The Jet Ski

The sun was a brilliant orange disc, shooting streaks of pink and gold across a sky in which clouds were just an afterthought. The light danced and sparkled, skipping across the glistening waves, as the jet ski spun through the warm water, leaving a trail of white foam behind us.

I wrapped my arms tighter around the waist of my love, who would one day become my husband and father to Lizzy and Cecilia, and breathed in the smell of his skin in the setting sunlight before resting my cheek against his shoulder and staring in wonder at the beauty surrounding me.

My 24-year old self stared straight into that setting sun, dazzled by the light, and perfectly buzzed off of the three happy hour margaritas I had had at our favorite bayside bar. I felt so alive in that moment, like the sky had opened up path upon path before me in which all of our dreams were just a short walk away. Love for my future husband swelled inside of me, echoing the waves behind us, and I could not imagine loving more than I loved him in that moment or being more happy than I was in that moment.

We were in love in the summertime and the world lay open before us, full of possibility, as we stopped to kiss. Then laughing, we raced the setting sun home.

This memory keeps flashing before me, memory of a time when Lizzy and Cecilia did not yet exist, when I believed in everything, when I felt like the world both wanted to give and wanted me to take all of the happiness from it that I could. I had no way of knowing that the year I turned 32, I would become pregnant with a baby that we were not ready for, my marriage would end, and my two year old would die a month before her little sister was born.

For years, my father has been telling me that life is weirder than the movies, more unpredictable, and, in some cases, far more dramatic. I think now about what I would tell my 24-year old self. Don’t marry him–it won’t work? Do you want to be a single parent? Can you handle your life totally falling apart within the span of a year?

I do not know what would have happened if I hadn’t married him, what trajectory my life would have taken if I had married someone else and had children with him instead. Maybe I would be happily married with two living children, instead of alone, grieving, with a newborn. Or maybe something equally as unpredictable would have happened to me.

The only thing that I do know is that if I could do it over again, I would not make any choice that would result in me never having Lizzy. Loving and losing Lizzy has been the best and the worst things to ever happen to me. But even knowing the outcome, even knowing that I would only have her for two years, I never would have chosen anything different.

I do not understand one single thing about my life, why this has happened to me, or if I was chosen for this. The only thing that I know is that every single second of Lizzy’s life, of her time here with me, was so infinitely precious, that I would never choose something else; I would never choose to not have known her, and by knowing her, to have loved her more deeply than I knew it was possible to love.

By simply existing, Lizzy taught me so many things, among them, what love and loving really mean. And as much as I hate it, as much as I despise it, as much as I want to run away from it, Lizzy is still teaching me with her death.

I cannot choose a different life anymore than I can choose to go back and warn my 24-year old self about what was to come if I stayed with and loved this man. It was through loving him that I have had both of my daughters, and there is no way that I would choose for either of them to have never existed.

Their unique DNA, their unique little bodies, personalities, and souls would never have come into being if not for the love that their father and I shared. I cannot regret it, and I would not change it. But this does not mean that I understand any of it, nor does it give me clarity about what my life is now or is supposed to become.

All I know is that Lizzy and Cecilia are mine and I am theirs in an irreplaceable, irrevocable, and utterly indelible way. Whatever “I” conceive myself to be is now because of my daughters, dead and alive. And whatever I do from this point forward will also be because they lived, and because they chose to share that life, however long or short, with me.