Warrior Princess.

When they told me you had left, I didn’t cry. I only felt like the news I had been half-expecting was now here. I felt a little guilty, even, because we were all praying that somehow, God would reverse this bad dream and make you all better again. And you didn’t. I somehow felt defeated, lost.

But I think you never did. I think you never allowed yourself to.

Yours, was the most beautiful funeral I’d ever been to. I just want you to know that. You’re a very special brave little girl to us all, and I just want you to know what a champion you’ve been. We were at your funeral, but it didn’t feel like we were mourning as much as we were celebrating your short life with us.

There were balloons. There were lots and lots of Balloons! And Colourful! Flowers! Everywhere! Snow white, Winnie the Pooh, Beauty and the Beast… and castles and sprinkles and shiny things everywhere. Your daddy came up to say how death… did not win, even though it may seem like it did. Your two best friends, 7 and 12 years old respectively, came up to share a minute’s worth of who you were to them. One of them, like you, was from my Sunday School class. I was so proud of her. Just like how I was and still am proud of you that even when the tumour took you away, you refused to let it win.

When it paralysed your right hand, you wrote with your left. When you could not walk straight, you used a handrail. When you could not swallow and they had to put a tube through your nose into your stomach, you joked that you looked like a little mouse. And when they shaved your hair for the brain biopsy and it totally shattered you and drove you crazy and made you cry ( I would, too), you said it was okay. You coped courageously. Your family triumped. You drew a cross on a piece of paper, you said God was good, in spite of your illness. You lived life bravely, till the very end.

How could death have won? Surely, it only produced the circumstance to which your courage shone through, the way stars do in the dark.

I don’t know why I cried when we sang at your funeral. After all, I should know, you’re a in a better place, a place where you had always wanted to go anyway. But I guess I cried still, because… I miss you.

When we went to see you in the coffin, it gripped me to see the medal I gave you folded neatly next to your body. It was the medal my overseas friend (who had liver cancer when he was 11 and then went on to do an Iron Man event later in life) had mailed to me to encourage you with. It gripped me also to see a stack of heart-shaped cards at your feet- they were they art and craft letters which I had taught my sunday school children to make, for a friend they wanted to encourage. Some of them made them for you.