I would love to imagine you in a field. Filled with flowers and butterflies. Tall sweet green grass that always carries the aroma of being freshly cut. Running and laughing with your dark red curls bouncing in the sunshine. Colors surround you that haven't a name and are so brilliant and vibrant they pierce the soul right though the eyes as they calm and excite all at once. The sky is of a sapphire blue with drifts of clouds painted in just the right spots like feathers drifting amongst the sea. You bound through the field and pick flower after flower making a rainbow of delight in you small delicate hands, long fingers wrapped around the stems and your finger nails just smudged with the earth. Some of the flowers have soil and roots hanging just under them. Your pretty little clothes have evidence of rolling around in that field. Marks of bright earthy green grace your knees from the trips and tumbles of a 17month old. Your new to this running thing and you love it. It makes you feel free like your flying with wind across your cheeks. Your with people I love, Aunt Carolyn, Aunt Tina, Tina, Leah, Grandpa Harley....so many more. They love watching you and the grace you carry. Your laugh is infectious and rings in their ears and they cant help but giggle along with you. You have friends with you as well. Pandora, Azalea, Adelyn and so many more. They all are just as infectious and carry a rainbow of flowers for their mothers here on earth. You have a favorite spot under a tree and swing on your belly on an old wooden swing that's never seen age. Its as fresh as the day it was cut and smells of sweet oak. This tree has pink flowers that float down and land in your curls. They smell like sweet cherries, sugar and orange marmalade, three of your favorite things. Your eyes are a hazel green,like daddy's, that change and reflect the sky. Your cheeks always carry a rose to them and when you smile its like two plump apples and your eyes flicker a sparkle, like an apple catching light. So juicy you want take a big bite and it would delight you and fill any need of hunger or thirst for eternity. You have a little pet bunny,named Rumpis Bumpis, he has spunk and gusto just as you do. I remember him. I bought him for my students as a pet years back. He loves children and running. He hops so high along side you and slaps his hind feet together in midair and you giggle. He twitches his nose and you kiss him. His fur is so soft, like a pillow, you can rest upon him mid-day for a small nap. I know you don't much like naps, but as you run and play the day catches up and you cant help but rest under your tree, breeze though your hair and head laying upon Rumpis, you drift off for only a short time before you are up and at it again. So much energy, spunk, laughter, & happiness.
This is how I want to see you when I arrive in Heaven. This is where I hope you are.
I love and miss you Stella Grace.
Send some of your sunshine my way baby girl.
xoxoxo ~Mom
Questions of the day:
Where do you think your child is?
Do you imagine a place they would be?
Do you believe in an after life?
4 comments:
Hi Krystal,
You recently asked why no one comments. Well I was thinking to myself why I don't. I mean I have in the past but like others do not want to offend you and I'm certain I probably have said something at one time or another that was not the right thing to say. That's the issue. Being afraid of saying the wrong thing and upsetting you. Well, for the past few days I've been pondering about what I could say or comment I could leave that wouldn't make you feel worse. I don't want to try to give advice like many do. Then I came across this article and thought of you instantly. I would like to share it with you. Even if I don't fully understand your loss, others do and this letter is a good example of that. It appears it's too long for one comment so I am splitting it up.
An Open Letter to the Radio Lady Who Said We Should Find “Closure.”
BY Fran Dorf
- - - -
Dear Madam Radio Host,
Around Christmastime you interviewed me on the Ageless Media Network, a group of radio stations that provides “upbeat programming” for… well… older people. I’m one. The subject was “grief during the holidays.” Grief happens to my area of expertise. I didn’t choose it. It chose me when my three-year-old son, Michael, died seventeen years ago.
You’re nice folks there, at the Ageless Media Network, even though your name is one of those doublethink euphemisms so common in the land these days, and what you’re really doing is trying to help those of us slipping helplessly into our dotage feel better while doing so, which, let’s face it, is an existentially impossible goal. Still, I was happy to be asked back. I vowed to emit an air of authority on my subject, say something useful and earnest, and not to stutter, say “um,” or make any bad jokes.
And then… whoops, you said something about the bereaved having to find “closure.”
