Capture Your Grief: Day 7

Day 7: Sacred Place

My sacred place is my garden. After wanting to have a garden of our own for some time, we started it this year and it has been a big part of my healing. Almost every day this summer I was out in the garden singing and talking to all my plants. I may have looked a bit crazy sometimes, but it allowed me to be a little girl again. 

The coolest part was all the dragon flies. I had read a poem after a friend of a friend lost her sweet daughter. Ever since I read that poem, which was about dragon flies, I slowly started seeing more and more come into the garden. I'm usually pretty terrified of any bug, but these dragon flies I felt I had a connection to. Even the really big and kind of scary looking ones. So I began holding my hand out for them to land on and talking to them too. There would be days where I'd go out and 20-30 of them would just be hanging out in the garden. No where else in the yard, just the garden. I truly felt my sweet Ari there with me, as well as all her friends that she brought around just to make me smile. 



My other sacred place is the Angel of Hope. I've mentioned before that we have two bricks that were gifted to us. These mean the world. We did not get a burial spot for Ariella, so having a place to go where her name is there along with so many other angels. It's beautiful and perfect. It's a safe place for us to "visit" our Angel as a family. 

Every year, they do a candle light memorial on December 6th. No matter the weather...and in Minnesota, you bet your bottom we're all there bundled up as warm as can be. They also do a "Walk to Remember" which brings all of us who have lost a child together to remember the sweet faces and love we have for them. 

We go there for the walk, the candle light memorial, and for her birthday. And any other time of the year we feel is necessary. We have even brought our little Rainbow baby to see her :)

 

Below is the story of the dragonfly I mentioned above.

"In the bottom of an old pond lived some grubs who could not understand why none of their group ever came back after crawling up the lily stems to the top of the water.  They promised each other that the next one who was called to make the upward climb would return and tell what had happened to him.  Soon one of them felt an urgent impulse to seek the surface; he rested himself on the top of a lily pad and went through a glorious transformation which made him a dragonfly with beautiful wings.  In vain he tried to keep his promise.  Flying back and forth over the pond, he peered down at his friends below.  Then he realized that even if they could see him they would not recognize such a radiant creature as one of their number. 
The fact that we cannot see our friends or communicate with them after the transformation which we call death is no proof that they cease to exist."

by Walter Dudley Cavert
Remember Now
© 1944, 1971

 Ariella Grace. 9.2.12 - 10.29.12.
#CaptureYourGrief #WhatHealsYourHeart #AriellaGrace