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Emilie "Em" Alice Parker
May 12, 2006 ~ December 14, 2012
Emilie's bell is D5. When D5 rings, we remember a beautiful, joyful, enthusiastic 6-year-old girl who had a passion for art and was an exceptional artist. Emilie was full of love, compassion and charity. She cared about people and their feelings and never said a mean word to anyone.
The eldest of three, Emilie, was a loving girl, a leader and a "best friend" to her little sisters, said her father, Robbie Parker. "They were all very close. She was teaching my middle daughter to read. She would help my youngest daughter make things, show her how to do crafts."
Emilie's father said his daughter was always willing to help around the house, take care of her siblings, and because their family had moved around so much in recent years due to his work and thus were not able to make many friends, Emilie became that friend they were missing.
He said her sisters looked up to her: "It was really sweet to see the times when one of them would fall or one of them would get their feelings hurt, how they would run to Emilie for support and hugs and kisses."
Her father said she loved to pick flowers - "like a goat" - and that she was "an amazing communicator." He added, "By the time she was 18 months, she was speaking in full sentences. She didn't have teeth yet, but she was speaking in full sentences. I think you can argue that in her six years in life she was able to get in a lifetime of talking."
When she wasn't talking, she was drawing. "If you left her a notebook, it was like giving a kid a piece of candy," recalled her father, who said every page in the notebook would quickly be filled. He recalled how his daughter loved to draw the cartoon character Puss in Boots and that she was also a particular artist — not wanting to draw on the back of a page on which she had already drawn. He said she thought it would ruin the picture.
Mr. Parker had been teaching Emilie Portuguese. On Friday morning, before he left for work, the two chatted in Portuguese. "She said she loved me, and she gave me a kiss, and I was out the door."
"There was something about her presence from the moment she entered this world that we knew we'd received a special gift." Emilie was kind and sunny-natured, her father said, "the type of person who could just light up a room." Her "laughter was infectious, and everyone who met her would agree that the world was a better place because she was in it." She was, he said, "an incredible person, and I am so blessed to be her dad."
Emilie's aunt, Jill Cottle Garrett, said, "Emilie was an example not only to her little sisters but to her family, to all her little friends, and now she has become an example to the world about purity, innocence, tragedy and forgiveness."
Emilie was laid to rest in a favorite white dress with an American Girl doll at a gravesite next to her maternal grandfather, who died earlier that year on September 29th. Douglas G. Cottle was an Ogden dentist who fell from his bicycle during a 200-mile race. He was recovering from brain trauma but fell and hit his head a second time trying to walk from a hospital bed, friends said. He was 62.
Emilie made a card for her grandfather to be placed in his coffin.
With tears in his eyes, her father recalled talking to Emilie after her grandfather died about how Heavenly Father missed him, and Emilie said, "I think Heavenly Father misses me too."
Shortly thereafter, Heavenly Father gathered Emilie in His loving arms and took her home.
Emilie will never be forgotten. A bell for Emilie will always ring at Christmas.