Happy Birthday!

Again, another birthday without you. Mine and yours.

Happy 2nd Heaven Birthday!

Happy 2nd Heaven Birthday! It was two years ago today that the world woke up a little dimmer. While two years feels like an eternity for those of us that you left behind, I'm sure it's been an easy two years for you. 

I've been thinking about you a lot lately. I'm not sure if the impending doom of the anniversary of your death or the memories of the night that you died replaying in my head or that brings about this constant reminiscing. Whatever it is, I know that it doesn't seem to get any easier but at the same time I couldn't imagine not thinking about you. Don't get me wrong, not a day passes that you don't cross my mind at some point. Whether it's a box of Girl Scout cookies, an empty package of cookie dough, or a terrible song on the radio, everything is a constant reminder of the void you left and the vivacious personality that was you.

Perhaps the reason you've been on my mind more than usual is because of your newest niece. Ellis Chelsea Brode was born February 11 in the middle of a snow storm. Much like the aunt that she is named after, she knows how to make an entrance. It's bittersweet, really. There is now a niece here that will never meet the aunt that she is named after. But don't you fret, I will make sure to tell her about you. I will tell her about the crazy things that you did and said. I will remind her of you often and point to your picture. One look at one of your pictures and she will know from the smile on your face the type of person that you were. You had it written all over your face.

I look at Ellis and Reagan and I am quickly reminded of a pair of sisters that were the same in age difference that once lived next door. Though our 9 year age difference gave us a little bit of a rocky start, as we grew so did our friendship. I look at them now and wonder: Will Ellis soon be bursting into Reagan's room unannounced and unwelcomed singing at the top of her lungs? Will she embarrass her older sister in front of her friends by spilling household secrets? Will Ellis make ridiculous requests of Reagan or call her horrible names when she is angry? And will Reagan reciprocate? One day, not too long from now, they will be grown and enjoy each others company. They will reminisce about the crazy things that their parents did and make fun of us. They will drive to the mall together singing along to their favorite country song. Yes, there will be a time that they fight as passionately as they will love each other. But that's the amazing thing about sisters...there is no one else on the planet that they can experience that relationship with.

The difference will be that their relationship will not be abruptly ended by tragedy. I hope to never read a blog written about one of my daughters being missed by the other. My hopes for them will be to love and fight intensely...until they are old and grey.

Am I a loser or are you?

It seems so distant, the last time I spoke with you.

However, it wasn't. 

I was talking to Reagan about school work the other day and how important it was to stay on task and to listen to the teacher, when I realized that I found myself thinking I was loser. I found myself drifting back to a time standing right outside your father's house. I had just moved back to Cleveland from Savannah with my fiance and daughter in tow and little else to call my own. I had pulled into the driveway, for what I don't know, but I got out of the car and began talking to your dad. As I stood there talking with your him,Vince and yourself came out to say hey. In the middle of the conversation, of I don't know what, you said, "You're just jealous I'm not a loser like you that had a kid too young". 

It wasn't your ignorance, or the blatant disregard for my feelings that I felt the most, but more over the idea that the very ignorance that you were speaking of was your very own niece. Someone so innocent she was not even able to call you by name. 

About two years later, while traveling in the car somewhere, you looked to me, without warning, and said, "Reagan sure is amazing." I looked at you in astonishment and said, "but because of her I am a loser. Chelsea, I hope that you can enjoy loserdom the way that I do everyday when she says, 'I love you, Mommy' and smiles sweetly at me. Unlike you, I am the person that she depends on to live and when she does amazing things, I know it is because of me. Someday, I hope you get to experience that." You looked at me and smiled, then began to laugh, "but Holly, why would I do that? I already know that God would punish me and I would be screwed". I laughed and agreed. You continued the conversation with "So does that make me a loser or are you?". It was one of those conversations that you tell someone about later on and they don't understand. One of those conversations that only sisters understand. We both knew in that moment that you and I both loved Reagan and each other  but didn't want to say it out loud.

I laughed again and we quickly moved the conversation to something else, but that moment stuck with me. 

How important you are to her and all of your nieces and they were to you. 

I sure do miss you and all of your sarcasm and rudeness. 

Love you, baby sister!

The beginning of the end

Whew! We made it! The one year mark. 

