For you Laura, on your birthday

Your magnificent brown almond-shaped eyes, photographed seven days before your death.

You came into the world with a facial ‘defect’, and when you left life, in a couple of seconds, you smashed your ‘shame’. A bilateral cleft lip and palate. The Coroner’s report called it a ‘sickness’. All the operations and all the pain which you bravely bore. All the hateful stares and whispers because you were different because you weren’t ‘perfect’. And in the early hours of the morning on the day you died one of your posts was a hard reminder of what you had to endure all your life.

Rest in peace my beautiful daughter Laura in a place far more beautiful, and kinder, than Earth.

I Wrote Your Name

I wrote your name in the sand,

but the waves washed it away.

I wrote your name in the sky,

but the wind blew it away.

So, I wrote your name in my heart,

and that’s where it will stay.

Always.

Author unknown