A Garden that Doesn’t Die

Attending weekly mass has been a struggle for me since I lost Lizzy. This is not because I am losing my faith or angry at God. For whatever reason, that has not been my experience. I do not believe that God is responsible for Lizzy’s death; I believe that we live in a fallen world in which death and disease are inherent. I believe that what happened to Lizzy is a product of ancestral human choice; evil and death exist because we chose this existence at the beginning of time. Therefore, I do not blame God because I do not believe that He causes human actions. I think He gives us the facility of choice and what happens from there is up to us.

This belief is also why I am so sure that Lizzy is in heaven. It is also why I believe that God is able to bring good out of even the most evil human choices. I believe good can come from Lizzy’s death. But I do not believe that her death is worth that good, nor that she had to die to achieve any outcome.

No, mass is not hard for me because of God or religion being incoherent to me. Mass is hard for me for three reasons:

1. Every week, harried parents with their living toddlers are attending mass, just like me. I still cannot bear to be around toddlers, to watch them or witness them living and loving. It is too much. And yet, mass is filled with them. I only attend Saturday or Sunday evening masses in an attempt to avoid them, and still I encounter them.
2. I attend mass at the same church in which Lizzy and I used to attend mass. The back halls of that church are rife with memories of her running around, playing with the bible finger puppets I bought her, coloring in her bible coloring books, taking my hand to explore the school halls, or rubbing her eyes and yawning in my arms before dropping her little head to my shoulder for a nap.
3. This is also the same church in which we held Lizzy’s funeral. The parlor of that church is where I saw Lizzy in her coffin, kissed her face one last time, and put the letters that I had been writing her since her birth into the coffin with her. The main body of that church is where I sat next to her closed, tiny, white coffin throughout her funeral, broken, pregnant, and bereft. The podium of that church is where I recited the poem that I wrote for Lizzy, which was the only type of eulogy I felt was appropriate for the death of a toddler.

So why do I attend mass at this church, you ask? Would it not be simpler to find a new place, with no memories of Lizzy? Perhaps. But I cannot do this for the same reason that I cannot delete the picture of me and Lizzy at a lavender farm from the lock screen of my phone. I refuse to erase Lizzy. And although the pain is there, and sometimes there to a level that I feel I cannot bear, it is better to experience this pain than to pretend she never existed.

I think this is the fundamental problem of grief for everyone; although memories of the loved one sometimes feel like too much pain to bear, they are all we have that allows us to touch and experience that loved one. And so some of us choose to stay close to those memories (or at least to not avoid them) because they are a backdoor way of staying close to those we have lost.

The final reason I attend mass at this church is because it is the home parish of the priest that administered Anointing of the Sick to Lizzy, gave the homily at her funeral, and baptized Cecilia six hours after she was born. This priest has been with me through this whole journey, and he has come to give me private talks and confessions to help me in my darkest times. I will never be able to thank him enough for all he has done for me and my family. And so, witnessing him celebrate mass (which, for Catholics, is the ultimate form of prayer) and listening to him speak during the homily is a form of therapy for m–an ongoing part of the journey I am still walking and will walk for the remainder of my life.

And so as I walked up to receive the Eucharist from this priest last night, I had slow tears coursing down my face as I do throughout most of mass, every single week. He administered the Eucharist to me and gave Cecilia a blessing as he does, every single week. And as I walked back, I said the prayer that I say after every time I receive the Eucharist, and that prayer naturally unfolded into a deep begging that God hold Lizzy in His arms, that He love her and kiss her and play with her and do all of the things that I so desperately longed to do with her. In quick succession, my superego berated me, telling me that of course God is already doing all of those things; after all, He is God and Lizzy is Lizzy.

And then the words from my priest’s homily at Lizzy’s funeral ran through my head for the untold thousandth time:

“As the springtime arrives, we feel the sunlight again, we see new life in the flowers and trees: we remember that death is not the end of the story. Lizzy was an image of God’s light and life among us. She brought that light and life to her family and to everyone who loved her. She was the sunshine of God’s love, and the blooming flowers of His joy. Lizzy was and is all gift. Praise and glory to God who would so generously give us Lizzy, if just for a short time in this life.”

And I saw in my mind, very vividly, a picture of Lizzy playing a garden that stretched on endlessly. A garden in which the colors did not fade, the blossoms did not wilt, and where new flowers continually emerged with the rising of the sun and the moon. It was a garden that didn’t die. A garden in which life was not based on the structure of death and rebirth: a garden which defied the very laws of nature and existence.

And I thought to myself that maybe that is what heaven is: a garden that doesn’t die. After all, Eden was called a “garden” and was supposedly a place of beauty and fruit which effortlessly and endlessly fostered and sustained life. We throw flowers at funerals because flowers represent both the beauty and wonder of life, as well as its incredibly short duration. But what if there were a place where the flowers didn’t die? And what if that place is what heaven is?

Lizzy was my little gardener. She loved plants and animals and ran towards any living thing with her arms wide open. If Lizzy belongs anywhere, it is in a garden. And so that is where I will think of her from now on: as playing happily, singing and chatting, and waiting for me and Cecilia in garden that doesn’t die.