Stream of Consciousness

I have days where I hide from Lizzy. I hide from her toys, her clothes, her pictures. I hide from my cell phone background that has a picture of us laughing at the lavender farm. I hide from thoughts and memories of her. I hide because I must stop what I am doing and grieve or cry or feel desperate and hopeless. I hide because I am a coward. I hide because I am a weak mother.

There have been recent days that I have not cried about Lizzy. They are rare. Do they mean that I no longer miss her or mourn her or need her?

The pain is always there, omnipresent. I think of her constantly. Sometimes, I push the thoughts away. I need her and need to be with her, but the only way to be with her is in grief. Grief is exhausting. Debilitating. Time-consuming. When I keep busy or overload my schedule with busy nothings, I make the days go by. The more I make the days go by, the closer I get to being with Lizzy. The closer I get to my own death.

I am being very proactive about Cecilia. About her health, research, nutrition. It makes the time go by.

Do I miss Lizzy less? I think about this often. I still think about her constantly. She is always on my mind and my thoughts inevitably turn to her. If I allow myself to dive into my thoughts, I am crippled; I cannot be proactive. I want to give up. So I hide, like a coward and a weakling, I hide from my dead daughter.

It is like walking on the edge of a cliff. The abyss is always there. It takes one misstep to go plunging. And then there is the long climb back up to continue the walk. As though the walk has a point. But supposedly it does, and I’m supposed to act like it does. So I climb back up.

But the issue here is that I am not allowing myself to plunge into the abyss as often. (By this, I mean no longer daily, but still multiple times a week.) I am not convinced that this means that I miss or love Lizzy less, but rather that I am learning to be more surefooted in my grief. More capable of carrying it.

Grief is a weight that you carry, without choice, without break. After carrying it hour in and hour out, day in and day out, for months, your muscles become accustomed to the weight. But the weight has not changed. The pain and the grief is the exact same weight as when you began carrying it. It is only you who have changed. You who have grown stronger in the way no one should have to grow stronger.

They say that our ability to adapt is one of our strongest advantages of being human. It has allowed us to survive. Without doubt, being able to adapt to even the worst circumstances: war, starvation, abuse, violence–allows us to survive. The first book I read after Lizzy’s death was Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. I needed to hear how he retained a reason to live in those circumstances. I wanted to hear about life in the concentration camps, when human life was not valued at all. And he speaks of this ability to adapt, of how even the most obscene and horrifying degradations become so normal, so commonplace, that you no longer know how to feel horror or despair. He speaks of the numbness that comes with adapting. He speaks of our ability to witness even the worst depths to which we are capable of sinking and still have a limping will to survive.

I have thought about Frankl’s experience in the concentration camps a lot lately. Not because my life is full of starvation and degradation, but because of how he describes how the human being can become accustomed to the horrifying. And that is exactly what is happening to me. I have become accustomed to the horrifying reality of how Lizzy was taken from me and of how she is now absent from my life.

I can no more control this than I can bring her back. It is something that is happening to me. In living so many days with this pain and without her, I am becoming used to both the pain and to being without her. Does this mean that it hurts less? I don’t think so. It’s the same pain. It’s just the norm now. It’s just a continuum. Does this mean that I am stronger for having borne it this long and continuing to bear it? Maybe. But I don’t feel strong. I feel broken and desperate and wrong. I feel that everything that I feel is wrong. The need for Lizzy is unceasing and can never be fulfilled or satisfied. It is a need that orients me towards death, not life, because my child is dead. And yet, she was the center and light of my life. So that which was the fullness of life, which I turned towards and gave myself to without reserve, has now become a beacon of death. But I cannot help continuing to turn towards her.

So what does this mean–that I am becoming so accustomed to the pain that I no longer cry every day? What is different about the days that I do cry? And what does the numbness mean? Am I just getting stronger at bearing the weight? At looking at the prospect of my life without Lizzy in it?

I have no answers. I have emptiness and busyness. Strength and weakness. Tears and numbness. Despair and survival. Can someone please make sense of this for me? Because I sure as hell cannot.