Remembering My Daughter

By Melissa Baresel

My daughter was 31 the last time I held her hand, in the front room of a funeral home.
She was 31 the last times I kissed her and told her I love her.
I held her hand for almost 2 hours.  I apologized to her.
I told her that I miss her terribly, and that my life would never be the same.
She was my first child.
She was the child who made me a mother.
She was the one who taught me both the incredible joy and the unbearable pain of being a mother.

My daughter was 31 when she got married to a man I met in the emergency room when he texted me that she was gone.
She had been married to that man for 11 days.

My daughter will never be 32.
She will never watch her own daughters graduate, or marry, or have their own daughters (or sons).
She will never hold her own grandchildren.
I studied her face as I held her hand.  The funeral director was kind enough to have painted her nails (she would have appreciated that).  I looked for anything that might make this all just a terrible mistake.....but it wasn't. 
I wondered what I could have done to have changed her outcome.
Our outcome....this intense, incredible, and indescribable pain.
Her death.
And now I am searching for a way to not feel like a victim of her choice.
Not to feel helpless.
I need to find a way to be okay, because I'm not.
I am lost.
I am broken.
Because she was lost
She was broken.
It is too late to fix her.
I need to find a way to help fix someone else.
I am trying to find my voice.
I am trying to ease my pain.