Three years ago today, my first granddaughter, Eliana, died in Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago, after several painful months of life.  

Today I sit in the sunshine in Eliana’s mother’s house.  My daughter Elizabeth and I are both sitting on the sofa with the dog between us, quietly typing at our PCs while her one-year-old naps in the nursery.

I came over to watch the baby today while my daughter and her husband take some quiet time to remember Eliana. Later the two of them will go out to lunch.

My daughter took the day off.

We talked this morning when I got here.

I said that I wanted to give her whatever she needed today, and we agreed that she definitely needed some time to write. 

Elizabeth is a working mother of a one-year-old.  She loves to journal but doesn’t get much time for it in her busy daily life.  So when the baby wakes up, I will take her, to give my daughter that gift.

In the meantime, we both sit with our own PCs (miracles of modern technology), typing away. Recording our own thoughts, our own reflections.

And I think what a blessing it is to have this grown up daughter, beautiful on the inside and the outside, living an intentional life, a life that chooses love, service, and caring…. Putting those first in her life, and then putting 100%  of herself into what she does.

Having Elizabeth inherit my gift for writing, my need to put words together into a shape that crystallizes one’s experience into words on a page or on a screen… that is lagniappe, as they say in New Orleans.  An extra gift.

I heard a speaker yesterday say that whether we embrace life or run from it, either way, we will experience pain and suffering.  That none of us escape life, no matter what we do, without pain.

No one could prevent Eliana’s death. Yet what a life she lived. In her brief, intense life, she taught us so much and lived so fully that there were over 500 people at her funeral.  And the gifts she gave to each of us, in our family, will last forever.

I don’t know what my daughter is feeling or writing today, but I know what I feel.  Today I remember and enter again into that special place of love that Eliana took us to, the all-suffusing love that surrounded Eliana and was so manifest that the nurses said wonderingly, “This room is so full of love!” 

Today I also remember, and feel again, the pain.  The pain for what might have been.  The pain of remembering the physical pain that Eliana lived with daily.  The pain of powerlessness as my daughter and her husband took a dark journey down one of the hardest paths parents ever have to travel.

I also feel gratitude. Gratitude for the release of putting these words on paper.

Gratitude for the love that surrounded us at our darkest hour.

Gratitude that I can help my daughter, today, by watching her daughter, as my daughter remembers and reflects…

Gratitude for the new life in my daughter’s nursery, baby Hanah, who recently turned one year old and is a solid, beautiful chunk of joy, completely healthy, who can be touched and cradled and caressed as baby Eliana never could be.

 I know that I’m supposed to end blog entries with a little life lesson, a sound bite that can be taken away and remembered.  And I am supposed to end descriptions of pain with the reassurance that the pain has gone away, so the reader can walk away satisfied.

But I cannot do that today.

I can’t turn that sober, wondering, pain-wracked little human being that was Eliana into a trite phrase.

 I don’t have words for what happened with Eliana because I don’t understand it myself.  I have no answer for why she was born as she was, why she was allowed to suffer, and why she had to die of such a terrible disease.

For me, her life and death is a mystery that I don’t understand.

There are several facts here that I do know, and do believe.

I do not think it was a coincidence that she died so close to Easter. I know that the resurrected Christ has walked with me on all the darkest paths of my life and will continue to do so every day of my life.

I know that Eliana is in the hands of a loving and compassionate God and that someday we will see her again.

I know that love, peace, and serenity flow into my life when I stop trying to figure out a mystery that I can’t figure out, and relax into acceptance, and putting my will and my life back into God’s care.

As I do today.

These are the things I do know, and for today, these are enough.