The Best Big Sister
For the past five months, I have been having this recurring dream, or, rather, I’ve been dreaming a scene in a dream that is recurring, although I arrive there from different dreams on different nights. It is twilight, somewhere between sunset and dusk, and there is a glassy body of water in front of me, with the stillness of a lake but the infinite horizon of an ocean. And all of a sudden, I realize that not only can I walk on water but also run on it. I start running, and I realize I can run faster. I run faster, and I feel like I’m flying. There is the suspicion that if I stop running, I will sink. To my right, the water ripples, as though an animal is surfacing or stones have been skipped. I know I must I avoid the disturbance in the water, or else I may sink. I swerve to avoid it. I keep running.
It is at this point that I always seem to wake, fresh with the sensation of flying, breathing the exhilarating salt air, remembering the shimmering pink and purple translucence of the water beneath my pumping feet. I can still see the clarity of the sky, the scarce and timid retreat of the clouds, the burning orange and gold brow of the horizon. But, mostly, I seem to remember the feeling of transcendent freedom, knowing that I could and can bend the laws of physics, suspend reality, and achieve the impossible.
I’m no Jungian psychologist, but it has crossed my mind to wonder if this is what I will see when I’ve died–when all of the pain and the fear has left me, and I realize I can do what I’ve never been able to do before: to run impossible distances towards the light. I wonder if Lizzy felt this freedom, and chased it tirelessly, with the same joyous and inexhaustible energy that she did her entire life. It makes sense to me that Lizzy would have fearlessly sought the light–even to the point of becoming light herself. And it makes sense to me that I would do the same, except that the light that I would be chasing would be Lizzy herself.
When I think about dying, I am less afraid now than I have ever been. I am torn between the joy and comfort and profound desire to see Lizzy again and the indescribable grief of being ripped from Cecilia, especially when she still needs me so. But it is not lost on me that my life could end in a decade, a year, a month, or a minute. I no longer err on the side of dream guarantees.
And so, upon waking and before sleep, Cecilia and I have begun to pray to Lizzy. For us as Catholics, this is not strange. Lizzy was a two-year old child, baptized and sinless. It is part of our theology to believe that she went straight to heaven, and being in heaven, we now understand her to be a saint. The same priest who administered Anointing of the Sick to her in the hospital first spoke this truth about Lizzy during his homily at her funeral. Because she was born in the spring, baptized in the spring, and died in the spring, he said he will always think of her as “Saint Elizabeth of the Springtime.” This belief has been of immeasurable comfort to me. It also feels like more than a belief. It feels like truth.
Lizzy was sinless. Lizzy was pure light. And so I know that if there is a heaven, she is in it. And being in heaven makes her a saint. So when we pray to her in the mornings and evenings, we say, “Saint Elizabeth of the Springtime, pray for us.” And then we ask: “Stay with us always, and then, someday, guide us home to heaven with you.” And once this prayer is finished, I look at Cecilia’s brilliant blue eyes–so like and so unlike Lizzy’s–and I say, “You know you have the best big sister anyone could ever have.” And when I speak this, this too feels like truth.
After all, Cecilia’s big sister is a saint. When Lizzy watches over and prays for Cecilia, she does it from heaven, in the palm of God the Father, on the lap of God the Son, and with the burnished wind of God the Spirit fresh on her face. She does it from the arms of Our Lady, who gives her all the perfection of maternal love that I wish to give her, except better and more fully than I ever could. And she does it in the company of the communion of saints, those hundreds of thousands of remarkable men and women throughout history who have somehow figured out the depth and reality of what it means to be human and what it means to love.
Those of us who have grown up Catholic have always known what it means to pray to the saints. But now, when I pray to the saints, I am also praying to my daughter and to Cecilia’s big sister. And with the same faith that tells me Lizzy is a saint, I know that she can now take our prayer, turn it into flowers, and lay them at the feet of God.
