There Is No Why

On the evening of my 33rd birthday, when Cecilia was 4 weeks old, I attended my first grief support meeting with the Compassionate Friends. I have since attended these monthly meetings with other broken and bereft parents looking for answers. At the meeting last night, I sat there thinking how most of us were never going to find answers to our questions.

Surrounded by so much death and so much pain, all we want is some sort of reason to guide us. The problem is that death is the primordial source of Unreason and Illogic. Death gets to be exactly as irrational, illogical, insensible, indifferent, random, and selfish as it wants to be, and nothing and no one can do a damn thing to stop it.

Death is the fundamental mystery of human existence. Why we die is a question to which no one has proof of answer. And so I sat there wishing that there was something to say or something to do to make us all feel better, or to give us hope, to give us reason. And I felt the utter futility of that wish.

All I can say I have really learned in the past months since I lost my daughter is that there is no why, at least not one that can answer the question without postulating a thousand new questions. Who has the answer to why a two-year old, perfectly innocent child died before she ever had a chance to really live?

Grief support, to the best of my current understanding (which is admittedly very little), exists so that others who are asking the same question can be with you while you ask it; it is not there to answer the question. It does not pretend to be there for that reason. It freely admits that it is there only to be there with you during the hereafter.

Because that’s the next big question after the obvious question. What does now, here, me, or I mean anymore without my child? I have come to realize with perfect clarity that I have no idea who I am anymore. I know that I still have preferences, likes and dislikes, things toward which I gravitate and things that repel me. But I no longer have a self-definition or a clear-cut purpose.

And yet with each day that Cecilia breathes, that purpose grows, and my tether to life and to wanting to live grows stronger. But this in itself causes a new pain because it feels further from Lizzy. Now, I know it is counter-intuitive, and I know that the only “healthy” path forward is to tether myself to life and not death. But Lizzy is dead. Therefore, I will always be tethered to death. And not Cecilia, nor any other children I may have, can ever break that tether.

It is five months to the day today since my baby died. I still cry every day. Sometimes, it’s when I go on walks with Cecilia or when I stumble across something of Lizzy’s or a new photo of her. Sometimes, it’s at mass, in the same church where she used to play and explore so happily, which also hosted her funeral. Last night, it was in bed, lying there with Cecilia, crushed by the surety that Lizzy should have been there with us, peacefully sleeping, her beautiful toddler body unbroken by disease and oxygen deprivation.

I don’t know how to answer the question, “How are you doing?” other than “I’m doing.” I’m going through the motions of life and living, and a good portion of it is playacting. I do it for Cecilia’s sake and for Lizzy’s sake. I do it because Cecilia needs a life and Lizzy needs a legacy. I’m not sure that I do any of it for myself. The motivation for “me” is just not there, and I can’t help but suspect it’s because I am not there. I am not anywhere.

One child dies; another is born. I died with the first child, and now I live with the second. I exist in the halfway place between my two daughters, and what I see and feel are shimmering echoes of living, of what I used to know and want, but somehow still amorphous and always out of reach. I suppose you could make the argument that Cecilia brought me back to life, but after having died with Lizzy, the life that I get to have will always be halfway in between life and death. And knowledge of this reality is one answer that I do have.

Side-by-side with that answer (and brought critically home during meetings of the Compassionate Friends) is that realization that death could be imminent for me or Cecilia or anyone else in this world that I love. The headaches that I have sporadically could, at any moment, become a brain cancer diagnosis. The stairs in the house or the knives in the kitchen can turn, at any moment, from tools into instruments of death. The cars that we drive every day could, at any moment, cause fatalities. I know now, with the bitter proof of experience, that it could all be over in a matter of seconds.

So why do we live like it won’t be? The only answer I can think is because living any other way is so deeply depressing that it would result in more deaths by suicide than we could count. And so, like children, we throw ourselves into this death-ridden life, sprinting across fields rife with landmines, and we call it “living.” We call the times when the landmines go off and consume life “accidents,” as though we didn’t know they were so present and so prevalent. I will never be convinced that this is life, and yet, I know no other way in which we can truly call ourselves “living.”

Five months. Five months since my life ended. Four months, to the day, since it began again. Month by month, day by day, hour by hour, second by second. I count the moments of my life. I have to make them matter. For Lizzy. For Cecilia. If I can’t manage this, I should have stayed dead.