That's what we are supposed to say right? That somehow we have crawled to the other side of the 365 days since Chelsea was taken from us and now it will be easier? To me I look at it as: "Good lord, now I have to make it through the next 65 or so years?!" It seems perilous, to say the least.              

While my sister was so much more than her death, I wrote this in hopes of the beginning of an explanation of the extraordinary pain that we carry throughout our lives. Chelsea is THE MOST AMAZING person that I have had the pleasure of knowing, in all of her glory, obnoxiousness, and glory for life. I wrote this segment only about a month after her passing because I wanted, for reasons only I can understand, to remember exactly how it happened that our lives became what they have and why this year has been one of learning. This is an account of the events as they occurred  through my eyes, from one year ago.

March 3rd, 2012:

              I hadn't been asleep long. The pounding of the rain from the lurking mass of storms that had come to the area had lulled me to sleep only a few hours before and was apparently exhausted. Surprisingly, it wasn't the enormous cracks of thunder that woke me up, it was my frantic husband. I had been so gloriously submerged in sleep that when he shook me awake it took about five precious minutes for me to come around and hear what he was saying. Honey, I just woke up! Give me a sec! About that same time, my phone started ringing. As I reached for it with very little grasp or clarity, I knew, immediately, what my husband was telling me and I sprang to life. I answered the phone and told my baby brother to pick me up in the driveway, that I would be ready in just a minute.

           The convenience of living near family never seemed more certain than in that moment. I knew I had very little time to get ready, because of Vince’s extreme speed in a vehicle and the fact that he lived in my step-dad’s house only a mere quarter of a mile down the hill from my own home. So I changed clothes in a flash, brushed my teeth, splashed some water on my face, grabbed my purse and my makeup bag (?) and headed for the driveway, where as I had suspected, Vince’s dark green Jeep sat waiting. So, donning a pair of mismatched socks and the ugliest pair of boots, I sprinted through the downpour of rain to his Jeep.  During the long ride through what can only be described as extreme flooding, I made a few phone calls trying to get an update on Chelsea’s status. I mercilessly woke several people up in the wee hours of the morning as Vince crashed his Jeep over and over again into the waves of water beginning to flood the roads. At about six minutes to our arrival, I distinctively recall talking to my step-dad, Chelsea’s dad, who had arrived at Northeast Georgia Medical Center hours earlier, after a late Friday night visit from the Lumpkin County Sheriff’s office. In all of the conversations that I had in route that evening, his was the one, and perhaps the only, conversation that I remember having.  At about four minutes out, I asked how she was doing and all he was able to tell me was that she was not doing well. What do you mean, not well? What does that mean? He told me that they were getting ready to give her last rites, which I quickly dismissed as some sort of cruel joke. This was, after all, the Kiessling family, notorious for all of their pranks. Minutes later, Vince flung the car into the hospital parking lot. As I unbuckled my seat belt, ready to spring from the car, Vince debated on whether it would be appropriate to park in one of the eight handicap spots that, I might add, were considerably closer to the entrance to the emergency room. I’m pretty sure my exact words were, “Fuck it, it’s two in the morning and this is an emergency.” He whipped the car into the spot and we bounded for the top of the stairs.

            Now, if you have ever experienced a trip to the emergency room after a call in the middle of the night, you know what I mean when I say that a rush of emotions comes over you as you near the ER doors. Like the distinct smell of chance comes over you and every possible feeling that you could ever feel comes rushing over you in waves and little pin pricks all over your skin.

            I had barely stepped through the first of two sliding glass doors that barred the rest of the world from the tragedies and miracles that occurred inside the ER walls when I locked eyes with my step-dad coming outside through the other set of glass doors. Just breathe, she is fine. He had an entourage surrounding him, or more like lurking under him because of his massive stature, but I barely noticed. The only thing that occurred to me was that he looked surprisingly calm, which brought to me a sense of tranquility and the urgent need to find out what was going on. Before I could even get a good running start toward him, I felt a jerk on my arm, like a force field holding me back from everything I dreaded.  I quickly looked and dismissed the women who seemed to have appeared out of nowhere and who was now holding my arm and talking about who she was. As if I care, lady. I have some serious things going on right now. In an effort to wash away the conversation that had taken place between my step-dad and I not eight minutes before, I asked how Chelsea was doing. It was then that I saw the greatest flash of pain come across his face and I knew. Even though it was difficult for him to convey it, I knew before he had a chance to allow the words to escape his lips that our lives had now been flipped upside down and inside out; that nothing would ever be the same.

