Rest in Peace Skye Harriet Margaret Miller

May 23, 1991 ------------------ June 9, 2011

Dear Skye ~

I don't know how all of this works,

but it comforts me to think that perhaps you and Erin have found one another again

in a beautiful place where sunflowers bloom in abundance,

~ a place of freedom from pain, a place of much-deserved peace ~

where you can both look down upon us, your mothers,

whose hands and souls joined in that waiting room two years ago
and again today as we said goodbye to you.

May we be graced with persevering resilience as we live every day

with you both tucked snugly in each of our hearts.

photo, thanks to Mary Davis

For instance, there's a woman across the room from you in the waiting area of Radiation Oncology. You're both sitting with girls who appear to be about the same age. Each of you has a smile plastered on your face as you chat with these young ladies, and you're flipping through the pages of magazines dated February 2001 while trying to think about something other than the fact that they're going to call these dear girls back to those rooms that house awful machines the size of garbage trucks and shove each of them inside one. And because the young lady you're sitting with is braver than you, she says ~ Mom, you don't have to come back with me anymore. I'm not scared. It doesn't hurt. I'm FINE!! ~ so you keep that beaming smile glued to your face when you'd really rather throw up right on the ugly table holding all the outdated magazines.

The minute your precious girls are led away, one right after the other, you lock eyes with this woman, and before you know it the powerful forces that emanate from the wombs of mothers who have birthed babies who go on to receive THE diagnosis pull you to seats right beside one another, and you're quickly blurting out ~ My daughter is 18. Yours too? She has metastatic sarcoma. Oh my God, yours too?! The tear ducts automatically switch to free-flow as you clutch one another's hands, and in those few minutes that it takes for those machines to swallow your daughters, blast them and spit them back out again you share your souls. You quickly rummage through your purses to find scraps of paper to scribble phone numbers and email addresses on, blow your noses to pretend you haven't been crying so that when your girls emerge they don't say ~ REALLY MOM? ... and you've made a friend.
Her name is Hope.
My Friends - November 8, 2010