“How’s your week been?” texts my sweet friend. “Girl! The crappy and the beautiful! Always! Until I get to Heaven, then it will all be beautiful!” I reply.

“The crappy and the beautiful” refers to an earlier blog in which I described the highs and lows of this life after my daughter’s death.

And let me stop right there. Because part of the crappy is simply choosing words to describe the present state of my precious daughter, words that don’t pierce through my heart and stop my train of thought. I really can’t stand to refer to her as “deceased” and certainly not “dead!” Dead is the worst word in the world.

The truth is that she is very much alive in heaven, but the reality is that I am here on earth. So, however I choose to refer to her, the words don’t come easily, but always fall clumsily from my mouth.

So there’s the crappy, but there’s also the happy.

A huge part of the happy is the part of my daughter that she left behind. She named her Brooklyn Grace.

Brooklyn was ten months old when her mommy went to Heaven (my favorite way to describe her passing), and through a wonderful miracle of God, we were allowed to adopt her.

So in addition to my two beautiful surviving daughters who are grown and gone (out of the house), we are now parenting this curly-haired, blue-eyed, five-year-old redheaded bundle of joy.

Here’s the happy, when she throws her little arms around my neck and asks if I need “some lovin’s.” Answer: always yes.

Here’s the happy, when the sound of her voice either singing or talking to herself as she plays fills this house and this heart.

Here’s the happy, when she says, “Nana, you’re my best friend.”

One day we went for a walk and picked some wildflowers. “Why do these have splinters on them?” she asked after I handed them to her.

“That’s just the way God made them.” (My go-to reply when I don’t really know the answer.)

“He shouldn’t put splinters on flowers!” was her astute reply. I laughed and agreed.

This is how we think life should be, right? Only beautiful. But the reality is that the flowers have splinters. The challenge is to look past the crappy to the beautiful. To savor the sweet in the midst of the sad. To see the happy in the midst of the hard.

Here’s the happy.

It’s time to write again. I haven’t written in this blog for many months because it had become a log of my grief journey and, frankly, I got tired of grieving. Moreover, I was really tired of talking about it.

When you don’t talk about it, you begin the task of telling yourself that you’re okay, that you were blessed to have her 21 years, that you’re blessed to have other precious daughters, that you’re blessed she left such a wonderful little human behind so full of love and sweetness. You try to find the good, all the good you can, hoping it will overcome all the bad you feel inside. And when it doesn’t, you feel worse.

When you lose someone, a part of yourself is missing that can never be reclaimed. Sure, you go on with life, you find many moments of joy. But the hole is always there. The missing returns.

So you keep a secret drawer with a few items of her favorite clothes. And you retreat to press your face into them, searching for the familiar scent of her that has long since faded.

When you take a family picture it’s never whole. It’s imperfect. It’s incomplete. The heart sees what the eyes don’t. She’s always missing.

You better believe your heart will never let you remember any times your beautiful, sweet, soft-spoken daughter was anything but. Your head knows different, but the heart speaks louder. Recalling only good times. Good times. Good times. Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump thump.

The sweeter the memories, the stronger the pain. Oh, my heart, why you gotta be so mean?

I think for the rest of my earthly days I will travel this path back and forth, the sad and the sweet, the despair and the hope, the head and the heart.

This is what missing someone feels like.