This Valley of Tears

When I ask myself what do I want from Lizzy, the answer is her loving presence. When I ask myself what do I want for Lizzy, the answer is unlimited joy, peace, love, fulfillment, and relationship. The logical next step is to try to discover how to achieve these things in this world, on this planet, in this life.

For two beautiful years, I had Lizzy’s loving presence, and although I only got to give her a fraction of what I wanted to give her throughout her life, by dying, she has achieved perfect joy, peace, love, fulfillment, and relationship. These are the things that define heaven.

If there is nothing after death, then Lizzy does not have these things, but neither does she have active suffering or a future that will, at some inevitable point, contain suffering.

If there is a heaven, then Lizzy is in it. Innocent, baptized, and pure love and life, there is no version of the afterlife other than heaven to which Lizzy would belong.

And can’t heaven give her infinitely more than I can give her? What, in the end, can I truly offer her on earth to compete? Am I so focused on my loss, my grief, and my desire to have her back or to figure out a way in which she wouldn’t have died in the first place, that I am forgetting to consider how selfish I am being?

Do I want Lizzy back because I can truly offer her a better existence than heaven can? Or do I want Lizzy back to alleviate my own suffering, to make my own time on earth more full of joy and light and love? Maybe the real question I should be asking myself is what can I offer Lizzy here, on this earth?

In one of our prayers as Catholics, we pray the “Hail, Holy Queen,” to Our Lady, and several lines of this prayer read, “To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve, to thee do we send up our sighs, mourning, and weeping in this valley of tears.”

And this is a valley of tears. A place where children are gunned or bombed down in war-torn countries. A place where where adolescents feel they have to arm themselves with knives in order to navigate the world around them. A place where parents sexually abuse and even murder their infants. A place where women treat abortion as back-up contraception. A place where men choose drugs, alcohol, friends, or other women over their wives and children–or worse, beat and kill their wives and children. A place where I have personally watched two people become living skeletons as the cancer ate them from the inside out. A place where floating islands of trash choke out and devastate the sea life that used to live there. A place where abuse begets abuse, cruelty begets cruelty, violence begets violence, and the sins of the father are handed down through the generations.

If being a parent means to protect your children from harm, why would I want Lizzy to be here? This world is a dark and brutal place. And no matter how much I convinced myself before Lizzy was born that I would give her only the things filled with light, I clearly could not protect her from the darkness of disease, a darkness that took her life.

If I have to live in this valley of tears, where loving means boundless suffering, where we must accept how little control we have over everything, then I need to learn a level of surrender that right now feels abhorrent to me. I want Lizzy back with every breath that I breathe because I cannot help but want Lizzy back. But would bringing Lizzy back into this world be the most complete act of love for her, or in reality, would it be a selfish act?

I cannot control what I feel, nor can I reason my way into feeling something else. The logical conclusion here is that Lizzy being in heaven should bring me some sort of peace. But I do not feel this peace. Peace, right now, is as evanescent as surrender. And all I can say for sure in this moment is that neither peace nor surrender go to bed with me at night.