Hot Pink Jellybean

Hot Pink Jellybean would be seventeen now, but she died of brain cancer a month after sweet sixteen. She was sassy and lively and hell-bent on getting what she wanted. So hell-bent she often walked all over others. Life with Hot Pink Jellybean was rarely easy. Let's just say a diagnosis of anti-social personality disorder wouldn't have fazed me.

Despite all that, she was my first baby and I loved her terribly, even when I hated her. I'm immensely grateful for our last year together. It sucked in more ways than I can name; she was sick as a dog from radiation and chemo, she couldn't use the right half of her body, and we watched her disintegrate mentally and physically over her last few months. But we also got to say a long, long goodbye. Nothing left unsaid and undone.

Some parts of mourning her get easier with time. Other parts, perhaps counterintuitively, get harder. Like an early Alzheimer's patient, I know I'm forgetting things I want to keep remembering. And I know the forgetting is inevitable. Then there's life: hers stopped at sixteen, ours go on. It's not so hard to celebrate her birthday now, but what music would she have liked in fifteen years? We'll never know. My other children, including the one born after Hot Pink died, will turn seventeen, and twenty-seven, and seventy. Hot Pink Jellybean will always be sixteen.