Blue Mommy Van

Hi friends. I wrote the following essay for our daughter's CarePage website (www.carepages.com key word AshleyHendrick), but decided to post it on this site as well. I am guessing there are many of you who can relate to the thoughts that I have expressed in this post; not so much about a specific vehicle, but about a special time in a family's life. It's funny how an experience with cancer can effect you in so many ways...

I traded in our family’s mini-van last week. Cash for Clunkers they called it. A program to stimulate the economy and decrease the number of “gas guzzling” vehicles on the road. For me it just meant another rebate we would be eligible for to help us afford a more reliable vehicle. Our van had more than 175,000 miles and a number of problems that seemed to be getting worse. Being given $3,500 toward a new car seemed like too good of a deal to pass up.

When the kids were younger we used to call our van the “blue mommy van”, as its less-common color made it easy to recognize from even a long way off. We bought it when our oldest daughter Ashley was ten, and her brothers were eight and four. It’s the vehicle they have spent most of their lives traveling in and will probably be the only car all three will remember from their childhood.

There was a collection of stickers on the middle window of the passenger side of our van. The number of stickers grew over the years, as our youngest son Austin was allowed to select one from his doctor after every visit that involved a shot. Most of the stickers were in the shape of a small smiley face or some other happy caricature, and all of them were pasted on the inside window next to where he usually sat.

It seems that each of us had our assigned spots in the van when we were riding all together. Mine was behind the wheel, my wife Beth rode shotgun, Austin and Ashley were in the middle seats, and our "middle boy" Aaron got the bench in the back all to himself. He liked the extra space while his brother and sister preferred the easier socialization that went with being next to each other and closer to us in front.

Our van has been on many trips over the years. It has traveled the roads of several states to the south and east, visited our nation’s capital, and has even been across the boarder into Canada and on to Niagara Falls a couple of times.

As the years have gone by we have done so much in our van and have created so many memories. On one trip up north all three kids kept singing this incredibly tedious song from a children’s television program…over and over and over. They knew it was driving me crazy, but that was what kept them singing. As much as I hated hearing that same song being repeated, a part of me knew even then that I was experiencing a special time with my kids that I would never forget (try as I might).

Perhaps my most powerful memories with the van occurred while Ashley was sick with cancer. We were coming home from her tumor biopsy in Detroit when the physical pain reached new heights and the emotional anguish from being unable to rule out cancer began. Three days later we were in the van once again moments after we learned the tumor was cancerous. Beth called me with the news while Ashley and I were at a tennis match. Moments later we were driving home to begin our ten-month cancer experience. That ride was the worst thirty minutes I have ever known, and I am certain that I will never forget it.

It was not too many days later that we took the middle seats out of our van to allow better access for Ashley’s wheelchair, and as the weeks passed our van became a bridge between the hospital and our home. We would pack and unpack it every time we made our way to or from a treatment, and the process of this packing and unpacking took on an almost ritualistic purpose in our lives. It seemed like we were always in a state of mental and emotional haze as we moved between the two worlds we lived in during that period, and it was our time in the van that helped us transition from one world to the other.

Before I drove the van to the dealer last week for our final ride together, I had to clean out all of the belongings that were tucked away in the places that were and were not meant for storage. I found more than twenty pens, pencils and markers. I also found books and magazines, toys and clothes, and lots of loose change. There were cd’s that I had long ago given up for lost, countless sticky candy wrappers and accumulations of “stuff” from almost a full decade of our family’s travels.

It bothered me a little when I dropped our empty van off at the dealer last week and gave it away to be destroyed. It bothered Beth even more. She made me take a picture of it.

Though it was dented and banged up in several areas, had a mirror that was hanging loose and a heater that no longer worked, it was still our special family transport. We have so many memories that are wrapped up in that old blue mommy van; so many moments of togetherness and times that were good; so many adventures.

As I think about it now I realize that it is not so much the memories we have of times in the van that made it so hard to let it go, but instead the realization that this chapter of our family’s life is now over. From a practical standpoint, our family just doesn’t need a van anymore. We simply don’t ride altogether very often.

There were no tears shed when I traded our van in last week. I was instead mostly happy about the deal we were getting and the new car that was about to be ours. I will miss our blue mommy van though. I will miss the moments our family shared while we were together inside it, and I will miss the ability I had to pick it out of a parking lot even on those occasions when I couldn’t remember where we had parked. Most of all though, I will miss the era that our van will always represent. The mommy van years were such a good chapter of our lives. Those were the years that we were almost always together as a family. Oh well. I guess that’s life isn’t it? Kids grow up, and vans aren’t needed. I wonder what’s next though…shopping for a condo? I hope not for a while at least.