February.
Valentine’s Day.
The day, the months, and words associated with them summon memories, what we want to say, and what we wish to have said in moments long past.
As I try to remember what we did on Corrie’s last Valentine’s Day in 2020, I cannot recall. We were dealing with the first part of tornado damage. I recall the scramble to help both children write names on Valentine’s Day cards for school.
February reminds us that we grow closer to a time when memories of Corrie are no longer a few months ago, or one year ago.
Valentine’s Day reminds some of us of what we’ve lost. Just as quickly as I learned about a blessing, I lost it this week.
I will find the strength to get past our latest hurdle, but my daughter will forever be my Valentine.
Why do I say that? I love our son just as much.
I will always mourn my daughter. I will have bad days two years from now, and as I talk to some moms, even twenty years from now. I will have days when I laugh about the memories of Corrie because personality filled every inch of her spirit.
When I learned I’d lost …
I didn’t write in my journal about a miscarriage. It doesn’t make it any less important. I wrote about Corrie. I recorded a memory I had of her from October 2019, and I wrote: “I just miss her, and want my daughter back.”
Because just as some dream of feeling every fiber of someone’s love, you never want your heart to beat with half of it forever gone. You never want to experience the full endurance of the words: “I want my child back.”
What we have to restructure our minds as a society to understand is:
Grief is not the epitome of sadness, although it plays a part. Grief is the remembrance of the deepest love.
Please remember whether you are someone who currently has a lot of life and births to celebrate, grief is not the epitome of sadness. Grief is the remembrance of the deepest love. Everyday, I remember the mothers who miscarried. I’ve joined their journey. I remember the women who long to be mothers. The women who would make amazing mothers. I recall the mothers who, like me, decorate their babies’ graves.
As I go through my journals for different inspiration for poems and pieces of narration, I find I wrote more about my daughter than I’d realized. When I was at my previous school, I dealt with serious depression during the course of the last year. I started a strategy in my journal to record quick memories of good events that had happened that day. In March 2019, I simply wrote: “Corrie in her princess dress.”
I will always grieve my daughter. This does not mean I am to be pitied or that I will fall to my knees and cry. As I wrote, grief is the remembrance of the deepest love. When I grieve my daughter, I also celebrate her life because she deserves to be remembered as long as her parents and brother walk this Earth. She was the very essence of life, and I was so lucky to be her mother.
I recently learned two of my poems on another subject will be published this year. I wrote them in the summer of 2019. But I’d left my daughter’s book of poems half-edited. Yesterday, I finished editing my first symphony written in honor of Corrie called When We Danced in the Rain.
The collection consists of thirty poems in what I call five themed episodes, instead of chapters. The most joyous is the episode called “On the Way to Calabash” with memories full of Corrie’s antics at our little restaurant that we visited each time we went to the beach. The darkest is “Days and Numbers Lost,” but it covers the full first part of the journey with Corrie. Most poems were written between June and August 2020. The last one added was written in October.
It is a different kind of February.
Our first without her.
It is a different kind of Valentine I wrote, but I wrote in the remembrance of the deepest love.
Corrie's Season 