Took Penelope for a walk this morning and the sky was so beautiful. Dark blue sky with rain clouds boiling up. Never seen such a beautiful color in the clouds, almost an eggplant purple. We came in and the rain boiled out of the clouds in a heavy downpour. Made me sad in a deep heart hurtful way.

I sat down to look up some color charts to find the correct purple color word and it was Rebeccapurple. Fit the color of those clouds perfectly. Looking up this color name, I stumbled upon the stories of a beautiful child who loved the color purple. Rebecca Alison Meyer died of brain cancer on her sixth birthday. That shade of purple just matched the rain clouds in my sky. Maybe subconsciously I felt her death and Rosie’s death when the clouds dropped their tears. Her father, Eric Meyer, wrote some beautiful essays that made me weep, about their family’s cancer journey with Rebecca. Course I have lost a child myself so these essays were so poignant and meaningful to me.

He wrote a beautiful discourse on all the things Rebecca would never do and the list made me realize when Rosie died I selflessly thought of all the things that her passing would mean to me and our family — the loss of future grandchildren, the aunt taken away from her brothers’ children, all the mother/daughter shopping trips and eating lunch in special restaurants, all the holidays passing without her, watching her graduate from college, her wedding, the family milestones celebrated without her — and I didn’t think about the things she never got to experience as she entered her young womanhood. She’s been gone for 21 years and 25 days. The pain is just as fresh as the pain of that Sunday morning phone call telling me of her death. You never “get over” the pain of losing a child you just learn in your own way and own time how to put one foot in front of the other and keep walking through life.

I’ve been sitting here for a while pondering on what I think Rosie has missed by being killed in a car wreck at age 17. She was a freshman in college so she’ll never have the satisfaction of having that degree in her hand. She’ll never fall in love, never break a heart, or have her heart broken. She’ll never marry, never decide to have children. She’ll never lay in the arms of a man who loves and cherishes her. She always told Chief to save up ‘cause she was “having the biggest wedding there’s ever been at St. James.” She’ll never hold her oldest brothers’ children or share secrets with her little brother. She’ll never party and frolic in the ocean with her girlfriends. She missing all the family cousin shenanigans. She’ll never have a social media account to rant and rave on. She’ll never experience the excitement of her own car or her own home. She’ll never know the outpouring of love and sympathy from family and friends that our family experienced after her death. She’d be so proud of the garden playground at St. James dedicated in her memory.

Losing a child is one of the most traumatic events a parent can experience. I think Eric Miller sums up a child’s death so accurately — “I feel the weight of these years she will never have and they may yet crush me.”