Friday Focus 17/04/2020 – Sharing some joy for Jessica

This week has been a tough one with the second anniversary of Jessica’s death. We tried to focus on the joy that Jessica shared during her life and mark the date by doing little things to #givejoyforjessica and encouraging others to do the same.

 

 

Sophie and I made and decorated salt dough hearts which we delivered to some of our friends. One of my friends had bought butterfly badges and shared these with other friends for us to all wear on 14th April as we thought of and remember Jessica. It was lovely to see memories of Jessica being shared on Facebook. It was so hard not being able to go and visit her and sit by her forever bed, but GreenAcres were very kind and put some beautiful purple tulips in her vase and sent us photos. We certainly felt very much surrounded by love that day, and have been on the receiving end of a few little acts of sharing joy for Jessica. Thank you so much to everyone who helped make that day a little more bearable for us.

 

 

As with last year, it was the day before that was the harder day. Jessica died in the early hours of the 14th April, so most of our memories of various last moments with her take place on 13th April and the evening was particularly tough. We cried a lot that day but watching videos of Jessica helped make us smile too – especially a couple of unedited video reviews that I found with all the funny little moments of trying to get the girls to sit still and tell me what they thought, and not constantly ask “can I see the video now, Mummy?” or pick their noses or wave their legs in the air. Moments that really helped bring back the ‘realness’ of life with Jessica and some of the perfectly imperfect moments.

 

I’ve had quite a busy week overall. Last Sunday, I thought it would be nice to do a Facebook Live on our church page from my piano and sing a few Easter hymns. I was just going to record it from my phone, but my husband (who runs a company that provides audio-visual technical support) had other ideas! I ended up having proper lighting and microphones, words on the screen, and a little screen for me to be able to see what was being streamed while hubby controlled it all from his home office (or ‘Daddy’s man cave’ as it is usually known).

 

 

We enjoyed it so much that we were willing to make it a regular thing and it’s led to a lot of discussion over ways of ‘being church remotely’ which has been good. Our church is without a minister at the moment. It’s fair to say that most of the leadership (and membership) are not very tech-savvy so live streaming worship hadn’t really been considered as a viable option. In all honesty, I wouldn’t have thought of it myself a few weeks earlier. I’ve been quite ambivalent about church since Jessica died and my faith has certainly taken quite a battering. It was wonderful though to have that sense of worshiping together as a community once more on Easter Sunday and to start to care about church again. If you’d told me a couple of weeks ago, I’d be offering to co-ordinate live streaming of worship, I’d have laughed and said, “absolutely no way!” but here we are. God does indeed move in mysterious ways!

 

 

Things that have made me smile this week

• Thomas’s adorable new dungarees.

 

 

• The beautiful butterfly mobile that Jessica’s godmother sent to hang in our garden.

 

 

• Chocolate for breakfast on Easter morning.

 

• Doing an Easter egg hunt in the garden.

 

• The little heart-shaped patch of light that appeared in the dining room on the anniversary of Jessica’s death.

 

 

• The thoughtful little gifts and flowers we’ve been sent in memory of Jessica.

 

• Making fairy gardens with Sophie. I’ve also made her a new fairy house to go in the garden.

 

 

• Sophie making up a song and dance.

 

• Learning how to solve a Rubix cube.

 

 

• Doing an online quiz night with some of our friends.