Suspended Between Death and Life

I gave birth to Cecilia Amaris Brighde at 2:42 am on May 5, 2019, and her birth was a pretty effective anesthetic for Lizzy’s death. For about a day.

Cecilia’s birthday was a day of grace and light and even some joy for me. It was also a day during which I felt that Lizzy had been present throughout Cecilia’s birth, protecting her and protecting me. Physically, the birth went very smoothly, Cecilia’s heart rate never dropped, and she came into the world beautiful, strong, and very healthy. She was also born veiled, which is a sign, I’m told, of a blessed child.

But if Cecilia is blessed, I feel it was by her big sister, Lizzy, who has taken it upon herself to become Cecilia’s guardian angel. I felt Lizzy very strongly in a light-filled way for the entirety of Cecilia’s birthday.

The next day, however, the anesthetic became only analgesic in nature. It’s not that I don’t love or find joy in Cecilia–it’s that the grief returned full force the day after her birth, and the grief is just as terrible, although different now that she is born.

When I was pregnant with Cecilia after the death of Lizzy, my swollen belly was this unavoidable but also intangible anchor tethering me to the living world when all I wanted to do was follow Lizzy into the grave. But now, with this tiny, helpless human in front of me constantly, she is more than just an anchor or a tether. She is immediate, alive, needing, asking, and physically connected to my body most of the time, either by nursing or by skin-to-skin napping. She could not be more concrete, more real, more in front of my face and impossible to ignore.

But Lizzy is still dead.

Some days are better than others, but the prevailing atmosphere of my brain is that I live in a type of Shadowlands, somewhere suspended in between life and death, like Frodo anytime he puts on the ring and sees the world the way the Ring Wraiths see it. It’s like there is this huge static behind everything, and I can’t understand why people are caring about the things they are caring about or doing the things that they are doing. The sense of futility behind everything that is happening around me is pervasive and palpable. Lizzy is not doing any of these things. Lizzy died before she had a chance to do any of these things, care about any of these things. She never even got a chance to grow up. And now that she’s not here, I can’t imagine ever caring about any of these things ever again.

And then there is Cecilia. Cecilia’s body is pink with oxygen, and her brain has not swelled out of her skull, killing her brain stem. Cecilia, and indeed, me, are still bound by the stupid, pointless physical rules of this world. We need to breathe, to eat, to drink, to pee, to poop. We sweat. I, at least, have to clean myself. We both produce mucus and saliva. We both need air and food and water to keep these so fragile bodies going.

I say “fragile bodies” but sometimes I marvel that my body has made it for 32 years, has just kept going and sometimes seems so strong and resilient because it has made it this far for this long. Cecilia’s body, by contrast, is a study in total fragility. Her bones are so tiny and delicate, her fingers and toes unimaginably small and perfect. Her skull plates still move around her head, her front and back fontanels hugely open to the so-sensitive brain tissue beneath. Her pupils move around, respond to her environment. She can see, feel, think, breathe on her own, cry, and as she does these things, I think about how her older sister lost her ability to do each of these things, one by one, as the nightmare unfolded and the center of my world was ripped from me from the inside out.

Our bodies are fragile, yes, and that includes mine. You deprive the body of food or water for too long, and it will give out. You place a bullet or a knife in just the right area, and we will bleed out. Let cancer or some other disease carve you out from the inside and you will die in a matter of years, months, days, or like my little girl, under 72 hours. You have three cardiac arrests and can’t bring back a pulse for over 8 minutes, and you will have irreversible brain damage that even a perfectly strong and healthy, beautiful little 2-year old girl cannot come back from.

It doesn’t seem right or fair, more or less logical, to have bodies that can be snuffed out in a matter of seconds and yet talk about the endurance of the human spirit, about evolution and how resilient life is because life is always striving to find a way even in the face of death. Well, maybe life works like that for some people, but it didn’t work like that for my two-year old. Despite three hospitals, 100 medical professionals, two priests, and the desperate prayers of hundreds of friends, family, and acquaintances, life did not find a way. It ended.

And I ended. The more time that passes, the more I am sure that I died the same day, the same hour that my little girl died. I know that I am not here. I know that whatever concept that I had of “I” has been shattered beyond recognition or reclamation.

And yet I am here. Cecilia is here. And I just continue to wall-bang back and forth between my dead child and my living child. It’s like Cecilia keeps drawing me back into a world that I no longer want to participate in, that is frankly confusing and largely meaningless, simply because she is living in it and she needs my help in order to do so.

And because everything that I thought I knew or thought I believed or thought I wanted has been totally obliterated by Lizzy’s death, I am just very unsure as to how to be here with Cecilia. Everyone keeps reassuring me that this will come with time. And maybe they are right.

Maybe Cecilia and I are born newborns, just trying to navigate a world which is largely too bright, too loud, too uncomfortable, and too confusing. Maybe, with time, we will both grow into whoever we are meant to be. Maybe I just have to accept that the “I” with whom I spent 32 years no longer exists. Maybe I died with Lizzy and was born again a month later with Cecilia. And maybe that is why I have no answers and everything around me seems unfamiliar and confusing.

One of the only things that I am sure of is that I am suspended between my two children–between my adorable, precious, ludicrously loved and loving–and, dead–Lizzy, and my totally helpless, largely unknown, precious and perfect tiny newborn, Cecilia. Lizzy is in every spare space of my mind and heart, and with every action that I do to take care of Cecilia, I yearn and ache in every cell of my body for Lizzy.

And I am very desperately afraid that this pain, so constant, so immediate, and so strong, will never go away.