Conversations with a Priest (Part 4): Suffering Motherhood

The final struggle that I discussed that day with Father Wyble was an issue that has consumed much of my thoughts and time since I lost Lizzy. It is the question of my vocation. For nearly 15 years, I have believed that being a wife and a mother was my vocation. With the birth of Lizzy, the depth of my calling to motherhood was revealed to me. Never had I known such joy and fulfillment in my life and in myself as when I became her mother.

For me, this was a clarion call of vocation. It was so perfectly clear to me that I was meant to be a mother–her mother–and my desire for more children was like a flame that burned inside of me. Therefore, when I became pregnant with Cecilia, I felt a tumultuous mixture of first, gratitude and joy that I was having more children and, second, guilt and sorrow that my time and energy must needs be taken away from Lizzy.

However, with the loss of Lizzy, I began to question my vocation to motherhood and even motherhood itself. As I mentioned in my post about Hamlet, in the midst of grief, you begin to wonder why we even perpetuate the cycle of life. For me, the acute question became why I should bring another child into life only to die? Cecilia, I felt, was already damned into existence, and that I could not undo. However, the question of more children–innocent, beautiful lives created only to suffer and lose life–was totally unresolved.

If I’m honest with myself, I still struggle with this question. I want more children with everything that I am, and yet, I still have days and hours and moments of wondering if perpetuating life is the right decision. Would not our time be better spent focusing on the life that already existed and trying to alleviate its suffering rather than co-creating another life which will add to the overwhelming number of people who already need help?

The problem really is that there is no answer to this question because it has plagued humanity from the start. Wanting to have children is more than just a biological impulse; it is a profound desire born out of love and need that transcends bodily imperative. I know this because I have experienced it, truly and deeply. But these unanswerable questions and this fundamental existentialism are unavoidable in the face of tragedy.

If I have an answer, it is simply this: that every single second of Lizzy’s life was infinitely worth it. Worth more than the 33 years of my life. Worth everything. And not for one fraction of a second would I wish that I had never known her or had those two years with her, even if I knew that was all I would ever have.

Lizzy’s life, so horrifically and unbearably short, was the most beautiful life I have ever witnessed. My daughter knew more about living and loving than I have learned in sixteen-times her lifespan. I will spend the rest of my life trying to allow her example to inform my choices and my actions about motherhood, stewardship of the earth, and love and compassion for all living things.

It is this redefinition of my vocation that Father Wyble termed “suffering motherhood.” I could no longer accept that motherhood was my vocation, since part of me believed that I had failed so deeply at it. Instead of confirming my failure, Father only suggested that maybe my vocation was evolving from motherhood into a type of suffering motherhood. Motherhood because my desire to be a mother did not die with Lizzy anymore than Lizzy’s death erased my identity as her mother. And suffering because Lizzy’s life and death and my identity as her mother, will do more to inform my vocation throughout the remainder of my life than anything else I will do or will become.

Suffering is a part of every day for me. It’s not just the times when I break down crying about Lizzy, which still number 2-3 times per day. It’s not just the plain work, hour by hour, of having to remember that Lizzy is gone, stopping what I’m doing, and then starting again for Cecilia’s sake. It’s not just that my life seems to be nothing more than a vicious circle of wanting to die with Lizzy and wanting to live for Cecilia. It’s that grief has engraved itself into every skin cell, every fragment of bone, every drop of blood, every neuron of brain, and every speck of organic matter that makes me human. Like a disease, suffering has spread, infecting every part of me. And do not mistake it; the suffering of grief is fatal. Whether it kills you immediately or fifty years down the road, it is inescapably there with you when you die, beckoning with a bony finger. It is that thing telling you that maybe death really is the release you have dreamed it to be.

I suffer because Lizzy is no longer here. I suffer because all of me yearns to go to her while, simultaneously, all of me needs to stay with Cecilia. I suffer because this split ontology makes my brain feel as though it is perpetually drowning, or, at best, cancerous. Very simply, I suffer because I have two daughters and one of them is dead.

So when Father Wyble used this term “suffering motherhood” to define me, it again sounded a clarion call within me. Not a bell of clarity and light this time, but rather a deep and resonant gong that vibrated the walls. For me, suffering motherhood is not about cowardly acceding to a miserable life. No: it is calling it what it is and acting accordingly. There is no way not to suffer for the remainder of my life. She is gone, and nothing and no one can change that for me. The only way to cope with this is to make sure that it matters. To me, to Cecilia, to those that knew Lizzy. The only way forward is to let Lizzy’s life be the beacon that it was from the moment she started to breathe; only now, it is shining with a radiance that burns to the touch. And although it keeps burning me, I will never stop following it.