Happy Birthday, Princess

Today Elizabeth should be turning 9 years old. We visited the cemetery and brought the requisite flowers and a heart pick and a butterfly pick with ribbons. Danny made a drawing for her on pink construction paper. He picked out a pick balloon to send the letter to her. I'm not sure if it was funny or sad that his letter was too heavy to float away tied to the balloon. It just sank and sat hovering over the ground, bobbing a little up and down. Not flying to heaven like it was supposed to. We ended up tying only a 1/4 of the page to the balloon. Then it rose high in the sky. The rest of Danny's note is folded, wedged between a gladiolus stalk and daisies at Elizabeth's grave. Matt and Mike didn't make notes this year. Perhaps they have realized that those notes don't actually fly to heaven and that Elizabeth doesn't ever get to hold them. Whatever the reason, it is just one more way that things don't get better as time goes on. Danny wants to shop for presents to leave at the cemetery so Elizabeth can get them when she goes there. At 4, he apparently doesn't have a firm grip on what death is, and although we've tried to explain it, there comes a time when there are no more words. Who knows, maybe she does visit the cemetery grounds in her own way--Danny pointed out today that she likes it there because there are a lot of flowers and she told him before that she really likes flowers.

Elizabeth was six when she died. Just three months short of seven. Elizabeth Edwards includes this poem in her book "Resilience." It is written by a man who lost his daughter to leukemia when she was just six. It seems fitting on Elizabeth's 9th birthday.

Death Plus Time
by Phil Lister

how old is she
I don't know what to say
don't know how to add
six years alive and one year dead
six plus one
is usually seven but not now
six maybe
six plus one is six
in a year six plus two will be six
or six plus one is none