay because this isn’t the end. What we started can’t have an end. That’s not the way that Christ’s atonement and plan of eternal happiness ends. In Mosiah 18:9 it reads, “Yea, and are willing to mourn with those that mourn; yea, and comfort those that stand in need of comfort, and to stand as witnesses of God at all times and in all things, and in all places that ye may be in, even until death, that ye may be redeemed God, and be numbered with those of the first resurrection, that ye may have eternal life.”

Love forever,

Jamie Nichols