“I would be happy to follow my husband anywhere in the world,” she said from the other side of the room.

I couldn’t believe I had heard her correctly, especially as I had just bared my heart to the husbands and wives of the church small group we had recently joined.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t want to go. Tim and I had just had dinner out with friends the night before, and with frigid subzero temps outside, staying indoors and cozy sounded marvelous. When one sitter after another said it wouldn’t work to watch our children, I took it as confirmation that it wasn’t meant to be.

Photo is mine - quilt made by my Mom, print is from Home, James

But as the afternoon waned, Tim approached me again. It was important that I be there, he insisted. We could make it work. Try another sitter.

So I found myself, just a few short hours later, at a concert benefiting a local homeless shelter, one we love to work with year-round. We’ve served meals there, adopted families for Christmas. They have such a heart for others, and we are always humbled and blessed by the interactions we have while there.

It was in the midst of ballerinas dancing and a lovely soprano singing that the announcement came: They were in the midst of updating a women's wing, and they had decided to call it Katie's Club. Katie's Club -- as in, my sister's foundation. My sister's legacy. Cue the tears.

This past year we've covered so many topics from Advent Acts of Kindness to highlighting concerns around the world, to sharing honest stories of struggles and joys, friendship and harder relationships, along with some wonderful guest bloggers. Here is a look back at our most popular posts of 2015.

5. 10 Years Later...The Aftermath of Grief
I sit alone in my room. Kids are tucked into bed. Husband is downstairs watching a football game.

The soft glow of light shines from my bedside lamp. Snuggled against the pillows, this place is my safe haven. A place I find rest and peace from the busyness of each day.

I find a familiar episode of Gilmore Girls and settle in to watch, but more importantly, to remember. My sister Katrina loved this show. And it was one of the last things we did together. We’d sit on her bed, she too weak to get up, hunkered down with drinks or snacks or just each other to watch episodes together.

We’d laugh and cry, interspersing our own conversation against the replayed episodes we’d watched more than a few times.

“I wonder what your kids will be like?” she’d say. I’d smile and tell her my hopes for the future with my then-boyfriend-now-husband Kyle.

I found it in my closet again the other day. Pausing, I pulled the coat from its place in the darkness, running a hand over it to look at it in the weak light of the spare closet. The dusty collar, the fabric-covered buttons, the slightly worn cuffs, an interior liner that reminded me of a picnic table.

It’s more than ten years old, now. But the color – that bright red, a beacon of a color and the reason I bought it when I saw it at TopShop during the semester I studied abroad – is still true.

The red coat in 2004

It was in the spring of 2004 that I stumbled out of a bus into Gloucester Green in Oxford, England, fresh off an overnight flight and fighting jet lag. The bus station was close enough to St. Michael’s Hall that we were able to trip along to the place we’d live for the next few months, suitcases bumping over cobblestones. It didn’t take long to settle into a rhythm: Sweaty hands and a pounding heart when meeting with professors one-on-one for a semi-terrifying hour once a week, hours and hours (and hours!) of homework, falling in love with Jane Austen’s novels, eating chips and cheese, feeling daunted by the Bodleian Library, hearing church bells toll, living on a college diet of digestives (cookies) and cold cereal, attending vespers, watching a fencing match, seeing Michelangelo’s drawings at The Ashmolean Museum, sharing pints with friends at pubs.

I was out shopping with friends when I saw it. It was £60, a dear amount at the time, nearly double that price in American currency. I hemmed and hawed over it, leaving and returning later. But it was winter, and then spring, while we were there. And with temperatures rarely dipping below 30 degrees, the balmy weather lent itself well to our incessant walking, necessitating a mid-warmth coat.

I loved it, so I finally talked myself into it and bought it. It became my favorite coat, a symbol of being young and happy and part of a world that felt full of limitless possibilities.

We spent this past week in Colorado with family and friends. For the first several nights, we’d gather at our house, Kyle cooking and everyone bringing something to share.

