Lizzy’s Sky

In September of 2018, Lizzy and I traveled to Florida to visit my grandparents for a week. My grandmother took us to the aquarium, where Lizzy pressed eager palms against the endless tanks of native fish, the dim blue light reflecting on her wide, gap-toothed smile. We reached into a shallow, circular tank to pet the smooth, gray flesh of skates and gazed into the colorful depths of a huge structure filled with sharks. She wandered through a children’s maze of old fishnets and stared in disbelief as a manatee swam past her. But, best of all, as we reached the sea turtle exhibit, Lizzy reached out to touch the life-size replica of a massive sea turtle that was plastered to the wall. She placed her delicate hand gently against the nose of the sea turtle, then leaned her tiny face in until her forehead gently touched its head. I gave her a minute, and when she was done, she pulled back into my arms, smiling brilliantly.

I later joked to my sisters that Lizzy was baby Moana.

In that short week, Lizzy and I swam in the pool with my dad most days, her chubby little thighs wobbling as she insisted on walking with him around the perimeter before jumping gleefully into my arms where I waited, waist-deep, in the water. She delighted in petting my grandmother’s cat and in walking down to the pier to see and hear the abundant bird life. One day, my father took Lizzy and I to some gardens-turned-wildlife-sanctuary, and Lizzy chatted with flamingos and giant tortoises and stared in fascination at the massive parrot that my dad got to hold on his forearms. We spent at least thirty minutes in the petting zoo where Lizzy walked right up to the potbelly pigs and miniature goats to pet them encouragingly, all the while carrying on a babbling toddler’s conversation.

It was for all these reasons and more that I dreaded returning to Florida this winter when we decided that Cecilia and I should spend a month with my grandparents, since my grandfather had been struggling recently with his health. Lizzy was everywhere I looked in Florida, especially since Cece and I were staying in the same room and sleeping in the same bed where I had been, just a little over a year before, with Lizzy. I sat there on my first night, unable to cope with the surreal memory of downing jars of peanut butter to stave off the severe nausea of my pregnancy with Cece while Lizzy had played on the floor, happily deconstructing every item that had been neatly organized on the black bookshelves.

I avoided the pool for a week, unable to face the memories I had of Lizzy there. Time passed slowly at first, but Cece and I eventually began to grow new memories in Florida, among them picking honeybell oranges and dodging fire ants at Dooley Groves, visiting the Salvador Dali museum, and spending a day drinking in the mind-blowing beauty and sensory overload of the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens. And there were softer and smaller moments, too, like watching Cece plink at the piano while sitting contentedly in my grandmother’s lap, or watching her tiny fingers curl tightly around my grandfather’s index finger and hearing his deep chuckle in response.

The days melded into weeks, and I began to feel a sense of peace that had been absent from me for over a year. For the first time, I allowed myself to begin to consider what my and Cece’s future could look like. I finished reading my grandfather’s book, which describes a life of education and travel that was intoxicating in its possibility but also seemed simultaneously totally out of my reach. My grandparents and I had many conversations over dinners rich with excellent seafood about travel, education, and their experiences raising their own children.

The sense of peace and hope that Florida briefly brought to me has long since evaporated. I returned home to the brutal reality of divorce and a custody dispute, Cecilia’s evaluation and diagnosis from NIH, the advent of Lizzy’s birthday, and the slow, stalking shadow of COVID-19 that was spreading over the country like a sickening, worm-riddled cloak. Now, as I approach the anniversary of Lizzy’s death on April 5, I find myself grasping towards memories of Florida, wishing I could recreate and freeze the feeling of them like sunlight on my skin.

Yesterday, Governor Hogan put Maryland residents under house arrest. The days are ticking by, birds are announcing the advent of spring, and people are sickening and dying by the thousands. Tomorrow, I have to break quarantine to take Cecilia to Children’s Hospital to have her kidney function evaluated. I have no choice. I am terrified for my daughter and worried for my family, especially for my grandparents, whose age puts them most at risk from Coronavirus.

It seems confirmed that fear is something that will never totally leave you, even under the best of circumstances. After all, life is such that it can end in a split second and at any time. I wish I could have spent longer in Florida. I wish I could protect my grandparents. I wish I could take Cecilia and run or fly away–away from her diagnosis, away from her blindness, and away from the coronavirus.

I wish I could restore Lizzy to life.

This is selfish, I know. After all, Lizzy is free from all of this sickness and death and fear. What kind of mother would I be to plunge her back into it? And as for Cecilia, I can run as far and as fast as I like, but I will not avoid this worldwide pandemic anymore that I can avoid the disease that sits festering inside of my baby, written into the genetics of every cell of her body.

There is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.

There is, instead, a waiting stillness in the space between when I stop madly doing paperwork, calling doctors, and researching eye and kidney function. I wonder if this stillness means that I have reached the point where I am finally just expecting death: Cecilia’s, my own, or members of my family. Sometimes I just gaze intently into Cecilia’s eyes–not knowing how much of me she can see in return–and sense a sort of bone-deep knowledge that somehow only babies have. It’s the kind of knowledge without knowing, and I saw it in Lizzy as well.

I realize I’m not making any sense. I’m tired and I’m afraid and I’m fighting despair. I feel like I’m thinking in slow motion, and all I can remember is being back in Florida and standing on the balcony with my grandmother, watching the sun set. I had just returned from my daily walk with Cecilia along the boardwalk through the mangrove swamp, riddled with fiddler crabs and herons. The sun had turned the bay pink and glassy, except for when the pelicans dove deep, gobbling up the twilit fish and causing endless ripples to quake towards the horizon. The sky was lit with fountains of color, a vast panorama spreading out beyond the scope of vision. The sun was huge and dripping, melting a burnished gold into the depths of the water and dipping below the hood of vermilion that cloaked it. Shades of orange and canary yellow streaked in shining webs before turning the same shade of pink I have seen countless times in the newborn cheeks of both my daughters. Finally, a soft and haunting purple stretched infinitely towards the rising moon as an osprey soared across the sky that lacked both beginning and end.

“This is what we call ‘Lizzy’s sky’,” my grandmother was saying, holding back tears. “This is what it looked like on April 5 while you were with her at the hospital.”

I could only nod wordlessly, listening to my grandmother try to describe the sense of beauty and freedom she had felt that day, which had seemed so contrary at the time to the mindless and senseless death of a two-girl old little girl. Both the beauty in the sky before us and the beauty inside of what she was saying was the type of beauty to which there is no response except surrender.

Beauty within beauty. Knowledge within knowledge. These are the things I have seen inside my daughters.

I watched the symphony of color meld, blend, and begin to echo as the last remnants of the sun slipped out of sight. I could hear Lizzy’s voice asking me, “For-ever?” I could see her face, smiling like the sun.

This was Lizzy’s sky?

“Yes,” I whispered . . . and surrendered.