Last week, my beautiful, 16 year old niece passed away in surgery she was having to remove a tumor that was growing on her top vertebrae and into her lovely brain stem. Such a shock. Such a blow to my sense of safety and well being. Such a blow to my family.
I can't even find the words to express what an extraordinary child she was, although I have been struggling to do so since the day it happened. Even in writing her eulogy last week, I don't feel that I could ever do justice to her. Nobody really could. How do you stand in front of five hundred people and tell them that what has happened is okay? That we loved her enough? We did love her. She never ever stopped smiling. Even in the hospital, undergoing very frightening and devastating treatment, she smiled though it. I would have crawled inside myself had it been me.
Everything about her was special. She was beautiful, she was funny, she was vibrant, she was witty, she was fun to be around. She was not like your regular, run of the mill, moping teenager. I loved her. People loved her; they adored her immediately. This is not something that I am making up in her absence. There were over 500 heartbroken people at her funeral last Friday, if that says anything about the impact she had on the lives of people who met her. People wanted to know her and be around her, be a part of her life. She was captivating and she stole people's hearts quite by accident. The children's hospital shut down at 2 o'clock for a whole hour in her memory during her funeral, because her surgeons could not make the 6 hour drive, but her nurse did. Even the operating room stopped. I want to go around and shake people until they realize fully how much the world is missing now that she is gone. I still can't make her be gone in my mind. How can it even be true?
The thing that reverberates in my mind and shakes me is that nobody saw this coming. 10 weeks ago, she was a normal, healthy teenaged girl. We did not know the tumor existed until late August when she was in an accident and they just happened to spot it on a scan they did to check for damage from it. There was no damage from the accident, aside from a mild concussion she sustained. Just this horrible growth that has apparently been there since her birth. We didn't know. It was such a shock.
I wish I'd have made it to the hospital in Edmonton a few hours sooner than I did. I went to see her twice after she'd passed away, and I touched her hand which was too cold. I can still feel the coolness of her skin where I touched her in my hand and it's days later. It seemed to penetrate through me. I wish I could have said goodbye to her before it was too late.
I'm home now, thousands of miles away from my sister and her children and my family and it is strange. Things are where I left them in my rush to get to the hospital, not expecting at all to be going to her funeral. People who never knew that she existed are carrying on around me, not knowing what sparkle is missing from this pitiful earth now- not having been touched by it. Do they even know what has been stolen from them? How lucky I am to have had her touch my life and so deeply impact it, as young as she was.
We let 300 blue balloons go at the end of her funeral. The wind came up and took them all at once in a massive group. It was a beautiful tribute, but what can you say after tragedy has laid its perverse hands on you without consent? Has violated your security? Has stolen from you?
I don't know. I just miss her.
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