~ a mask Everett made at school ~

Last night I watched a documentary about a 10-year-old girl named Maeve, who died in a traffic accident. Actually the documentary was about how her family and community are coping creatively with her death. Today I looked up their website, called Planet Creature.

Maeve’s father has written about the actual events of his daughter’s death, and I read that with great interest. He, like me, sat with his loved one’s body after death. In common were our feelings of wanting to do something but there being nothing to do, other than quietly communing with the body, saying a silent loving goodbye to it. I could recognize my own emotion in his use of a word that fits my experience around Mom’s death: disappointed.

Maeve’s mother told of a prophetic, symbolic dream the girl told her about on the morning of the accident. The dream clearly showed that Maeve was about to take a distinctly different path than that of her parents and sister. This dream was a huge comfort to both parents after Maeve’s death, and reminded me of Mom’s dream of meeting God and talking about what she was going to do in heaven. The dream seemed so right, to me; a sign that there is some meaningful force that does have a hand in our life, and death, stories.