Good Grief

Oh, this winter is horrid and I’m completely sick of it. I waved my white flag in February. It’s now April. And still winter.

So, what will I talk about that will make this post not depressing?

My grief.

Ha. What? I’m going to talk about grief and somehow that will not be depressing?

Yep. Stick with me, here.

Today, my sister has been in Heaven just as long as she spent time with me and my family here on Earth.

13 years.

Dude. My brain is having a hard time wrapping around that. How could that much time have passed? I can still see her big, blue eyes, her huge smile and her snarky attitude appear right before my eyes. I haven’t lost any little bit of her, but it’s seriously been 13 years?

This is where the good comes into play. The way that this post will not end badly or sad. It’s what I think of as “good” grief. Thinking about every wonderful thing that has happened in my life that contains my sister.

Playing barbies, watching Disney movies, singing to Backstreet boys, Boyz II men, N-Sync, and 98 degrees. (HA!) Oh, and Celine Dion. We spent so much time cutting out pictures of Leonardo DiCaprio from countless teen magazines and ‘sticky-tacking’ them all to the wall. (yay Titanic!) Sometimes with blue sticky-tac that my mom hated because it left blue marks on the walls. Whoops! We would pull out our baby-books and photo albums and stare at all the pictures from when we were really little (like 1-3 years old) and laugh and laugh, even though we were still really little. I remember road trips to see family for holidays in our big conversion van, in the big bench seat in the back, sharing a portable CD player. Dad got us an adaptor, so we could each put in our own set of ginormous headphones to listen to the Backstreet Boys, Boyz-II-men, N-Sync or Celine Dion at the same time.

I remember watching her play the piano, so little, but so proud. And so much better than me! J Singing in church, as loud as we possibly could. Looking at each other around our Dad, and laughing. That giggle! I won’t ever forget that giggle. Sitting at the kitchen breakfast nook at my grandparents, eating Kix with about 5 tablespoons of sugar on the top, so then at the end you could basically eat all of the sugar that didn’t dissolve in the milk. I remember doing those paint by number posters that we worked on in the upstairs bathroom(?) of my grandparents farmhouse because the bathtub up there was really cool, according to Laura. It was pink. J

These little memories. They are so fantastic. And they are always the things I think about on this day. She was a gift. My awesome big sister.

See, I told you.

The good grief.

May these memories make you smile today, too.