Inside was a small cloth bag of flower seeds, sunflowers, and a letter folded around it, and when I read it I understood why she had chosen something that grows.
Grace had loved the big sunflowers along the back fence since she was a little girl, tall as she was and then taller.
She wrote that she wanted me to plant these somewhere I would see them from the kitchen window, and to tend them every summer, because flowers do what she could not promise to do, they come back, year after year, and she wanted me to have something of hers that would keep coming back, so that every summer of my life there would be a little more of Grace, not a little less.
A little more of Grace, not a little less. My girl, with a week left in this world, had thought about how to keep growing in my life after she was gone from it.
That is why I sat down on the edge of her bed and could not look away. She had sent me a garden, so that grief would not be the only thing that returned each year.
I planted them that week. They came up taller than me by August, a whole row of them nodding at the kitchen window, faces to the sun the way hers always was. I sit out there in the evenings and I am not lonely, because the whole fence line is full of my daughter.
Other mothers come by now, the ones who have lost what I lost. I send them home with seeds from the flowers of Grace, and now there are sunflowers growing in yards all over this town, a little more of my girl every summer, in more places than I could have dreamed.
I want the world to know the name, that is the thing. Not the manner of it, not the flag or the folding of it, but the name, and the laugh, and the way that child loved. So I say it, to anyone who will listen, and I tell them what was in that package, because a story kept is a person kept, and I am not about to let mine be forgotten by a world that moves on too fast. Say their names. It is the whole of what we can do, and it is everything.
The house is quieter than it used to be, I will not lie about that. But it is not empty the way I feared it would be. Every keepsake is a conversation, every anniversary a visit, and the love did not stop when the letters did. If anything it grew, because now I carry it for both of us. That is the secret nobody tells you about losing a child. The loving does not end. It only changes hands, and both hands are yours.
I kept that package sealed for almost a year because opening it felt like the end of her. It was the opposite. It was my Grace, planting herself in my life so she would come back every summer for the rest of mine. And she does. Taller every year. Face to the sun. Just like her.