Remembering

Ed and I have a once-a-year musical gig together, at the local bereaved Parent Support Group's annual Remembrance Service. We play and sing a song by Australian poet Henry Lawson, set to music by folksinger Priscilla Herdman, called The Waterlily. It's a sad and beautiful song, about a mother dreaming of her child who has died.

There have been 15 of these services since our baby Sophie died; we've been to all but one (the year I ended up in the hospital a few years back.) We've been doing this song for perhaps the last 9 or 10 years. It should become easier, but I am finding that in the last couple of years I have had a harder time getting through the song without crying. I suspect it is because there are relatively few times that I devote to simply thinking about her, and this is one of them.

I consider the night of the service to be sacred. Other parents I know have drifted away from it, no longer feeling the need to be there, and that's OK. I suspect Ed might too, if I wasn't so compelled to go. But there is a point in the service where all of the names of the babies are read aloud, and hearing Sophie's name spoken by someone else is a gift.

One mother has made it her project to put together memory quilts, with squares that families have contributed. This is the square I made for Sophie, in the year after she died. The little bunny was drawn by our eldest daughter, who was 5 when her sister died. Our younger daughter came later.
I welcome these moments of remembering.

(Thanks to Barbara H. for taking the picture and emailing it to me.)