            I had the most intense surge of so many emotions; it was so intense and painful that I collapsed on the floor right there in the entrance to Northeast Georgia Medical Center Emergency Room. I couldn't cry hard enough or yell out loud enough, nothing I did seemed to come close to expressing the tremendous, crushing, searing pain that I felt in that moment. For anyone who has never lost someone extremely close to you, it would be nearly impossible to describe the mind-shattering, blinding ache that takes over your body; it is as though someone has just ripped your heart from your body and your soul from your mind and all that is left of you is a hollow, empty shell of what you once were. I mean, how do you ask someone to steady themselves and come back to reality when they have no heart and soul?

            I am not sure exactly how long I stayed, knees buckled, on that grimy floor, but one of my step-dad’s entourage was finally able to either convince me to stand or picked me up. He introduced himself to me as Chaplain Ralph, the on-call Chaplain for the hospital that evening. Lucky him.  He stood in front of me and tried explaining what was going on and what had happened, but I wasn’t really listening. If I had been anywhere close to being my human self at that moment, I would have compared him to the teacher from the Charlie Brown cartoons. Wha wha wha wha. I looked past him and started glancing around frantically. Where is Vince? I know he had been here a moment ago; I hugged him at some point. I looked outside the glass doors that just a few moments ago I had been fighting with all my might to get into, and now wanted nothing more than to get out from behind their cold grasps. I spotted my brother leaning over a trash can outside the first set of doors, heaving with all that he had. The news had made him physically ill. My step-dad stood behind him staring off into the parking lot and the dimly lit streets beyond, as if trying to find the answers out there in the stormy night.

            I stepped away from Chaplain Ralph and the arm-grabbing lady, whom I found out was the social worker on call that night, and slowly stepped out the doors to join my puking brother and overwhelmed step-dad. I am pretty sure the good Chaplain was mid-sentence when I decided to rudely walk away, but I didn't care much for anything anyone had to say at that point. Whoosh. A strong gust of wind blew down and into my face as I stepped through the sliding glass doors and out to the covered drop-off area where my diminished family stood in shambles. I checked on Vince first. I’m fine. Then I walked to Dan, puffing on a cigarette. With nothing else to say or do or even think, we just stood there. I wasn't sure if it was the way the dingy light of the hospital overhang hit his face or the enormous amount of hurt he wore on it, but at that moment, my step-dad looked like he had aged 20 years since I had last seen him. . So there we stood, in silence, staring off into the abyss of night, wondering how we all came to be right here, right now. No one seemed to have the answer to that question and no one seemed tremendously worried about it in that moment. All we seemed to know was that Chelsea was gone and we were still here, left to somehow pick up the shattered pieces of our lives and carry each other through this.

              While we stood there killing ourselves and not really caring much, stunned and still trying to bounce the shock off of each other, the Chaplain reemerged from inside the emergency room. He quietly notified us that they had cleaned up her body and that if Vince and I were ready, we could go see her. Moment of truth. We glanced at each other and then back to the Chaplain. Without any words, the three of us walked in through the ER, where it seemed that as soon as we stepped through the front doors, the entire department slowed to a screeching halt. I have been on the other side of this standoff, between the untouched staff and the grieving family, this was, in fact the very ER that I spent two years of clinical training in. I had seen the family grieving the teenage overdose victim, a family in hysterics over their three year old family member that had drowned in a neighbor’s pool, and I had even seen the family in sobs over a loved one lost in a car accident. I guess, on that side of the lines, you think of how safe you are in your world, that something so tragic could never possibly happen to you. How wrong I had been.

