the third installment of the remarks i made at my daughter's grave on her 22nd birthday:

Love does not die. This is a statement often repeated to comfort the bereaved. This truth is the light I am beginning to perceive on the emerging side of the indescribably terrible place I was sent to when Bekah died.

I did not choose to come here. Bekah did not choose, court, or deserve her early exit from life. We are victims, each of us, chosen by random to know this pain and this loss where we should be knowing her voice, her laugh, her hugs….

Thank you Bekah, for your ongoing extra special efforts to reinvest me with a faith that allows hope, without which life is, if not impossible, certainly not worth my time. I have stalked your soul for almost a year and today it is your 22nd birthday…but you will never be older than 21 years 13 days. By the numbers I have learned that you were always 22, based on your date of birth. Those with a destiny number of 22 are especially special souls, with auras of gold and accomplishments of deep meaning. And so you lead your bereft mother away from the desert of despair back to life after your own life has been cut short.

That love is a force and a need as well as a feeling is not a new concept for me. Little did I know that my daughter would be taken abruptly and rudely by a human who is for my purposes the embodiment of Love's antithesis. So it is people who feed my faith and it is people who threaten it. People who want me to be happy and fulfilled and people who would happily relegate me to a lifetime in hell.

An irony attending Bekah's tragedy is that because of it, I have grown close to family members I never would have otherwise, I have gotten to know and come to love many of Bekah's friends who would have maintained their distance had she lived, and I have been comforted by and allowed to offer comfort to bereaved people from around the world. These people bring more and more love into my life. At times I want to wail and often I do cry, because why did Bekah have to die to enrich my life?

But in the final analysis, though as I have learned I cannot turn back the clock, make Bekah be alive again, or even effect justice for her, there are some choices left to me. Choices regarding whether I settle down in or work my way through the desert of despair. Whether I wail and protest the wrong done to Bekah from a vacuum of bitterness, or work to make a change and maybe save one mother and one child from having to endure this. Whether I accept everything that has been left to me and offered to me because Bekah died, or just the grief that wants to own me.

The bottom line is: if I choose only the grief and allow the rest of my time on this planet to be dictated by this bereavement, if I refuse the gifts, of love, friendship, companionship and comfort that have been presented to my children and I by generous caring people in the aftermath of her murder, because she should not have had to die to make this happen, Bekah will still be dead.

- posted by barbara @ 7/09/2002 01:53:00 AM