Elena Gilbert knows grief.
At this point in her life, she has grieving down to a science. Her mother, Miranda, died while giving birth to Elena's younger brother, Jeremy, when she was five years old. Only a few months later, Jeremy died of crib death. Her father, Grayson, died of typhoid a few years later when she was only ten. After her father's death, Elena left her home in Mystic Falls to live with her Aunt Jenna in Richmond. There was a grace period between her father's death and Jenna's death that she felt happy. Elena went to an all girl's school and made friends. She learned how to play the piano and how to speak French, and she was courted by a few boys, though it was never really love. However, when her aunt and baby cousin died in childbirth when Elena was seventeen, she lost the little joy she had left in her life since the death of her parents and brother.
Elena continued to live in Richmond with her uncle, Jenna's husband, but she had no real family left anymore. She no longer went to school because she had to replace Jenna as the caretaker of the house and of her uncle, though she rarely ever saw him these days since he spent his time drinking himself away at the pub. Now Elena's life was waking up early every day in order to have time to cook three meals and have the house in pristine condition while her uncle wasted her family's savings on liquor and gambling. Some might wonder why she put up with her uncle and continued to live under his roof. Elena dealt with him because of his rather nasty temper that he had when he came home drunk, which was most nights, and she feared he would inflict his wrath upon her if the house wasn't kept as well as Jenna had it before her death. But the biggest reason that she stayed was that she had nowhere left to go. Her family was dead, and she wasn't about to marry into a new one. Elena was determined to make the situation work because if she didn't, she wasn't so sure she would even have a home anymore.
On Elena's eighteenth birthday, the news that the war had started reached Richmond. Many of the city's able-bodied men enlisted themselves that day, including her uncle, who was only in his mid-thirties. A few days later he left to go to training, and that was the last time she ever saw her uncle again.
Elena now spent her days as a seamstress in order to pay the taxes on the house and to gain back the money her uncle wasted with drinking. All of her food came from her garden that she spent every waking moment that she wasn't sewing trying to keep alive. Her dresses were all hand-me-downs from Jenna or old dresses of hers that she patched up. At this point, many would've given up and tried to marry someone with a decent income. It would've been easy for Elena to do because even though she wore patched up dresses, she was one of the most beautiful girls in the entire city with her shiny chocolate colored tresses and big brown doe eyes. However, Elena didn't want to take the easy way out. She was determined that once she did marry, it would be for love: she wanted a love that would consume her, she wanted passion and adventure, and even a little danger. She wasn't going to give these up for a stable life. And so, at this point in Elena's life, her hope was the only thing that kept her going everyday.
When Elena wasn't sewing or working in her garden, she was volunteering at the hospital in Richmond. Everyday, more and more Confederate soldiers were piled into the cramped space. Many were dying of disease, but there were also horrific injuries from recent battles against the Yankees. Those were the worst to assist the doctors with. She couldn't even the count how many times she had to try to calm men down while one of their limbs were being amputated. Even though it was disgusting work, Elena continued to help the hospital in order to do her part for the war effort.
Each time that she came to the hospital, Elena first always looked to see if her uncle was one of the many men that were dying around her, but she never saw him. After being disappointed that she didn't know the whereabouts of her last living family member, she would begin her work. Her main task was to just try to make the soldiers comfortable while they were extremely ill or on death's door. Elena would hold their hands and tell them stories of her childhood when she lived with her Aunt Jenna, like how she would mess up her French and say embarrassing things to native French speakers: anything that would take their minds off of how much pain they were in. She even got the occasional marriage proposal from them and she would laugh it off and tell them to ask her again once they felt better. And once those men that she would comfort passed, she felt grief, but she managed it the only way she knew how: to work even harder to help them.
One day, when Elena was going through her routine of comforting the wounded men, two pretty beaten up soldiers were rushing in another, but this soldier was severely injured with blood rushing out of his chest and appeared to be losing consciousness. Elena immediately left the man she was helping and assisted them in lifting him on a clean cot. Her first aid training kicked in and she applied pressure to his chest in an attempt to stop the bleeding. When a doctor replaced her hands with theirs and started to operate on the soldier, Elena squeezed his hand and truly looked at him for the first time. The man was extremely handsome even though he was dying: he had a strong jawline with sharp cheekbones and he had wavy raven hair that she had a strong urge to run her hands through. He had slightly calloused hands, but Elena liked the feeling of them against her fingertips. His body was muscular but lean at the same time with defined biceps and abdominal muscles. She wondered how it would feel to have those strong arms wrapped around her. However, she didn't see the most beautiful part of this man until after his eyes bolted open, and she finally looked into his crystal blue eyes for the first time.
