Samantha’s Memorial Party

Samantha’s memorial party was a fitting tribute to what a beautiful soul she was.  We put a bubble machine outside the door so everyone had to walk through the bubbles to enter the building.  There were purple, pink and white balloons on the floor and streamers on the ceiling.  There was a banner on the wall that read ‘Live On, Samantha’.  It was not a ‘funeral’ at all.

Her urn was a beautiful lavender with silver butterflies on it.  There were fairies and crystals around her pictures.  Christopher and his friends recorded some songs for the ceremony – ‘Sing a Song’, because Samantha definitely sang her own song, ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’ a solo by her brother, ‘It’s My Party, I’ll Cry If I Want To’ which is what she sang to us every time we started crying.  The guys did a really good job on the music.

We then showed a video collage of pictures of Samantha from birth.  She had such an angelic face sometimes :-).

These pictures most personified Samantha’s personality when she wasn’t sick.  Of course, the video was about 20 minutes long.  The boys sang ‘You Raise Me Up’ which played behind the photos, and Chris sang ‘True Love’ at the end, because Samantha is now our Guardian Angel.

After the video, we all took a purple rose and spoke of how Samantha had touched our lives.

We then placed the rose into a base of greenery and built an arrangement from our love for her. It was much more beautiful that what we could have purchased.

Samantha’s urn was buried next to where her ‘other mother’ (her nurse Cheryl) will be buried. It was important to Cheryl to have her near her, so I agreed to let her ashes be buried there. Since Samantha’s spiritual name was Dolphin Spirit, the stone was perfect.

We released butterflies, but were not able to get a good picture of the release.  We apparently had not warmed them up enough, and many of them sat there on the ground for a while.

After the cemetery, we returned to the memorial site and ate and partied.  Samantha’s favorite part was when the boys started popping all the balloons.  It was a very intense day.

But, everything was perfect.  Samantha loved it when things didn’t work out as planned.  She loved chaos and laughter, and her ceremony was filled with both.

Live On, Samantha!