I. WANT. SNOW. TOO. DARAH… I don’t remember if it was before or after you passed away, but the very first “wonderful experience” that I put into my Beauty of Life jar was my memory of the very first time that I ever got to go skiing.  Your mom treated Maureen and I to a day of skiing at Boston Mills a few winters back.  That day, that experience, that gift from your mother, and that bond with your family is so very important to me.  I will never ever forget it.  You and I may have bonded a little bit at the 555 family dinners on Sunday nights, or the day that I had the honor of photographing the revealing of your beautiful bald head, and unfortunately over a few bowls of terribly disgusting energy soup at the Creative Health Institute, but that’s not enough.  We were suppose to have more family dinners together, more icky wheatgrass faces while taking shots together, and so much more of your best hummus ever on holidays.  I was supposed to go to your college graduation and then watch you change the world one kid at a time.  You were the only chance for my children to have an aunt and to have cousins.

This is the part where I imagine that you are burping, rolling your eyes at me, and saying “Really?!”.  Because you know better than I that maybe none of those things were meant to be.  The only thing that I am really trying to tell you is that I wanted a sister-in-law and even more than that I wanted to bond so close that the “-in-law” part eventually just went away.

And now I have to thank you…

On the day that I asked your sister to marry me you provided us with the best weather a couple of skiers could ask for, sunshine everywhere and a mountain piled high with fresh snow. And one of the most important things that I said to her was how essential it was that we were high up on that ski lift so that we could be close to you when I asked her to spend her life with me.

Written By: Jeremiah Currier