Carrying the past into the future.

Happy New Year to whoever is reading my blog!  Thank you for visiting and "listening", even if I have no idea you're there. :)

As we closed 2013, it was...I was going to say a "little bit", but really, it was A LOT bittersweet for me.  The year had started off well with a lot of excitement and anticipation, and within weeks our lives were turned upside down…mostly internally…emotionally…amazingly our lives remained intact on the outside…we actually "functioned" on a day to day basis.  I don't mean to boast, but I know that it was our faith that has carried us through, as well as all the prayers that had been lifted up on our behalf.  After Eve's birth and funeral, for the next half of the year, we were pretty much in survival mode trying to - again - make sense of reality and giving ourselves room to grieve in whatever ways we needed to.

On the Eve of 2014, I was a bit saddened as we bid farewell to the tough  past year.  And this is how I've been feeling all year long as time passed.  It's almost as if time is taking me further and further away from Eve and her memory.  Closing the year felt like it meant I had to close the chapter on this difficult "event" in our lives; further it made me feel like I was meant to fold away my memory of Eve and place it in the special "Big Sister Box" we made for Eleanor along with the few mementos we have of Eve - like her hand and footprints, the little socks and beanie she wore shortly after birth…

The next day, January 1, 2014, we went to visit Eve's grave site first thing in the morning.  It is strange to think that in the past I couldn't understand why people would visit their loved ones' graves.  I no longer think that way.  I actually feel the urge to go visit Eve's.  Not because I think she's there; because she isn't.  But because I just need to. I think about her almost all the time, and still dream about what life would've been like had she lived, so it's not like I need to be there by her grave site to remember her.  I just feel I need to go.  So we went.

After we had lunch at home, we decided to take Eleanor to watch Frozen.  It was her very first time at a movie theatre!  As expected, she did well to sit through the whole movie.  I think all the travelling and flying she has done have trained her to sit patiently.  One thing we had to work on was to have her speak quietly if she wanted to say something. :)  At the beginning of the movie, when the main characters - the princesses Ana and Elsa - sing and dance, Eleanor turned to me and whispered "I love this!", and her itty bitty eyes were wider than I had ever seen and they were focused on the screen the whole time. :)

Today, Eleanor asked me a question about the movie.  She asked me why Princess Ana had to speak to her sister Princess Elsa through a key hole.  I explained to her that it was because her parents kept them away from each other because Princess Elsa had magic powers which turned everything she touched into ice.  Then Eleanor asked me why Princess Ana died, and I told her that it was because her sister Princess Elsa had accidentally frozen her heart.

Then I began to think about how this movie touched a few sensitive spots of our recent loss of Eve.  The movie is about two sisters, one of which dies due to something happening to her heart…and as I stood there wondering whether Eleanor did make or would make any connections to her own experience of loss, she asked me "Mom, why did God have to take Eve right away?"  I answered her as honestly as I could. I told her, "I don't know. I think God wanted Eve with him earlier than we did. But we get to see her when we go to heaven."

I'm sure Eve will always be a part of our lives, whether she lived to see day light or not.  We love her, we cherish her, and we want to keep her memory alive within us.