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Six Months (Part 2): Accountability

For six months I have lived with the terror of fearing that I may have done something or not done something that contributed to or caused Lizzy’s death. For six months, people surrounding me have gone down countless theoretical rabbit holes trying to define the “what-ifs” and “what-could-have-beens” that may, given the butterfly effect, have changed the outcome and possibly saved Lizzy’s life.

Mentally masticating on the endless ways in which I could have or should have done something better and tormenting myself by postulating that my different theoretical behavior could have possibly changed the outcome of Lizzy’s death has occupied many of my waking, conscious hours. I travel in circles, winding my down down unnamed roads of alternative choices, feeling just as lost when I arrive at yet another vast unknown. It is pointless; it gets me nowhere; it is exhausting; it is masochistic….I know all these things. And yet I am compelled to continue it.

At the bottom of all of this is the reality that Lizzy is gone. This is unfathomable to me. I live face-to-face with an unfathomable and fundamentally unacceptable reality. In response, my brain tries to find a way in which alternate choices could have or should have altered the outcome of her death. These obsessive circles demonstrate exactly how incapable I am of living in the now or dealing with the present reality. They also demonstrate exactly how unwilling I am to accept that, at the end of all things, we are not in control.

I can excuse some of this as the human brain’s reluctance to acknowledge that life is beyond a summary of our choices. It is psychologically comforting to believe that life is as simple as choice and consequence, cause and effect, because that gives me the illusion of control, and, in the process, some sort of a guarantee of keeping Cecilia alive–based off of me making the right choices in the future. The problem with this is the ample amount of evidence that life and death are objective realities beyond the faculty of choice. How many more examples of people behaving beyond reproach at every step and still suffering and dying can I hear? Apparently countless, since, despite these examples, I still believe that I failed my daughter and let her die.

For six months, family, friends, midwives, doulas, therapists, pediatricians, and priests have told me that it wasn’t my fault that Lizzy died. During monthly grief support meetings, other parents of dead children have told me that they eventually had to let go of the guilt because the burden of grief by itself was already unbearable and the guilt only broke your arms when your legs had already been blown out from beneath you. Throughout that horrific week in the hospital, I had nurse after nurse, doctor after doctor, and specialist after specialist reassure me and my family that I did everything that could be done and that they were doing everything that could be done. And finally, last Thursday, I had the primary PICU doctor and surgeon on Lizzy’s case and the pathologist who did her autopsy tell me, in no uncertain terms, that there was no way I could have saved her. That nothing that they did, in fact, ever had a chance of saving her.

Clinically, medically, scientifically, I have all the proof I need. And yet….my mind always replies with a “but…” I can imagine how helpless the people around me feel to change my mind. I know how frustrated they must be getting. I know it must cross their minds to think I’m trying to be dramatic or get some sort of special attention by not letting this go. All I can say is that I recognize what is happening in reality around me, and I cannot stop where my brain goes and what it is doing.

It has crossed my mind that this might be a mental illness on the level of an eating disorder. Everyone around me, including science and objective reality, is telling me I’m not guilty, but when I look in the mirror, all I see is a murderer.

And I have to ask: If your first child died, is there any…possible…way that you would not feel like a failure as a parent? Further: if your first child is dead, the objective reality is that you could not keep your child alive.

So there are two options here. There have only ever been two options here.

  1. Guilt. Choices have consequences. Cause and effect. Something that I did or did not do caused Lizzy’s death.
  2. Existential terror. The world is a vast and terrifying frontier in which random, terrible, irreversible, gut-wrenching and life-altering things can happen to anyone at any time, without reason, justice, or karma informing it or placing any sort of controls or restrains on it. In short, I just happened to win the world’s worst lottery.

Now, please tell me, which of the above options would help you to sleep better at night?

And for that matter, what is better? There is no “better” here. There has never been a “better.” Lizzy is dead. That is all. And no piece and no part of that can ever hope to become “better.”

For me, there is only the waking to the reality of her absence, the struggle to live with that reality, and the battle to fall asleep to that reality. And, despite all evidence to the contrary, there persists the nagging suspicion that I could have done something better. From waiting until I was healthier to conceive her so that she had the best start on life, to breastfeeding her for longer so that she had more immunities, to doing everything remotely possible within my power to strengthen her immune system, to educating myself better on childhood illness, death, and disease…I could have and should have done more. She deserved more. She deserved better than me. She deserved everything.

But at the bottom of all things, we have to live with ourselves–with the pathetic and grotesque weight of our failures, our shortcomings, and our “not enoughs.” Still, there is a way in which trying to blame myself has become like grasping at straws. But I also refuse to excuse myself by saying that I was just a first-time mom, pregnant, single, and overwhelmed. I refuse to pretend that Lizzy ever deserved anything other than 100% of the best of myself, no matter what else was happening in my life. And it is these feelings that I know will stay with me until my own death, no matter how many physicians exonerate me.

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