when words aren't easy.

photo credit: @bethcabral

I'll be honest. 

I've been trying to write something beautiful for you, for the last several weeks, 

and it just hasn't come.

May 25th, 2016.

Two years today since you went Home, Meg. 

Today has been hanging like a storm cloud over my consciousness. 

And if I'm being honest, my consciousness is already a mess as of late.

I'm calling it my "nearly-30 crisis mode".

Not much energy for anything besides trying to put one foot in front of the other;

it makes it hard to write vividly, deeply.

I just wanted to honor you in a really small act of remembrance. 

To somehow throw out into the heavenlies what I'm feeling today, too.

But nothing came. 

Sometimes words come so easily they literally bleed out of my fingertips; there's not enough ink in the pen, I can't type fast enough, the thoughts and words come so fast I forget half of them before they're logged on paper or in a document. 

It just doesn't always work that way, clearly. It can't be turned on and off like the tap. 
It doesn't mean I'm not feeling anything...sometimes it means I'm feeling too much.

But Meg. Oh Meg.

Meagan Jean, I think of you.
ALL.
THE.
TIME.

I think of you when I'm driving and a song that we listened to together in high school comes on the radio. 

I think of you when I smell lilac anything, because you went through a phase where you absolutely adored everything lilac scented. 

Sunshine and the smell of crunchy pine needles brings everything flooding back, our days of make-believe in the woods.

When I'm in a room with your sisters I have to pinch myself, remind myself you're no longer here, because they laugh like you, they smile like you. The three of you share facial expressions, and a killer sense of humor. 

Sweet girl, we leave more of ourselves behind in the people we love than we can possibly imagine. You wouldn't believe how much you left behind in them.

I think of you when I'm laughing with my niece. She knows your name, and she knows where you've gone. 
Your death made heaven a real place to a little girl who is learning what it means to love Jesus. She knows Who you're with.

I have a hundred thousand memories of you that flood my mind at any given moment, from any of hundreds of stimuli - a look, a smell, a song, a movie, a pull on my heartstrings, a laugh from a stranger. Driving on a road we traveled together - even if it was just one time.

If I've learned one thing since you died, sweet cousin, it is this: the people we love never really leave us.

I think the people we "lose" become more a part of us than ever before, because we are so determined, so driven to keep them alive in the ways we know how. 

In photos, 

in remembering, 

in stories we tell, 

in weeping, 

in laughing.

In LOVING.

In loving, even though we are on completely separate sides of heaven.

Love knows no separation of the two, 

because Love has a name, 

and He is everywhere at once.

Love's name is Jesus and you are at His feet, Meg, and He is here with me, too. 

So maybe we're not that far, after all. 

But today it feels so far. And I'm going to let it.

I love you, sweet girl. All my love, Meggy.

<3 Ecka

How rare and beautiful it truly is...to even exist. <3