           Lead by the Chaplain, Vince and I stepped beyond the doors of Trauma room A1, the room that they put the serious conditions, or, in our case, the unrecoverable. I am not sure what I expected to see when we crossed the divide from the brightly lit emergency room ‘pit’ to the quiet sanctuary of A1, but a dimly lit room and a group of melancholy staff lining the walls surrounding the room was not it. My eyes went immediately to the bed in the middle of the room, the floor surrounding it littered with gloves, bandages, tubing, and wrappers from the valiant effort to save her life. There she lay, as if she was sleeping, except for the intubator tube down her throat, I might have thought she was. I crossed the room and without even thinking grabbed her hand, as if a gentle squeeze would wake her up. Her face, upon closer inspection, was a little swollen and extremely bruised across the bridge of her nose and under her eyes and besides the stitches running across the top of her forehead, she was just as I had always remembered her, lovely. I stroked her hair, called her name, and turned to leave. It was at this time that I noticed Dan had followed us into the room and now stood sobbing in the corner. We stood there hugging until Vince had said goodbye and came to join in. We all quickly escaped the morbid room and it was at that time that I realized that this would be the last time that I would ever see my sister’s face in person, and the weeping began again.

             The next few hours were spent calling family, or at least the ones that we felt needed to be awakened at that early hour of the morning, and giving them the impossibly grave news. With each person, we would relive the whole tragic story over and over again. My sister-in-law, my maternal grandmother, Dan’s sisters and his mother, my older brother, Garrett, my husband – each time, I grew a little number and little emptier. It was decided, by hospital staff and among ourselves that our mom and our older brother, who were currently in route from Savannah, a five-and-a-half to six hour drive away, would be left in the dark about Chelsea’s loss until they arrived. We would let them continue to think what they would about Chelsea’s condition after the car accident. While a lot of back and forth criticisms came and went from this decision, I still feel that we chose the best course of action for our circumstances. It wouldn't have done either of them any good to know the truth. It wasn't like they could close the distance between them and the hospital any faster with that knowledge. I actually kind of envied them for being spared the extra few hours of agony that we had to endure. Especially after the escalating amount of suffering that ensued after the arrival of Chelsea’s paternal grandmother and the retelling of a story I no longer wished to play a part in.

            When a loved one dies in the emergency room at the hospital, your family becomes a threat. You are now a special circumstance and a telling sign of how the hospital has “failed.” The incessant crying and hysterics are looked at with stunned looks and muffled comments, as though you are a cold and you might spread if left to mingle with the people who are still whole. So some social worker or psychiatrist suggested that they tuck these grieving families away, segregated from the other families and masses of people who were not there because of the death of a loved one.  Enter the ‘Insanity Room’. That isn't really what they call it. Hospital administration and staff call it the Quiet Room, but to anyone that has had to spend even just a few brief moments in that room would know that it is anything but quiet. You can hear the sniffles, cries, and even thoughts of all of the members of your family. There are no secrets kept within those walls. The most horrible part of that room, and perhaps the loudest, is the sound of your own thoughts. They are so loud and pronounced in that room, there is no escaping your own mind, there is nothing to distract you from having to think your thoughts and allowing the events of the evening wash over you. Even better than that is when they put the family members that slowly trickle in through the night piled in as well. With every chair facing the one on the opposite side of the room, you have no choice but to stare at your sobbing grandmother, or bewildered cousin, or a pleading aunt, until you feel like you are not going to be able to take it anymore, until you are, quite literally, insane.

