Grace

Do you remember the time when you and Ambe were trying to do handstands up the wall, in the room with the mismatched carpet tiles and the bright yellow walls? You got off of the floor with your belly full of the pizza you had just devoured, placed your hands on the floor flipped your legs up to the wall, unknowingly about 3 meters away from the wall causing you to land with a smack on your back, with those blonde curls that I've always loved, scattered across your face. You rose up brushing your hair out of your face and bursting out loud with your ever so bright laugh. That was your going away party and I will still tell you to this day that those decorations were terrible no matter how much you tell me you loved them!

But now you're gone, along with that hair I loved so much and that ever so bright laugh that lit up that entire room. I remember the day it all happened so vividly, my parents' hushed voices outside of my room. The classroom was so hectic that morning, everyone was rushing around as we had a history exam, Ambe walked through the door into that dark dingy classroom, that always smelt off, and looked me in the eyes as the words fell out of my mouth "What happened?" Her blue eyes didn't shine so bright and she wasn't herself, "You'll find out in a minute..." I could hear the pain in her voice and how your the decade old friendship that would stay with her forever. I knew somehow, my head had put the pieces together but I didn't want to admit it to myself until those two words had fallen out of her mouth 'Grace died.' There we were standing in the middle of the doorway holding sobbing our hearts out everyone looking at us, but holding each other so tight as if to check this was reality and not some type of twisted dream. I don't remember much from the rest of the day, only bits and pieces, walking aimlessly around school, the sombre silence at lunch watching the girls who were apparently so 'distraught' that the exams should be cancelled, run around the benches laughing like nothing was wrong like the world around them hadn't been ripped apart. I arrived at the empty office and called my mum sobbing down the phone barely getting the words out and her say softly "I know." You were gone and there was nothing we could do.

The day of your funeral, we were all standing outside our Hogwarts-like school with Ambe deciding what songs to sing. Amazing Grace was first and I spent days afterwards listening to it on repeat. I didn't go, I felt like I was intruding on something so special, you had grown up surrounded by all these families and a religion that held you all so closely together, I felt too much like an outsider to be there. I couldn't face seeing your little sister Niamh only 8 years old say goodbye to her only sister in the world, the other part wishes I went so I could finally say goodbye. A few weeks later Ambe's mum was driving me home, when she passed over the program from your funeral asking if I had seen it yet, flicking through the pages, there were photos of your little smiling face in countless places, on climbing frames, leaning over the fence with a giant beaming smile.

School had set up an almost half-dead tree for you in the library, right by that big Victorian fireplace, and we could go up to the front desk, pick up a bright coloured pen to write on coloured tags, tying them on with memories of you. That tree was going to be planted in the garden... It never was planted, somehow they found money for brand new benches with the school logo carved in but couldn't plant a tree already half dead? Or even an engravement into a bench in memory of you? Somehow it feels like an injustice to your memory, I know you wouldn't care since you didn't care much for the school anyway. But it still feels like that they needed to mark this moment somehow acknowledge you were gone not just spend a week or two caring until the half of the term was over and they could go back to normal like nothing had happened. I however did mark it, I have my own tree if you like but more fluffy and black with floppy ears and a nose. I got a jet black rabbit called Gracie after it all happened, and her sister Nibbles.

I don't think I could possibly understand how terrified and the pain you must have experienced at the time, away from your family and wanting nothing more than your mother to hold you tight and take the tightness away from your chest and to hold you close and reassure you that everything would be alright as you last breath left your lips... But no. You were all alone with no mother to hold you tight as you whispered your soft goodbyes, in an ambulance halfway down a mountain in the Himalayas.

It started off slowly, then all at once, the breaking apart from our group. Your death had torn me apart, thereby tearing the rest of us up. I want to make it clear I'm not blaming you it would have happened either way, since we were that group just put together out of circumstance, rather than true friendship. It just helped push things along a little quicker. But, it all happened for a reason, because I'm happier now I moved back to Scotland and have a whole new group of friends that I know won't leave me when the going gets tough. It's been great I'm only half an hour from the centre of Edinburgh, you'd love it here, we could have gone to see the pandas together our favourite animal.

Do you remember when you came into our class the first week? Mr Lax standing at the grand old height of 5 foot 2, who told us he couldn't grown a moustache for Movember because all that he could grow was fluff, gave us that awkward conversation on puberty and sex which seemed hilarious coming from a man that seemed to be still going through puberty himself. But you won't get to experience your first love, or you're wedding day surrounded by the people you love. You won't know how it feels to carry a baby or see their first steps and their grinning face looking up at you, seeing the smaller version of you growing up with the people that loved them the way you were loved. You won't get to experience that. Any of it. But we will without you, our kids will grow up without ever getting to meet their Auntie Grace or know your children. Somehow you managed to go through life only as a child never reaching your thirteenth birthday just a few days after I turned 14 as you were taken far too soon with someone with the most tender of hearts who just wanted to make everyone happy. But I know one thing you definitely got to experience, you managed to gain an eternity of love in the few short years that you lived.

In your religion, you believe your spirit was friends with the people in your life as they were next when the universe began and they spend lifetimes together finding each other somehow. A few months after you died one of your, Sophia and Ambe's family friends had a baby, who I like to believe has your spirit. May they have your brilliant blue eyes and those cascading curls with your smile that lit up the room, or maybe they look nothing like you but I know for one they will just be as loved and adored as you were. You are still with Ambe and Sophia in some way even if they can't see you and somehow that makes everything better.