Embracing Emma

Tune in now!

Thank you for all the donations for the St. Jude Telethon! We're half way to our $5,000 goal and with only 8 days left we're running behind!

Don't feel like you have to donate a lot. If everyone who follows this page donates $5 we could raise more than $250,000!

Please click on the link below and donate what you can to help all of our kids fighting cancer and their families.

http://fundraising.stjude.org/goto/markwelp

7/14 St. Jude fundraising update…
Thank you so much for your donations!
So far you’ve donated $1570 or 31% of our goal!

Please donate if you can…no amount is too small. All the money goes to St. Jude.

Thank you!

The Welp family

http://fundraising.stjude.org/goto/markwelp

Mark Welp is once again raising funds for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in memory of Emma. Please click on the link and donate what you can so we can reach our goal of $5000.
Thank you!

http://fundraising.stjude.org/goto/markwelp

Happy 6th birthday in Heaven, sweet Emma💜 Our hearts break that you aren’t celebrating 12 years with your sister. Life isn’t the same without you. It’s really hard to balance grief and joy at the same time. We know you are celebrating with Jesus and Great Grandma, eating all the cake and having a dance party. We miss you with every fiber in our bodies. Thanks for the glimmers you send us each day from Heaven💜

Dear Emma,

1,825 days without you. Today, we sit at home without you, alone in the stillness, looking at the empty space where your laughter used to live.

You were six when the world fractured. Five years have passed since then, which means you have now been gone almost as long as you were here. That is a cruel kind of math. Abby is eleven now. She is growing tall, losing her baby softness, and becoming the most beautiful girl. Every time I look at her, I am hit by a breathtaking wave of gratitude, immediately followed by a quiet, aching phantom pain. Because I know exactly what you would look like right now, too. Your dark brown eyes would match your long dark brown curls.

Abby carries you forward in ways that breaks my heart and heals it all at once. You are talked about and your name is said every day.

People told me back then that grief changes shape. I didn’t believe them. In those first couple of years, grief was a jagged piece of glass in my throat. It was the suffocating weight of hospital and St. Jude corridors, the beep of monitors, the deterioration of your fragile body. It was the anger of watching a vibrant, fierce little soul be stolen by an illness too big for her small body.

Five years out, the glass has worn down into something smoother. It doesn’t scream anymore- it hums, as a permanent background noise. I feel it when I pack 1 school lunch, back to school shopping for 1, birthday/Christmas shopping for 1, etc.

I miss you every time Abby has something to celebrate without her built in best friend beside her. This absence will forever feel this way.

Amidst the missing, a strange profound beauty can sometimes be found among the wreckage. Loving you for six years was worth the heartbreak that followed. Your absence hasn’t made the world darker, it has made me look closer to the light. I love fiercely. I hold Abby a little longer. I don’t take quiet mornings for granted.

You are not here, my sweet girl. But you are never, ever gone. 💜

We will always say Emma’s name. She is a part of our every being. And we miss her terribly 💜

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1DHZc1uDKY/?mibextid=wwXIfr

Today is a weird day. It's International Bereaved Mother's Day.

A day meant to create awareness, honor those of us with a child on the other side, and validate the grief that we carry every day.

But, I've always had a weird relationship with this day.

First, I never knew it existed until my own child died.

In those early years, I hated this day! It felt like one more thing I had to endure and find a way through. Like two Mother's Days back-to-back, which felt like torture.

If I'm honest, I'm indifferent about this day now - 10 years in.

We don't need a day to talk about our kids or our grief.
We don't need the burden of reminding or educating others.
We don't need a day to hold our grief and motherhood sacred.

We can do all of those things every single day!

Yet, today exists. And because it exists, we get to decide exactly how we want to engage with it.

Maybe for you, today is a quiet day of survival.
Maybe it’s a day of loud, proud remembrance.
Maybe you’re feeling a bit of both, or nothing much at all.

There is no "right" way to be a bereaved mother today. You don't owe this day anything.

But if you find yourself wanting a space to speak their name or show their face, I’d love to hold that space with you here.

If you feel like sharing, I’d love to see a photo of your child in the comments, and if you’re up for it, tell us one thing about how you’re navigating the "weirdness" of today.

Have a Bereaved Mother's Day. However that looks for you. ❤