Okay, so lots of folks say spectacularly stupid things on radio and television (not to mention on the Internet and in life), and other folks just sit there nodding. Why, just last month I heard Mitt Romney say he was severely conservative. Is that like severely anemic, severely depressed, severely disabled? Then, the other day on the radio I heard a man say, “My profession is I go around with a video camera and get people to do embarrassing things.” Seriously? This is a profession?
Anyway, I hope I was gracious, but I may have had a brain bomb and I’m afraid I might have said:
“Closure is for doors, windows, annoying books, open mouths…”
Actually I’m not sure what the hell I said. I may have disassociated. So if I said that part about the open mouth, I apologize, and I accept that you may not ask me back for another interview.
In case I said any of those things or babbled, I would like to go back and say this: Radio Lady, I’m relatively certain you meant well, nearly everyone who says stupid things in connection with grief does. There are, of course, exceptions. For example, Ann Coulter, who said—on the Today Show no less—that 9/11 widows were “enjoying” their husbands’ deaths, and someone calling himself 12th Monkey, who made the following comment in reference to Cindy Sheehan, the woman who became a political activist after she lost her son in Iraq:
“She [Cindy] reveals [in her book] that her son’s death almost drove her to take her own life. ‘Every night,’ she says, ’I had to restrain myself from taking my entire bottle of sleeping pills instead of just one.”
To which 12th Monkey replied:
“Cindy, please reconsider.”
I know, Radio Lady, that you weren’t raised in the gutter with Ann and 12th Monkey, and you would never say anything like that—even if you didn’t like my politics. This doesn’t not mean that you should be allowed to continue making spectacularly misguided remarks that are heard by other people and then repeated as if they made sense. The bereaved, who are already hurting, are seriously upset when people make comments that delegitimize their feelings, and I have to tell you that the pervasively used “C” word is a doozey of an upsetter. As if someone who’d lost a child would even want to forget that child. Ever. I wish there were some sort of eject button I could press for every reporter, pundit, luminary, bubblehead, celebrity, radio host, friend, ex-friend, relative, sister, brother, cousin, mother, or politician, who has ever said that word in the context of loss, as if it’s meaningful, or helpful, or a useful way to think about loss.
We don’t get “closure” on our losses. We incorporate our losses into our lives and try to find the way not to become embittered because of them, and even to make meaning out of them. The fact is, if we don’t try to make meaning out of all our experiences, from the profound to the ridiculous, we’re probably just standing still.
You, Madam Radio Lady, are not alone in offending here. I constantly find myself shocked by this culture’s ignorance about grief. I still cringe when I hear people offer advice to the bereaved, as if they have a clue about what one should do, or how to feel better. I weep when I hear religious platitudes, and when I hear them express their ideas about the mind and intentions of God, such as, ”God must have wanted him,” or “He’s with the Angels.”
One should not say such things even to believers, because at that moment, the bereaved person may be really mad at God, or may even be questioning his faith, his belief, the very basis of her (or his) existence. Seriously, I almost lost my mind when I heard Sarah Palin say, after the Gabrielle Giffords shootings in Arizona last year, “May God turn their grief into joy.” Ah. Joy. My child in heaven with Jesus, instead of here with me. As if God wants us all to be smiling Disney characters.
While I’d certainly want to have my son back (though I can’t even imagine him now, at age 21), the truth is that life cannot be undone, it only goes one way, and we humans have no choice but to learn the lessons our lives present. The truth is that there are lessons to be learned from the experience of great loss, ways of being the world that are different than before, a way of understanding others you didn’t see before, ways of empathizing with others’ pain, ways of learning to “be with,” and so on.
But let me assure you that “how to get closure” isn’t one of those lessons.
Best Regards,
Fran Dorf
"We don’t get “closure” on our losses. We incorporate our losses into our lives and try to find the way not to become embittered because of them, and even to make meaning out of them. The fact is, if we don’t try to make meaning out of all our experiences, from the profound to the ridiculous, we’re probably just standing still."
^^ Yeah... I like that. <3 <3
This is beautiful, Krystal! I definitely believe in an afterlife, and am excited to someday meet my loved ones again. ♡
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