              After hours of moving around the ‘public’ waiting room, a trip to Walgreens, twelve cups of the strongest rocket fuel I have ever had, and about fourteen subsequent trips to the bathroom, the time for mom to arrive was almost upon us. I had been tracking their movements across the state with my older brother via text throughout the night and by his calculations they should have been getting close. I guess it was around 6:15 am when I sent another text to see where they were when he sent that they were in the hospital. I quickly picked up the phone and dialed him. Where are you at? He repeated his text. They were here. The phones started to crackle and his voice began to fade, like some sort of cruel joke determined to make this evening this most difficult of my life. When his voice came back, loud and clear, over the phone he told me that they were stepping out of an elevator into the CCU, or the Critical Care Unit, of the hospital. Garrett, why are you guys in the CCU? He was obviously confused. You guys are supposed to come to the Emergency Room. They had assumed that that is where they would take her after she was stabilized. Oh my God, they think she is still alive. In all of our scheming to get them up to North Georgia safely, no one thought about this moment of the plan, the moment when we would have to give a bit of our secret and possibly secret in its entirety….over the phone…from another department of the hospital. Garrett said that he didn't understand but that he would get directions to the ER and they would be down shortly. When I got off the phone, I turned to Vince and covered my mouth, in complete disgust in myself. How could I have been so careless? I had told them to come to the hospital, but I didn't tell them where in the hospital. So, my poor mother and older brother were wondering the hospital at that very moment with the false hope that Chelsea was alive somewhere. It was at that moment, standing at the entrance to the department, staring down the hallway that lead to check-in, that we all turned to the sound of my mother’s voice. She rounded the corner, both of them wearing grins on their faces and scolding themselves for taking so long to get there. My mom looked at the wall of solemn faces staring back at her and joyfully asked where Chelsea was and the status of her condition. No one answered. She asked again. Still nothing. Someone has got to say something. I stepped forward, away from the shocked and pitying faces of my relatives, and shook my head. I knew what I wanted to say. Chelsea didn't make it, mom, she is gone. The words just wouldn't come out, so I stood there shaking my head and then Dan and Vince quickly began doing the same. It was only when the look on my mother’s face turned from joy and concern to despair and anger that I realized the words stuck in my throat. She didn't make it. I stepped towards her and tried to wrap my arms around her but she grabbed my shoulders and began shaking me, as if she could somehow change the ending. As if I were a magic 8 ball and she didn't like the prediction that it was giving to her and by shaking it she could wash that ending away for another. No, mom, she is dead, she died. She collapsed into the floor, in almost the very spot that I had collapsed about four and a half hours earlier. The swarm of relatives, Chaplain, and social workers were upon her in a flash. I stepped away and followed my distraught brothers out to the overhang. It had gotten chilly overnight and I hadn't even realized it. As we stood there, in the icy wind that the storms had brought in behind them, I thought to myself how different my life had been a mere seven hours earlier and how I badly wanted to return to that time. 

Someone once asked me when I feel that I will be healed in some sense of the word. I answered them as candidly as I could. When I can think of Chelsea and not remember the feeling of the night that she died and the vivid image of her lying dead in exam room A1, I will feel healed. When I say Chelsea's name and the first thing that comes to my mind are not of the series of events from the night that she died and instead those of our childhood, I will feel healed. When I think of Chelsea and hear her laughter instead of my own tears, I will be healed. I don't know when that will be, if ever, but I look forward to it. 

Perhaps the more important thing is that I do remember her. 

Happy 1 year Heaven birthday, Chelsea!

Lights, Camera, Action!

If you google your name, your obituary is the first thing that pops up. After that comes North Georgia College's article about you, then comes AccessNorthGA.com's account of the accident, then comes my blog...

If you log into your Facebook page, there are 531 photos of you and 1,385 friends.

Impressive.

But what I remember of you barely touches that and though I have tried to recall all of the best/ worst of you in this blog, there was soooooo much of you to share. It adds up to a lifetime of laughter, cries, and yelling. And I'm not sure what to do but to continue to share and soak up what I can of your short 19 years of life.

Apparently, I am not the only one.

I was contacted back in November by a young man, with an impressive background, and an amazing vision, about being a part of his views on grief. His name is Andrew Morgan. My blog about you caught his attention and he called me up to ask if I would have the courage to share our story. He was raised in Roswell, GA but now lives in Los Angeles, CA and was taking on the enormous project of touching on the process of grief. He lost his father in a bicycling accident in which Andrew and his father were cycling down Roswell Road in Atlanta one day and his father was struck by a car, mortally wounding him. I instantly felt a connection with this amazing guy.

So I agreed. Now your life was not lost in vain and our family's journey to survival and healing will help others. His documentary, After the End, highlights the way that people from different walks of life and different stages of loss, grieve. How everyone turns after the loss of someone close to them is an amazing journey, and he has been so brave to document it.

I was sooooo nervous the day that they arrived. I actually felt nauseous. I had spent days cleaning and weeks trying to prepare for whatever they brought my way. I was not prepared in the least. They got lost on the way here....to be expected, and showed up in all of their glory, not quite sure of what they were walking into. I sat nervously at the kitchen table as they brought in and set up all of their equipment, sweating more and more as the set up more and more. Before long, my living room was rearranged, with giant lights shining on my love seat, two cameras set up, chairs were placed perfectly, and a microphone hung right above where I would be placed. It was quite intimidating.

