Fact

The MRI came back clean, meaning that I do not have soft tissue cancer. I am immensely grateful for this reality, but it has also been hard to focus on gratitude since the reality of a divorce and pending custody trial has been coloring the past month of my life.

The thing about grief is that there are always new ways in which you can be reminded of the horror of your loss. For instance: when a magistrate asks you if you are free to attend a hearing on the day your daughter should have turned 3. Or when your child’s death has become just another fact in a court case.

It is this factedness of Lizzy’s death that holds a particular horror for me, although I don’t know exactly why. After all, I live with the reality–the fact–of Lizzy’s death and absence from my life each and every day. I suppose that there is something especially upsetting about having to say “before Lizzy died” and “after we lost Lizzy” and recall anecdotes about “when we were in the hospital…”

Is that it? Has Lizzy’s death just become a piece of the puzzle that now has to be solved regarding Cecilia’s future? I still don’t quite think that anyone fully understands what I mean when I say that Lizzy was my world. Or what it means when I say that people don’t realize how much of a relationship you can have with a 2-year old.

There is something particularly horrible about having to repeatedly reference Lizzy’s death in a timeline of events. There are ways in which her death is now reduced to a fact. A timestamp. Paperwork.

It is the casualness of the constant references to Lizzy’s death that I find horrifying, especially when I find myself doing it in order to explain the time frame of a particular event. But that’s also the thing about grief. It is fact that you are left to deal with the medical bills and ordering the tombstone and switching over the college fund. And all of these things are horrible in their own, special ways.

Will there come a time in which the horror stops? I don’t think so. I think it’s with you always. I think that because we are still within time, evolving and changing, our grief is something that both changes with us and stays exactly as terrible as it has always been. Because grief lives both in this world and outside of it. It is–very literally–supernatural. The horror doesn’t change; what changes is your ability to live beside the horror. And, this too, is fact.