Her Gift was Love

Our "goodbye" to our sister from her Celebration of Life spoken one week ago today:

Since January 5th, we’ve been thinking about our baby sister. Her bubbly, hilariously-uncensored, personality. Her empathy and extraordinary drive to make other people feel special. Her beautiful smile, and contagious laugh. So many wonderful thoughts, but none that could be put into words that seemed suited for saying goodbye.

When we were looking through some of her things, a yellow post-it note fell out of one of her sketchbooks. On it, she'd written a quote by Pablo Picasso " The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away". Judging by outpouring of support from all the people whose lives she touched, it's clear that her gift was love.

Growing up, we girls were so fortunate to be surrounded by so much of that gift. Our immediate family, our extended family, our friends that are like family… Love was the most important aspect to our lives. In our house specifically, “I Hate you” was worse than any curse word. In moments of childish tantrums, that phrase was grounds for time out. Our father had a zero tolerance policy for this. “You’re sisters, you love each other, you always will” he would say. We are so grateful for this now. He never let us go to bed mad at each other and he never let us say goodbye without saying “I love you”.

And that’s all we can really think to say now. We love you, Stephanie. This goodbye is so different than the ones we’ve said before, but what matters is that we love you. And we always will.