New Life Takes Flight

Today, June 21, 2009, our new life begins.

The birth of our new life has been through a long and painful end of the old.

Yesterday, June 20, 2009, Tracell Ann Weiss's casket was lowered into its final resting place, a burial plot with her grandmother and grandfather under a towering shade tree. In a matter of minutes, her site was covered with a blanket of flowers, the only remaining symbol of her colorful life. With tears streaming down my face, as the sun began to set on the most difficult day of my gray life, I re-arranged her blanket as though tucking her in for the night, and said goodbye.

It was a sorrowful conclusion to a journey that began almost five years prior, when Tracell first received the devastating diagnosis:

"The lump in your breast is malignant. You have breast cancer.".

Not once on that dark afternoon did I think those words would lead to this sad goodbye at her gravesite. While Tracell shed tears, I callously told her, "You have one day to feel sorry for yourself, and then we are going to fight this and beat it.".

Really she had every right to feel sorry for herself for the next five years, as the cancer fought relentlessly to consume her physical body. Yet while it consumed her body to the very last breath, on June 3, 2009 at 12:00 PM, it never touched her amazing spirit. Tracell never quit. Tracell never felt sorry for herself. Tracell never stopped being Tracell.

Through it all, through the chemotherapy, double masectomy, radiation, more chemotherapy, lung draining, natural therapies, radical diet change, surgeries, spinal fractures, and breathing tubes, Tracell never lost focus on why she was fighting so hard:

Brayden Mark Weiss.

Brayden is our son. He was born in October 2001 and had just turned three years old when Tracell first heard the devastating news she had cancer. Her first thought was about Brayden. Every thought the next five years was about Brayden. She was fighting for time, time with her son, to watch him grow into a man.

Yet, despite every prayer and plea, the cancer failed to grant a mother's right to watch her child grow to adulthood. It failed to understand her benevolent wishes to watch her son graduate from high school and college, to see him married, and greet her grandchildren. No, the cancer played by its own rulebook, a rulebook that could only have been drafted from the deepest layers of Dante's fiery Inferno.

As Tracell slowly ran out of appeals with her antagonist, she sought to make every moment with Brayden count. She threw him a huge 7th birthday party, with a homemade "snake" cake that became so famous with her friends, they referred to "the snake cake" as they shared, during her final days, what they most admired and loved about Tracell. She took Brayden for a two-week "trip of a lifetime" to Florida in February, made memorable by Brayden's ear-infection, three hours of standing in the rain at the Daytona 500, and her lifetime dream of swimming with dolphins. Even as she struggled to breathe and limited to a wheelchair with multiple compression fractures in her spinal column, Tracell managed to attend three of Brayden's baseball games in April/May 2009.

Tracell was an incredible mother. She set the highest example of love and guidance for her son. She was "momma kitty" and he was her "baby kitty", even during Brayden's final visit two days before she slipped from the clutches of cancer and into the hands of God.

It has been said, the death of an individual is a tragedy, the death of a million a mere statistic.

On June 3rd, Tracell become our tragic statistic.

Tracell was our tragedy. Our friend, mother, and daughter.

Tracell was breast cancer's latest statistic, another notch among millions of victims.

On June 3rd, everyone that knew Tracell became a victim. We all joined the victims of those who, at one time or another, mourned the devastating loss of a loved mother, wife, friend, and daughter to breast cancer.

So it was, as she rose into the hands of God, that Tracell began to give birth to the new life of a father and son. Together, Brayden and I began the transition from our old life to the new, marked with a river of tears as we mourned the loss of mommy.

Following a beautiful celebration of her life on June 13, 2009 in Northglenn, CO, friends and family gathered outside the church to give flight to a final wish. It was her wish to transfer her spirit to the flight of a butterfly. As more than a hundred mourners joined hands in a circle, Brayden released thirty-six Monarch butterflies, each lifting her spirit high into the bright blue sky.

As I stood at Tracell's California gravesite and said goodbye, a Monarch butterfly landed on the blanket of flowers. Tears streaming down my cheeks, I knew it was Tracell's spirit giving birth to our new life. The butterfly twitched it's wings and waited.

I made her one final promise, "Tracell, I promise to make sure our son will never forget you."

Then I said, "We're ready."

The butterfly opened its wings and took flight.

So began our new life, Brayden and I together, riding on the wings of a butterfly.















Brayden and Scott at a Rockies Game