Dealing with loss and regret

Today's post is not related to scrapbooking or crafting. Today, I want to talk about loss, grief and regret.
Just the thought of typing the words has me in tears but that isn't surprising as I've cried so many tears in the past 12 days that I wonder how they are still able to flow so frequently and abundantly. Twelve days ago my world and the worlds of so many people completely changed when my youngest sister passed away suddenly and unexpectedly. I don't know how long a person can live in shock or denial but I'm pretty sure I'm still at that point. It's so hard to mourn when your mind hasn't completely wrapped around the fact that she's gone. I know she's gone but it still doesn't feel real.
I hadn't spoken to my sister in a few months...not because we'd fallen out, not because I was angry with her, not because I didn't want to talk to her and certainly not because I didn't love her. I thought about her every single day...EVERY day. And just about every day I thought about calling her but I kept putting it off. "As soon as I finish so and so..." Or "after this or that..." but as good as my intentions were, it just never happened. The fact that I am not a big phone talker probably contributed but the point is that I didn't call. I didn't reach out to her and tell her that I was thinking about her or how much I loved her.
And now I have to live with that.
People who knew my sister knew she was loud, obnoxious and possibly a little crazy sometimes. But the people who really knew her knew that she was a loving person with a heart of pure gold. I've seen people do her wrong time after time and yet she didn't turn her back on them. She might yell and scream and throw a few (Ok, a lot of) obscenities their way but at the end of the day she would have given the literal shirt off her back to those same people. She lived a hard life and she struggled a lot but she always made it though and rarely did she ever ask anybody for anything. She was a good and kind person and she will be missed more than she would have ever imagined.
I'm not going to go on and on but I felt like I needed to acknowledge her death-- if for no other reason than my own peace of mind.

Losing her so suddenly has made me even more conscious of the reason I started scrapbooking 12 years ago. While she left behind photos for her children, there are none of her personal thoughts, feelings or memories associated with those photos. I want to leave more for my children and grandchildren...maybe it's selfish and maybe it means more to me that it ever will to them...I have no way of knowing, but I do know I'm going to keep scrapbooking and preserving as many memories as possible.

I want to share a couple of older layouts with my sister as the subject. These are just quick photos I took of the layouts still in the page protectors so not the best quality.

This is one of my earliest layouts...that's me and my sister
quite a few years ago. We were at Mama's for Thanksgiving.

journaling is blurred...I have always loved this layout. It's
a great picture of her and it has lots of sparkly :)

That's it for today guys. I actually have a couple of layouts completed that I haven't shared with you yet and I'll try and get to that  later this week.
Thanks for coming by!

Rhonda

RIP Kim...you are loved and will never be forgotten.