Remembering Lily: Lily's 2nd Birthday

This week we celebrated Lily's 2nd birthday. It's hard to believe it has been two years. When Lily died, our world completely stopped spinning. I would see other people continuing on their normal lives and and try to remember what it felt like to have a world that kept going around. I'm not sure when, probably because it happened gradually, but life started to go on.

Some friends in our support group introduced us to the the Christmas Box Angel monument in the Spanish Fork, Utah cemetery. If you have read The Christmas Box by Richard Paul Evans, you will know the history behind the angel. Every December 6th there is a candlelight ceremony held there for everyone who has lost children. It became a special place for us to go and remember our little angel.

These were taken on Lily's Day last year (10 Feb 2008). We brought pink and white baby's breath from some of the bouquets we had received after Lily was born. The flowers had dried so nicely that we had kept them in a vase for a year. It seemed appropriate for Lily's first birthday to leave them there with the angel.

When we decided to move to Illinois, we were very sad to leave "Lily's Angel," as we had come to call it. We visited the angel one more time just before we started the drive east.

Mike had looked online and found that the Christmas Box Angel closest to our new home was over three hours away. As we neared Lily's day this year, I looked at the listing of angel monuments again and found that a new one had just been built in Springfield, only an hour and a half from our home! It was still too far to travel on a Tuesday evening, so we we drove over last Saturday instead. It was nice to find a new special place.

It was a gorgeous day, the nicest we've seen since winter weather set in, with the temperature in the 60s. Eliza loved being outside. I love this last, more pensive picture of her. It make me wonder what she knows.

To commemorate Lily's birth, I wrote a shortened (though far from short) version of her story to post on our blog. When we first lost Lily, I found comfort in reading other families' stories of loss and journeys to healing. At the time I was not a faithful enough blogger to record our own experience, which is sad. My journal-keeping was about as faithful as my blogging, which is even sadder. The best record I have is in letters I have written to Lily explaining how she has blessed my life in ways I never would have imagined. Maybe eventually I'll share some excerpts here.