The Thirst for Yesterday

I want to go back.

Not just to before Lizzy died. To before she was born. I want to do it again, to change the outcome if I can, and if not, to at least make sure that I treasured every single second of her life. To make sure that no time with her was wasted.

When I look at pictures of myself before Lizzy was born, I pity the girl in those pictures. She has no idea what’s in store for her. She is so carefree, so innocent, so blissfully unaware of the horror that life has planned. When I have memories of a time before Lizzy, I think, “If only I could go back…”

What would I do differently? What would I change? And could I change anything at all?

I want to go back to when it was normal to wake up next to Lizzy, to have breakfast together, and to go about our day of busy nothings. I want to go back to the peaceful supposition that Lizzy would always be with me–would, in fact, easily outlive me–would bury me. I want to go back to believing that my life would follow the normal course of parents: that my child would survive, that she would grow into whatever beautiful and wondrous creature she was born to become.

I want that innocence back. I want back that trust in the way things should be. I want to live my life choosing to believe in the good like it is second nature to me. It once was.

Lizzy should be walking around this house, chatting, playing, lighting up the lives of everyone who interacts with her. She was light.

Instead, I have echoing silence, unbroken by the sound of Cecilia breathing in her sleep. And I have this deep, quaking desire to rewind time, to reverse what has happened and reclaim what I had. I want what I had back. I want both of my daughters.

What kind of choice is that? To get to have only one or the other? In what world does it make sense that they were never even allowed to meet? In what spectrum of reality was it decided that I could no longer be a parent to two daughters, but only handle one at time? I just did this. I just raised a child to two years old from infancy, without siblings. And now I am repeating history.

So if I can repeat history, why in the name of all that is holy can I not go back and relive history? Why can I not return to the time when Lizzy was here, when I took for granted that she was alive and would continue to be so?

Because, as far as I am concerned, if my two-year old baby was going to be taken away from me, the least that could be given would be some sort of warning so that I could make sure that Every. Single. Second. of her precious life was full of beauty and love and that every second of my life for those two years was entirely focused on her instead of the adult bullshit that I thought I had to focus on.

And if the next words out of your mouth are: “life isn’t fair,” then I ask you to just keep your mouth shut. I’m not stupid. And those platitudes are far easier to speak when it isn’t your child that is dead. I am living exactly how unfair life is. And–more accurately–Lizzy died, demonstrating exactly how unfair life is.

Unfair, uncontrollable, unpredictable, incomprehensible, enormous. All of these words leave me suspended in a hurricane of terror, knowing that my life and the lives of everyone that I love are out of my hands.

So what are we–helpless? Victims to some horrifically indifferent force? What kind of world has rules that allow an innocent baby to die? What kind of God permits this sort of tragedy? And if this is the way that it is and these are the sort of rules that we have to abide by, then shouldn’t I at least be given the option of going back and reliving it, of doing it over, of doing it better? If she only ever had two years, then the decent thing to do–the human thing to do–would have been to let me know so that I could make sure that those two years were utterly perfect for her.

But life isn’t decent. Life isn’t even human. It is impersonal, objective, and supremely uncaring that in taking Lizzy out, it flayed me alive, leaving me raw, bleeding, and totally incapable of being a person anymore. Because no matter what I do, or how much help I get, I still wake up to the same stifling reality every hideous day: there is no going back.