This morning I’m sweating as I vacuum out the truck. Too many kids trampling through and too many weeks left to fend for itself have found our vehicle in a sad state. As I wipe old milk stains off the leather seats and suck up broken glass (?!?) that mysteriously appeared from under our side console, I think about the purpose for our upcoming trip to Colorado, an endeavor to once again support Katie's Club, a fund set up in memory of my sister Katrina.

The hikers ready to climb the first year!

10 years ago, Kyle and I were packing for our first trip to Colorado. With no kids in tow, our lives looked quite different as we packed two bags for the both of us (can you even imagine?!?) and jumped in the back of my brother-in-laws truck, naively ready to climb a mountain. A feat we’d never accomplished, all in memory of a sister who’d passed away not even a year earlier. The pain still raw to the touch, tears just barely removed from the surface.

I remember how hard that first year had been for me, moving into the toy room at my brother-in-law’s house, struggling to pay bills and find work, trying to finish grad school, all while navigating the grief of losing one of the most influential people in my life. I remember how the grief would wash over me in waves—sometimes awakening me at night, as I’d writhe in pain on the floor— not realizing until much later that my physical symptoms were simply a manifestation of the grief I was walking through.

But as I look back now, I see how God used so many things, so many people, to show me his goodness during those days. And climbing a mountain was a huge part of what eventually began a healing in me I didn’t even realize I needed.

All leading up to this past Sunday, sitting in a dimly lit downtown restaurant—sipping wine and sampling cheeses--with a group of friends who’ve walked with us over the course of these past ten years. All who’ve supported Katie’s club and hiked with us and loved us well.

In my mind’s eye, she is larger than life – clear blue eyes still laughing, no more wrinkles than she had when she died at 28. While my own eyes have started to crinkle and form lines in the corners, she is still eternally young. While I peer anxiously at my roots to search for gray hairs or smooth work-worn hands over hips gone soft from two children, she remains eternally beautiful. 

My beautiful sister Katrina

And even though it’s been eight years since she died in 2005, I still talk to her when I’m all alone.

Just like New Orleans is still rebuilding its city eight years after Hurricane Katrina swept through; I’m still rebuilding my heart after the loss of my own dear sister Katrina. 

There are parts of me that know that she's gone. The rational part that knows that life and death are equal halves of the same coin; the emotional part that held her soft, manicured hands in her final moments, who whispered brokenly: It's ok. You can go. I love you. The part of me that knows that she was meant for something more. 

The ultimate act of unselfishness is to let someone go, even when we are desperate for them to stay. But the reality of letting go is a mirror for us of the love God has for us, proven by sending his son to earth, knowing he would die. Not from terminal illness or cancer, a heart attack or stroke, but from something as common and as devastating as sin. 

I can’t explain it, exactly. But the legacy my sister left was the same one Jesus has bequeathed us, his children: Love. And eternal life. So when my oldest daughter proudly tells me her full name -- Elise Katrina Demery -- and she asks me, for perhaps the hundredth time, who Katrina was -- I have the chance to tell her about the auntie who lives in Heaven with Jesus, who we'll see again someday.

And in the evening, as I get the baby ready for bed, I sing a song that rises up from memories of days at First Baptist Church, wooden pews and worn carpet, voices singing as one while the piano plays. Noelle pauses her constant stream of babble as I start to sing "Blest Be the Tie that Binds":

Blest be the tie that binds
our hearts in Christian love;
the fellowship of kindred minds
is like to that above.

Before our Father's throne
we pour our ardent prayers;
our fears, our hopes, our aims are one,
our comforts and our cares.

We share each other's woes,
our mutual burdens bear;
and often for each other flows
the sympathizing tear.

When I reach the final verse, my heart stutters, throat closing and eyes tearing up. But as my daughter smiles at me, I catch my breath and smile, too, the pain and the pleasure of life mingled as they so often are. 

When we asunder part,
it gives us inward pain;
but we shall still be joined in heart,
and hope to meet again.