Tomorrow is Copeland's birthday. I can hardly believe so much time has passed. Conor and I pulled up the video we were so graciously given for her memorial service and I was absolutely undone as we watched what should be by now familiar images flash across the screen. For him, perhaps they were; for me - well, I confess I can so rarely watch the video that each time I do, it's like a sort of reunion... remembering her face, her noises, just the way she was. And realizing, all over again, that she's gone. I would ask you simply to pray for us. Amazingly, in almost six months, God has given me really smooth days. Not to say that the sadness doesn't creep in on occasion, but life has been startlingly normal and... good. For some reason, after putting Sellers to bed tonight, the weight of all that was about to happen a year ago tomorrow - the beginning of the best and the worst week of my life - hit and I felt the very air being sucked out of me. The joy. That strange, panicked sensation that rocked my very being when the funeral home took Copeland's body away... it all returned afresh, as though twelve months hadn't really gone by. In some ways, as I've told friends, I just want tomorrow to be normal. It hurts too much to allow it to be anything more. It's too hard. And yet, in others, I know it will bless me to stop and do whatever it is I need to do - cry, laugh, simply remember - and give myself the freedom to indulge what I beginning to realize I've long suppressed. Whether that suppression is healthy, I don't know. I suppose I've done what I've needed to do to get by. But i found myself tonight uttering the same prayers I did a year ago: "God, just get me through this. Get me through whatever time is left between now and the moment i get to hold her again." Pray that our grief would be authentic... whatever that means. And pray, too, that as we embark on a new season, one filled with unspeakable joy, that I will have wisdom and maturity to open my heart and my arms to embrace the new life we are about to welcome into our family.
Thank you all for being one of the many who reached out to Conor and I over the last twelve months to carry our burden. Your letters and cards and e-mails and even - of course! - comments on this blog, have meant more to me than I can express. I am forever altered by the way you have loved me. It will always shape the way I love others from now on and it will give me strength as I continue to walk this path the Lord has called me to.
With deepest gratitude and sincerest affection,
Boothe