Andrew made certain that it was a casual conversation, but it wasn't something that I was at all prepared for. I had prepped myself for days, if not weeks, on what I would say, how I would react, and my reactions to everything that they could throw at me. But as the scene unfolded, I felt like I couldn't breathe. Eventually, I took a deep breath and dove into the conversation, after which, I felt like a flood gate of information. He asked me so many questions about you, which I proudly answered and offered up some extras. Then he looked to me and asked, "What was your relationship with Chelsea?". Hmmmm. This threw me off. How was I to answer, in honest truth, what our relationship was? I replied, "Well, she was annoying....". And then I laughed because I knew that that was as honest as it could ever get.

Through the four and half hours of questions, ventures out to pick Reagan up, and reading of the blog, there were so many hard questions. The worst of which came when he asked how the events of the night that you died unfolded. I replied candidly, opening up about what I could only describe to him as the most difficult moment of my life. As I replayed the events of that night out loud to him, I kept screaming into myself, "Don't self destruct! Don't self destruct! You can do this!" But it was when I looked up, into his eyes that I saw the same hurt and pain felt in my own heart in the eyes of the man interviewing me. His were welled up with tears and I could tell he knew exactly what I was saying even before I said it. That is when I looked at him and said, "There are no words to describe that feeling, the emptiness, unless you are talking to someone that has experienced the same thing." And there isn't.

At one point he asked me about my wedding. Up to this point I had held it together pretty well. He asked me what you were like on my wedding day, being that you were my maid of honor. I told him about how impressed I was that surprisingly you were amazing that day. You were reassuring and kind and told me on several occasions how beautiful I was. You seemed to know exactly how I was feeling and that the twisted knots of emotions that day were running high, so you did everything you could to make it seamless. I told them about how you complained about having to wear a long brown dress because "brown just wasn't your color", and I told you on that day that when you got married you could stick me in the most hideous dress you could find. And then I lost it....because that day will never come to be.

We talked about you, and talked about you, and talked about you. At one point, I told him about how impressed you would be that the whole day was about you. They laughed. They were so kind and professional, but yet so attainable, like I would want to call them up and hang out with them at some point. I told them afterwards, as they were leaving, that I was nervous about agreeing to do this because I have a huge lack of articulation when it comes to speaking. I can make anything look great on paper, but talking to someone, comes out more like...blah.

I had told them that putting into words the way that I felt about you was indescribable and painful. This is fact. During one of our 'breaks' I told them about your lifelong dreams, one of them being, to live in New York City and work on Broadway. I can remember you talking about being part of it all and how important it was to experience the New York 'state of mind' and live like a New Yorker. You wanted so badly to be apart of the limelight and feel bigger than you did in Cleveland, Ga. After telling me your plan for New York several years ago, I laughed, yet again, and said, "You do realize that you need a small mortgage to buy a gallon of milk in New York?"


I would have loved to see what you could have done with your life and while it sickens me to know that I never will get that opportunity. Your life and death will not be in vain. I know that you could have accomplished everything that you dreamed, because that is who you were. A portion of me and a larger portion of what defined me lie in you, something I recently discovered. Just know that you did finally get the spotlight because that day was all about you. Your story and how it affected our family will help others, and that is well worth the pain and struggle, and I like to think that your ability to love and give shines through in that moment. I hope I made you proud because in those moments, I know I was proud of you.

There wasn't a creature stirring...

Two years ago you asked me for a pea coat for Christmas. I got you that pea coat, a grey one, from Old Navy. You loved it and wore it everywhere. You were wearing that coat the night that you died, it was stripped from you at the hospital and disappointingly enough, I cannot recall what happened to it after that.

I sat in church this evening and grinned recalling last year's church service. You made fun of my shoes, calling them "inappropriate for the occasion". We sat on either side of our mom during the service and sat there giggling our way through every Christmas song because of mom's insistence on trying to pretend to be part of an opera. Afterwards we all came back to my house and while I was baking some cookies, you and mom found The Sound of Music playing on TV. One of my fondest Christmas memories will always be the sound of you and mom belting out "I am 16 going on 17" in what can only be described as a very special "Kiessling" rendition of a classic song. Jared rolled his eyes and I joined in, and then we laughed hysterical. They say that scent is the strongest receptor for memory, but the sound of your voices will always ring true in my heart.

