What a relief

Dear Ella,

You will be pleased to hear that I am going to give you a break and let other people do the writing for a few days.  Letters and messages for you continue to arrive in all shapes and formats - they are all so lovely and I am sure will make a welcome relief from my ramblings.
Lots of love
Mum
xx


''Dear Ella,
Yesterday I went to the second of my Bereavement Groups. This time we really got stuck into emotions and did some (rather wacky) exercises to express ourselves. One that has stuck with me, and I realise sounds totally silly when I explain it, was when we were given boxes of 'things', varying from rocks to love hearts, and asked to put them down on the floor in a pattern of sorts that would represent where we stood with our family and relations in the current situation we were there to grieve over. Mine obviously involved more friends than family, so I decided this was still ok and set about choosing an assortment of buttons. It is the first time I have been asked to represent things in such a way but I tried to do what they were saying and went along with it, and before I knew it had a rather methodical pattern of buttons set around a centre point. That centre button was you. It felt very weird to say so when faced with questions from my partner in the exercise. Also rather subconsciously you were a clear button and all the others were solid colours. Talking about why these things occurred felt very surreal. I'm still not sure what I have taken from it, but hopefully we will revisit it in a few weeks time and try the same thing again. The aim is to see if any thing has changed - ie. buttons move closer to eachother means relationships repaired/building/becoming closer, and moving further apart may mean we are moving on etc, I'm sure you get the idea. Anyway what has stuck with me is this idea of you being this clear, near invisible button in the middle of a big circle of friends. It really saddened me to look on my buttons and see that the circle wasn't complete, and had I been asked to do this on a regular day maybe a year ago, we would all have been at equal points, in a group, together. I was sorry to see that was not the case now. And from the bottom of my heart hoped that that would change. But I know it won't. I felt that somehow if you were here and could have seen it (and were willing to be involved in such a strange and controversial activity!) that you would have been offended to not have been in our circle of friends, and would have hated the fact that you were different. So I just wanted to write and apologise in a sense for thinking of you like this. 
Anyway on a better note, next week we have been asked to take in a reading of some sort, I have got two - the poem I read at your celebration back in November, and Greenday lyrics :) The thought of this being the activity next week has cheered me up a little, and I look forward to going back. 
All my love,
Georgina''