Stevie Gurl and The Flower Wave

She was five. Sitting quietly in the window, she watched for someone who wasn't ever coming. Her eyes squinted as she strained to hear a car or anything approaching.

"Mama, when is Jesus bringing the baby back?"

I choked back my tears and smiled down at her. My poor, sweet Stevie didn't understand yet. The baby wasn't coming back. Her little sister had passed away and she sat in the window daily waiting for her return.

"Now that she has a new heart, she's coming home, right?"

I brushed her hair back from her face and shook my head. I explained to her again how the baby had to stay in heaven to keep her new heart, how she wasn't coming home, and how we wouldn't see her again. Stevie looked puzzled. Her eyes searched mine for some sort of answer that I couldn't give her.

"But I'll miss her. How will she know I love her?"

There wasn't a good answer coming to mind. How could I make a 5 year old understand what I wasn't grasping myself? The only thing I could think to do was take her to the cemetery. We went together and put flowers on her sister's grave. We whispered "I love you" into the empty quiet and held each other as we wept for the baby we missed so much.

"My sister died and isn't coming back."

For weeks after, Stevie still struggled with the notion that the baby was never coming home. She also couldn't understand how leaving flowers on a grave was giving a gift to her sister who now lived in heaven. She played outside in the front yard, waiting for someone to bring back her sister day after day. But one day was a little different.

"I've picked flowers to give to my sister."

I went to take them from her and put them in water, telling her we would go to the cemetery later. She pulled her outstretched bouquet back. With her shoulders pulled up to her ears, she shrugged me away and marched back out into the yard. She then laid them with great care on to a large rock near the end of the driveway.

She spent that day sitting, watching, waiting. As the evening crept in and the night breeze began to blow, the now wilted flowers began to stir on the rock. "Your flowers died", I breathed to her as I took her hand to bring her inside. After a few moments the flowers drifted away one by one into the pink sky.

"Now sister has her flowers."

Stevie smiled up at me. In her own way she had come to terms with her sisters death. In a single afternoon, she had not only figured out death but how to give her sister a gift without having to physically handing it to her.

I forever wear a wave of flowers floating across my shoulders in the wind...

Stevie's flowers to her baby sister in heaven.