The Silent Scream

The thing about grief is that you don’t only have to deal with your own grief; you have to deal with everyone else’s grief too. Sometimes this is a gift, when their tears or breakdowns reassure you how much your child was loved and wanted. But sometimes it is a burden, when their grief causes them to act selfishly or to believe that their answers should move you further along the path of your own grief than you are ready to be. Either way, grief is never just about your grief. And although I’ve been treading water and trying not to drown in the vast ocean of my grief as Lizzy’s mother, there is a still a raging maelstrom of everyone else’s grief about and around me that I frankly don’t know how to deal with.

All I can say is that it amounts to pain. Consistent, endless pain. And to a sorrow so deep that all my words are lost in it.

I have taken to crying silently. Sometimes this happens late at night, when I cannot sleep for the stress and the pain of it all. Sometimes it happens in the car. And sometimes it happens during mass, when I am surrounded by families with their living toddlers smiling and playing as Lizzy once did. And what happens is that the invisible hand chokes me, I stop breathing, and then I begin to sob–except no noise comes out.

When I was in highschool, I watched a movie about partial-birth abortion while researching my side for a pro-life versus pro-choice debate. This movie was entitled The Silent Scream because obviously a fetus cannot scream while he or she is being “terminated.” Or if he or she is screaming, no one can hear it. Either way, the pain and the death and the horror is happening, no matter whether or not there is audible proof of it.

I find myself thinking of this phrase “silent scream” lately. When I cry, I try to keep it silent first and foremost because of Cecilia, who is usually asleep. And when she’s not asleep, it’s starting to feel wrong to place the crushing weight of my grief on a twelve-week-old. Other times, it’s because I don’t want those around me to know I’m crying, either because there is nothing new to say or because I don’t want those I love to be so abruptly reminded of their own grief when they are trying so hard to live something resembling a life. And still other times, it is because I am in public, and I must retreat to a bathroom to stare with tear-veiled eyes at the stark and empty ceiling, while inside I am screaming as loud as I can.

I scream because I cannot accept the reality of my life when it comes pouring down on me. Tears stream down my cheeks, my mouth is open, but there is no sound except perhaps a choked hissing as the breath is released and gathered in again. And like most episodes of sobbing, you have to allow it to wash over you in wave after wave until you land, dehydrated and exhausted, on the dry and salty shore.

Last Sunday at mass, this silent screaming consumed me for about fifteen minutes. Afterwards, depleted and numb, I watched consecration and thought about Jesus’ death. I thought that no matter what you believe about his remaining presence on this planet, at least historically this man lived and died. And he died a particularly brutal and terrible death. And then I thought about how many people believe that he changed the world forever with his death, or changed the reality of death itself, transforming death into life. I thought about how, throughout the world, people weekly remember this one man’s death and allow his life and death to transform their own lives.

And then I thought about Lizzy. Most people in the world around me have no idea that I even had a two-year old daughter who died. Most people in the world will never even know that Lizzy lived, more or less that she died. My daughter’s death has affected the world at large barely a fraction of a fraction compared to Jesus’ death. For the most part, the world just keeps turning, people just keep living, and Lizzy just keeps being gone.

How do you explain to yourself what the purpose of a two-year-old’s life was? How do you understand why a child so young was taken before she had a chance to do much of anything here? And while I struggle with how little Lizzy ever got to live and how few people ever got to be impacted by her life, I also know that Lizzy’s life mattered. Matters. After all, what is more sad: a man who gets to live 40 or 50 years, but lives in misery ending in suicide? A man, who at his death, is utterly alone, with no one knowing who he was and no one mourning him? Or my child’s death, who lived only 2 years, but lived those years being absolutely loved with every ounce of love within me?

150 people showed up to Lizzy’s funeral. Realistically, I think many of these people showed up in support of my family in a desire to be there during such a “tragedy,” rather than because they knew Lizzy personally. It was about supporting the framework around Lizzy, not necessarily about Lizzy herself. But, still I was grateful. You see, when your two-year old is lying breathless in a tiny white coffin, the things you become grateful for have a clarity and poignancy all to themselves. It mattered that so many people came to honor Lizzy’s life and to support those who loved her. It mattered and it matters.

Lizzy matters. Her life and her death matter. And I’m still trying to figure out exactly how to tell the world how much she matters. My sense is that it will take an entire book in order to properly articulate it. I know I haven’t done it in nearly fifty blog posts, which are mostly just ramblings of a grief-stricken and broken mind. I think it will be one of the most important things I ever do with my life to tell the world how much the life of my daughter mattered.

There is a need to memorialize Lizzy, and it needs to be better and more formal than this verbal vomit that I write on this blog. It needs to communicate how precious and beloved she was. It needs to illustrate how much she has changed the world in the short two years she was here. And I have to do it through writing because it seems that writing is the only way I have now of spending time with my daughter.

Lizzy was not Jesus, and I know the vast majority of the world never knew and never cared that she lived or died. But her life and her death transformed the world; I know this to be true. Her life and her death transformed me. I know that Lizzy is a gift that was given to me that continues to unfold, even after her death. I sense that she is a mystery which will continue to reveal itself to me in all of its wonder and beauty for as long as I am alive.

And maybe this is a reason to be grateful. Even though I feel most days like I am only stumbling and rambling, blind and dragging, through this life–I still have moments where I can stop and feel wonder at the gift that Lizzy was, that she is, and that she continues to be. And although I will spend the rest of my life desperately missing her, desperately wondering why I only ever had two years with her, I will also spend the rest of my life grateful for each and every second that I had with her. For she is my gift. My mystery. My wondrous, little miracle. And that deserves gratitude.