You showed up Christmas morning excited to see what Santa had left in your stocking. I thought it was hilarious that I had lovingly stuffed it with coal, a used candle, and a miniature sweater. It was that very day that we went to our family gathering at our grandmother's house and exchanged our last words to each other....and they weren't pretty. However, that wasn't the first Christmas that ended with us fighting. I remembered a Christmas several year ago, one of our first in Savannah, in which you asked for a Dane Cook CD. I searched high and low and finally found one. However, when you unwrapped it on Christmas day you quickly informed me that it wasn't the right one and that I needed to go exchange it for the correct one. Outraged and irritated, a heated argument that consisted of me calling you an ungrateful brat and you telling me that I don't do anything right ensued. It ended with me telling you to leave. A month later you called me asking if I wanted to go see a movie, as if nothing happened.

Christmas was your favorite time of the year, although you thought your birthday should be a national holiday, Christmas actually is. There was something about your personality that you could find the good in anything bad but it was as though Christmas was the one time of the year that everyone else felt the same, which instantly brought a more annoying projection of your joy.

I went to the Memorial Garden behind the church and left a flower for you before church tonight. While I have stood in that very spot lots of times before, it was the first time that I stood there and felt joy, the same annoying projection of joy that you brought to me for the last 19 years. And I did not shed a tear.

So while there isn't a creature stirring tonight there is less noise, loud voices, and singing and I know that holidays, birthdays, and other events will come and go in our lives and they will never be the same, for the first time tonight, I felt like we would be okay. I felt your irradiating joy and that it is a good feeling.

So Merry Christmas little sister, while it is not the same without you, I know that you have the best seat in the house for your favorite time of the year, and someday we will celebrate together again.

.

Election Day...

Bad news...Ron Paul did not win....

Perhaps it is good that you did not have to witness the uprising on Facebook, as friends were made and some lost, this morning when the nation awoke to a re-elected President Obama, although you probably would have shrugged your shoulders and went on with your day.

For the rest of us, it was an impressive display of a nation completely torn in half and one that will never be the same.

I participated in early voting this year, as it was that I was working 12 of the 24 hours of the day yesterday and knew that there would be no way that I could make it to the polls. But as I stood in line while the long ago retiree took my information sheet and asked for my ID, I thought not of the amazing upheaval that was involved in today, but more of your extreme passion to exercise your American freedom. Before you died you had marked on your calendar at your dad's house Tuesday, March 6th, 2012 as your very first "Voting Day". You died 3 days before you were able to exercise that right. So Vince and I went to the polls during the March 6th Preliminaries and voted for you. We wrote in your candidate, Ron Paul, a silly but necessary gesture to your memory. The calendar at your dad's house still holds that "Voting Day" mark, but now, many months later, a very different outcome. You didn't care what anyone thought about your choice in President and you didn't listen to reason, but that is exactly what this country's foundation was built on, the love of the freedom of choice. And I couldn't help but beam with pride when I heard you, very nonchalantly, voicing your reasoning in the choice.

I like to think that everyone thinks as though I do, learning to take life in little strides with baby steps, but unfortunately with so little knowledge of how quickly that can be taken from someone, how could I actually expect that?

You were so expectant on the unknown and so willing to take on the new challenges with stride. I can only hope that as a nation we can do the same. If one 'small voice' can make that much noise perhaps everyone else will listen. We can all hope. So while the nation lull in the wake of the presidential election, I will lull in the wake of the amazing hope that your memory gives me every day. And hopefully we can all do the same and grasp every day with the same hope and love for life.

I did not vote for President Obama and went armed into the polls with the knowledge that I would not vote for him, but it means nothing to anyone else my personal reasons for doing so. And THAT is the American way.

A day so important that my amazing baby sister marked on her innocent calendar on her first year of eligible voting but was unfortunate enough to not be able to participate in, really puts everything into perspective for me. It gave me the drive to make sure that my voice was heard, and really, at the end of the day, that is all that matters.

Who can really tell whether you were just being goofy or you were dead set on your choice for very "important" reasons, but who really cares...

While you did not sway my vote one way or the other, and for those of you that really knew us, know that we often went in opposite directions, you did sway my reasons for heading to the poll at all. You were so excited to believe that you were making a difference and that your voice was heard on the larger stage, so excited for the future and the life ahead of you. You had an insatiable hunger for the life that you were going to live and the life you were going to lead that you actually wrote the day of voting for the preliminaries on your calendar.

If only we could all be that motivated and excited about the lives ahead of us, regardless of the outcome....

I saw this quote by John Quincy Adams and thought about you: "Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost."