Heavenly Day

Tomorrow (April 5th) would have been Samantha's 15 month birthday. It's one of my all-time favorite stages: toddling around, maybe saying a few words, understanding more and more every day.

Today I mourn what will never be. I celebrate the 15 month old Samantha who lives only in our imagination. And yet my love for her is undiminished. It lives on, kept alive by purposeful acts of remembrance, as well as the many, many events that occur hourly (minutely?) that remind me of her presence and of course, her absence. There are moments of joy in my life, and for that I am grateful. But those moments are always, always accompanied by a painful realization: Samantha should be here with us.

I've put together a little video montage of some footage from her one year. It's got plenty of shots of my older children, who absolutely love to watch themselves interacting with Samantha onscreen. My son yells "again!" as soon as it ends.

I set the footage to a song by one of my favorite singer/songwriters, Patty Griffin. I love the song "Heavenly Day" and have found it to be a good way to think about our year with Samantha. Some lines are particularly meaningful:

"The smile on your face, I've been longing to see.
It's enough for me, baby. It's enough for me."

and

"Tomorrow may rain with sorrow,
"Here's a little time we can borrow."

Tomorrow did indeed bring a deluge of sorrow. 2008 was a hard year for us. As I mentioned in my last post, we were dealing with the loss of my brother and spending a lot of time with doctors trying to fix Samantha's heart defect. But it was also a wonderful year in many ways. It was the *only* year we had with Samantha, and so it means everything to us. As Dickens so aptly put it, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." That about sums it up.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0J345q4SETQ