Easter Triduum (Part 3): Resurrection

Happy Easter, everyone. Exactly a year ago today was Lizzy’s funeral. This is also my 100th post, and I have decided to finally make this blog public in the hopes that it can help someone else who is either grieving a child or even just asking the hard questions in the midst of this Coronavirus pandemic.

I think I left off yesterday by asking what the point was in having children if they are born only to suffer and die. Today, I’ll tell you what I think the point is.

Every single second of Lizzy’s short and precious life was infinitely worth the constant suffering I will live with for the rest of my life by virtue of losing her. The pain is everywhere and unending, and yet there will never be a scenario in which I would choose to have never known her.

I was more alive and more myself during those short, two years that I had with her than I was during any of the 30 years prior to her birth.  The reason why my grief is so crippling is exactly because there is a direct correlation between the strength and vibrancy of how much Lizzy and I loved each other and how vast and empty the world has now become without her.

What was the point in the life of a toddler that most people never even knew existed?
The point is that the smallest, quietest, and most inconsequential lives are sometimes the ones most worth fighting for. Lizzy was only here for two years, and yet she taught me more in those two years about living, dying, and being human than I had learned in 30 years. Her life was beautiful in ways that are absolutely beyond articulation. And her death is devastating in ways that also defy description. 

Lizzy did change the world, even though poets and artists and musicians will probably never tell her story. It doesn’t matter. I will tell her story.

And I will tell you also that our children are born with the answers we seek. Sometimes, even they themselves are the answer.

There are days when I can see these answers in Cecilia’s dimples: in how a chipmunked-cheeked smile breaks across her face whenever you tell her that she’s being silly. I can feel these answers when she nurses to sleep while holding my hand. I can hear them whenever she mimics the sound of a cuckoo’s cry with perfect intonation and pitch.

Like Lizzy, Cecilia is filled with light and life, and yet, of what worth is a blind infant to anyone other than her mother? It doesn’t matter. I will love her and preserve her life and tell her Lizzy’s story all the same.

Today, on this day of Resurrection, I can hear answers to my questions in the calm susurrus of the breeze and the soft call of a wood pigeon. I can see them in the gentle rainfall and the sagging limbs of the cherry trees, richly pink and heavy with dew-laden blossoms. I watch Cecilia as she sleeps and feel the warmth of her skin, the blood full and pumping, working with invisible vigor to keep her alive. Her chest rises and falls, her fingertips fluttering occasionally. Her mouth lies open in the total surrender of baby slumber, and her lashes rest like combed coal against her cheeks.

Like Lizzy was, Cecilia is the answer to all of my questions. What I need to learn is how to stop asking long enough to listen as the answer unfolds before me. If I can learn to do this, one day, I may find myself in a place where I no longer feel the need to ask questions and seek answers. Eyes closed, I will spin in slow circles, breathing air so pure it’s like drinking water. I’ll stretch my arms out to the sky and bathe in sunlit luminescence. I’ll smell lilies and hyacinth on the breeze and open up my eyes, eager for their beauty. Instead, Lizzy will be standing before there me, smiling brilliantly, chubby arms open, asking her two-syllabled “Up?” And I will reach down, take her in my arms, and let her laughter carry us both into the light.