Stand

As a child, adults told me to “face my fear,” but I could never help thinking that if they actually knew what I was afraid of, they would tell me to run instead.  Fear has been the ever-present phantom of my life: slithering through my childhood, seducing me in adolescence, and insinuating itself into my adult relationships.  Despite my sordid history with fear, I don’t think I ever glimpsed its true face until the day I took Lizzy to the emergency room.  And since that day, it has been the most loyal and undesired of companions.

I don’t know if you can access the true face of fear until the life of one you love is in jeopardy.  Many will freely agree that to lose a child is every parent’s worst nightmare. Sometimes, when I stop and remember my life and try to understand what happened—how my first daughter died days after turning two from a vicious and unexplainable disease and how I gave birth a month later to a second daughter with a genetic disability that impairs her eyesight—I feel like I’m not real, like I’m living out the script of a movie or a book and that this all a fantasy that is really happening to someone else: someone braver or stronger. 

There are days when I ask myself if I’m just waiting around for Cecilia to die.  But this is the fear that sometimes takes my voice talking.  Fear has fused so totally with my identity that I no longer know how to differentiate between myself and it.  Despite this, as the days curl into night and the sun still manages to rise, and I continue to wake to a cooing, living Cecilia . . . I begin to believe.

I begin to think that if I cannot conquer the fear, I can at least mitigate its damage by the simple act of exposing it.  Because that’s how fear works.  It scurries and slinks in the corners of the world, using shadows and lies to convince you and itself that it is bigger and badder than it really is.  There is only one defense to this dark game of dress up; you must drag it into the light, strip it down, and deal with the reality of what is.  If you can do this—if you can suck down the bile in your throat and silence the thousand whispers guilting or shaming you into immobility—you will find that what you feared so much is not actually unmanageable.

Because, you see, once the worst has happened to you, you will find yourself waking to a new frontier of who you are and what you can do.  It is not so much courage that enables you to stand without faltering in front of the shrinking, pathetic creature that once masqueraded as a demon; it is common sense.  It is being grounded in that which is so real and so true that nothing and no one can ever undo it or take it from you.

Lizzy was and is my light and her death does not unmake the perfect beauty of the two years we had together.  I feel I died the day Lizzy died, but I found a reason to live again the day Cecilia was born, and as long as her heart keeps beating and her lungs continue to pump oxygen, I will drag every shadow out of every corner and face it head on. And though I may do this shaking or stumbling, I will not stop, and I will not fail because this who I am now—and, coward or crusader–this is my story.