"Shut up! Shut up!" I shouted at the radio. As another song was being played that brought memories flooding back. It did not matter what station I flicked to, or how much I shouted at the radio, the memories were always there. In the end out of shear frustration I turned the radio off. Leaving just the sound of the car as it slowly ate up the miles along with the rhythmic beat of the windscreen wipers as they battled the spring shower I had been driving through for the last hour.

"It doesn't matter" I said out loud, not that there was anybody to hear me, something I had found myself doing the last few months. "It doesn't matter" I said again "I will always miss her, music or no music, a mother can never forget."

It had been several years since the death of my daughter, each day my heart ached with missing her; each day my grief grew deeper. My life was in a total mess, I did not know what to do.

I had in the past always seen myself standing in front of an easel, but had never had background or training at all. I had always tried things, using my creative energies in quilting, needlework and basket making, trying to find what I was meant to be good at.

After the death of my daughter, I had looked at my life through different eyes. Two years after her death, I had become a college freshman, taken art classes and started to finally find "my art". This "going to school for me" had been a huge step in my life, a great new adventure. This was the gift my daughter had left me.

With that step however there had been problems and pain. Like any family that has to deal with a loss like ours did, the loss of my daughter, life is turned upside down. It is so hard to try and keep looking for your own way forward when your world has been touched by so much sadness. My son had taken the loss of his sister really hard, becoming a problem both at home and at school.

Was I being unfair to try and find my own adventure in life, when the ones I loved were so lost in their own world? I had battled my soul and my conscience every day since I had started my new road. Should I live my life as before and forget my dream?

"What am I meant to do? What?" I had asked the question so many times. I looked up at the heavens and once more said a silent prayer. "Please" I said "Please just show me a sign, show me the way."

I turned a bend in the road, and there filling the sky was a rainbow. I pulled into the side of the road and trembling stepped out of the car and into the rain. As I looked up at the sky, the rainbow changed. It split into rainbow upon rainbow, level upon level across the sky, filling it was glories colors. Each rainbow ended in the same clump of willow trees, whose fresh spring leaves, turned to gold in the rainbows light.

Tears sprung to my eyes, mixing with the rain on my face as I marveled at the beauty, the sign that had been sent to me.

Cars passed, some slowed to see if I was okay, others just hooted, I was oblivious, lost in the sign that had been sent to show me what I was meant to do.

Eventually, cold and wet but with a glow in my heart I got back into my car, sure now what I had to do with my life, sure that I must go on and create, that everything would be fine.

I still though missed my daughter, the ache was still there. About a week later I was sorting through my daughter's things. Suddenly I came across a picture she had drawn, when she was young. Drawn in childish crayon, it was a picture of a rainbow and on the top of the rainbow she had drawn a cross. At that moment, I knew this was my daughter's sign to me, letting me know she was safe and in a better place. Letting me know that one-day I would see her again.

Barry Eva 2004 

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