Six Months (Part 3): Absolution
“How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when, in your heart, you begin to understand… there is no going back? There are some things that time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep… that have taken hold.”
– Frodo in The Return of the King (Peter Jackson’s movie)
On Thursday, March 28, 2019, I chased a giggling and bright-eyed Lizzy around a petting zoo and held her peaceful, slumbering weight in my arms during daily mass while the sun burst in rainbows through stained glass windows. On April 5, 2019, I lay down next to Lizzy’s broken and purple body and told her how much I loved her and how much she had changed my life while they turned off the machine that was breathing for her and beating her heart.
No one can change for me that these things happened. No one can undo that my world ruptured to its foundations within the span of a week. There is no going back. No return to who I once was, and no return to what my life once was. If I live now, it is in the Shadowlands between where Lizzy is and where Cecilia is, and no matter how much I try to remember things like color, oxygen, or optimism, there is no escaping the encompassing gray of this mist that does not subside.
I begin to fear that peace is evanescent. That grief is immutable. That our lives are no more than a summary of what’s left after everything that matters is taken from you. That, even at death, we cannot fathom the point of it all.
When Lizzy was some 16 months old, my sisters and I took her to a South Carolina beach. We proceeded to spend the next three hours periodically swooping her up into our arms to prevent her from sprinting headlong into the waves she found so fascinating. You would think that the pull of the tide and the enormity of the ocean would have frightened such a small child, but Lizzy was fearless that day–as she was fearless in every other aspect of her life.
For most of us, fear is consuming. So when I fear, I try to remember Lizzy’s fearlessness and learn from her. I try to allow the mystery of her life–and death–to inform and guide my life. Because I suspect that it’s all there: the secret to the meaning of life and living. I think the answers are all in Lizzy, but I don’t know that they would be if she hadn’t died. I think it is both her life and her death that hold the answers. And, although I’m not sure that I can lay claim to even one of those answers yet, I feel a sort of strengthening certainty that they are there, resting, and waiting for me.
Two days ago, Father Wyble completed Cecilia’s baptismal ceremony in the same church in which we held Lizzy’s funeral, although he had already performed the essentials of the sacrament some five hours after Cecilia’s birth. Cecilia was anointed with oils and her baptismal candle was lit, and I allowed the joy and beauty of the sacrament to wash over us. I felt Lizzy’s presence, as I always do when something significant is happening with Cecilia, and afterwards, once I had settled Cecilia into a nap, I went to confession with Father Wells.
As before, the holiness and the peace of this man was radiant. I sat before him, a shredded mass of existential doubt, self-loathing, unfaithfulness, and fear. And as the pain burbled forth from me, erupting and erupting until I could think of nothing else to say, I felt the familiar release that comes after.
He gently reassured me that he did not think I was a person of weak faith, but that, like Jacob wrestling all night with the angel, I am wrestling with my faith. I told him how prayer had become a ladder for me, and he reminded me to allow myself to find the beauty in that prayer and in a life that finds survival in prayer. He told me that he does not find me to be a person of weak faith but a person of whom much has been asked. And finally, he gave me a powerful prayer, called The Litany of Trust, to pray when I am feeling particularly weak or afraid.
Then the words of absolution poured over me, a familiar washing: “I absolve you from your sins, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
And it occurred to me that on Thursday, I had been absolved of all guilt in her death by Lizzy’s doctors, and now I was being absolved of both guilt and sin by God through this man–this priest who has been with me through it all from the beginning. I have been absolved, in fact, by everyone to whom I have spoken about my feelings of guilt in Lizzy’s death.
It seems to me that I have been wading through mysteries lately, from the mysteries of life and death that characterize the work of the pediatric intensive care unit, to the mysteries of my faith and its sacraments. I do not pretend to understand these mysteries, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t feel their effects in my life.
Inch by scrabbling inch, I am clawing my way up a mountain trying to understand what my life after Lizzy’s death means. And sometimes, these mysteries take my feet out from under me, causing me slide down 5 feet, 50 feet, and even, sometimes, back to where I started. But, very occasionally, these mysteries instead take me by the hand, wipe my forehead, and give me a drink of water.
One of the last things that Jesus ever said while he lay dying on the Cross was: “I thirst.” Our Lord thirsted and was given vinegar mixed with wine to drink. When I thirst, it is for answers to these mysteries, and it is for Lizzy. Always for Lizzy.
Paul writes in his first letter to the Corinthians, “The last enemy to be destroyed is death.” And this is the crux of my faith. Christ’s death was a death-destroying death and his life was a life-restoring life. This mystery haunts me, compels me, stays with me. And it occurs to me that if the last enemy to be destroyed is death, then, too, the last person left to absolve me of Lizzy’s death is… myself. And maybe the how and the why are no longer what matters, because the mystery of her life and death and what I can learn from them are, in the end, the only things that really matter.