My cousin, 14 at the time, died on this date last year- December 8th 2006
This is the memory tribute I wrote to her, in her memorial book January 7, 07.
I posted it here this past April, just before what would have been her 15th birthday.
Today, like many days, I think of her. So I repost my words to her.



Hi Alena,
I miss you! I’m sitting here printing out all your tributes (you are so loved), and as I look out the window above my desk, it is rainy and grey and all the flowers are gone. I miss their happy beautiful faces, but I know they will return in the spring (like a gift and a promise from God, though things appear gone from us, they go on and continue in other ways, and eventually we will see them again). How I wish you could return in the spring with the flowers. Spring is my favorite season, and Easter my favorite holiday, and we always spent it at your house (easter egg hunt, good food, chocolate). I will miss you most every year, when the flowers return, and you are not among them. But I believe you, little flower, kind and beautiful still grow and bloom, just somewhere where we can’t see you right now, this I must believe, for it is all my heart can bear. And someday I hope to grow and bloom near you, there will be sunflowers for you, and pink peonies for me, and our souls will walk together in fields of flowers, and we like them, will bloom and grow forever, no partings, no pain, no sorrow (the end of a winter all our hearts must endure till then). Till then know, that thoughts of you will continue to bloom and grow in my heart (that is where I have planted my memories of you). And from now on, whenever I see a sunflower’s sweet joyful face, I will think of you, Alena, and maybe if sometimes for a moment in that moment, you would see a sunflower and think of me too, then maybe our souls can still touch.



Goodbye for now,
Love you always,
Tiffany




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The song edelweiss kept repeating in my head while I read her tributes and then while I wrote my own, that is why there is bloom and grow echo in my words.
I just sent out my sympathy card to her mom (my aunt), and family this week. I have had the card since last December, but I couldn't bear to send it. I kept waiting for it to not be true, I kept waiting for something to say in the card, that would some how, in some small way be helpful, but nothing ever came to me. I feel bad I had nothing to offer her mom but my own sad heart, standing as only a faint echo to her own.
I put a copy of the E.E Cummings poem in the envelope
********
E. E. Cummings




I Carry Your Heart With Me


i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)
i fear
no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet)i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

********
perhaps a romantic poem but the meanings still seemed right, I carry your heart with me in my heart. And of this wonder that keeps the stars apart.
My hand shook as I tucked the card in and sealed it. I was surprised by this, as I was going out of my way not to think about what I was sending or why, while I did it. But still I knew, of course I knew, and still I felt it.


Yesterday was Friday, she died last year on that day of the week, so I spent the morning revisiting those horribly sad scenes. Knowing now full well, there is no hope for changing how they end.
I can give myself the spiritual beliefs, I can fill myself with them, of soul, still whole, just not here among us, and find some solace to hold onto, but I really have trouble with the physical body part. I got stuck there at times, when I think of her in the ground, and then this voice screams through my head "Nooo". No to her being dead, being there, and no to my thinking of her there. I hate death, I hate the loss of the person, not what was, for you can never lose what has been, but the future loss, the loss of having them in today and tomorrow in new ways, rather than in being limited to carrying them with you tucked inside, woven into as part of your own soul ( I want the separateness of their existence to go on, having adventures and experiences I am not part of, but that I can see and hear about, and be their friend through. I want their footprints still upon the earth through their own feet, not just through ours, all of us, who love and miss them). I hate deterioration. It is hard enough in the leaf and flower, how do I ever accept it in the physical shell which used to house a loved one? I can't think of her that way, or of my Nana and Pop that way. That makes no sense to me.

And on that lovely dark note, I shall have to start getting ready to go to a Christmas party. A family one, but from my dad's side, not my mom's people. I wonder what my aunt, and the rest of her family are going to do today? I have not courage nor heart to call them. I'll talk to my mom later and ask her if she knows. My heart is torn, but when I think of my aunt, of her heart, it feels ripped apart, broken into two separate pieces.