Remembering

It's your birthday, shortly after New Year's.  We tromp and shove away the snow from the ground to find your little heart-shaped marker.  Fire and Ice roses with ribbon and ferns,  a small afternoon effort by Mom and Sister.  We sing a Happy Birthday song.  We talk about how old you would be, what you might like in school.  How much we love and miss you, and look forward to seeing you again. 

When we have no more to share with each other, we have a prayer.


It’s Memorial Day.  The spring weather is bright, usually!  The college kids are home, and the whole family drives to the cemetery.  Mom brings gardening gloves and an old kitchen knife to edge back the grass from the little cement base.  There are spring and early summer flowers now from the family garden, and sister may bring roses as well.  Sometimes, a little candle in a glass cup is lit while we think and talk about you; your place in our family and hearts.  After family prayer, when all are done, the candle is blown out.

My garden, any given day.  Next to my little bench in my “thoughtful spot” is a small terra cotta cherub with angel wings on a garden pick.  The color I associate with you and the memories around you is repeated in the irises next to the bench, and in a nearby old chunk of amethyst given me by a beloved great uncle.  In the quiet dappled shade, during the tired lassitude of the day, sometimes tears of longing and missing you surface, sometimes we just sit quietly with memory, and sometimes catch a honeysuckled hint of sweetness to come.

Much of insight and understanding came this from experience with death, and was motive force for writing.  Some of my poetry is directly about this daughter.