Grave

This past Mother’s Day, I decided to visit Lizzy’s grave for the first time. Last Mother’s day, Cecilia was only a week old and grief over Lizzy had returned full force, so it was a fairly miserable day. I’m not sure what I thought or expected this Mother’s Day to be like. What I know is that I wanted to visit Lizzy’s grave on her birthday in March, but the stay-at-home orders for Covid prevented me. The weeks dragged on, and it started to feel more and more urgent to visit the cemetery. Finally, I decided that quarantine or not, I would visit Lizzy’s grave on Mother’s Day. Luckily, Governor Hogan partially lifted the order, explicitly allowing cemetery visits, and my father chose to accompany me.

What does Mother’s Day even look like for someone like me? I am mother to a dead toddler and a blind one-year-old. Neither of my daughters can celebrate with me in any of the traditional ways. This choice at least allowed me to be with some part of both of my daughters on Mother’s Day.

I asked my father to stay in the car with Cecilia and give me a few minutes when we first arrived. I knelt by my grandfather’s grave first, resting my palms against his headstone, and telling him how I much I missed him and how grateful I was that he was was watching over my little girl here on earth and teaching her how to dig potatoes in heaven. The tears started to come then, and I gave myself several minutes, working up the strength to turn to look at the beautiful white headstone on my left.

The last time I was here was over a year ago for Lizzy’s burial. I remember sitting numb and frozen as the funeral people handed me a white rose. Every member of my family threw their rose into Lizzy’s grave to land on her tiny coffin. Some part of my brain was aware that people were feeling uncomfortable and awkward when I didn’t stand to participate in the ritualized behavior. I remember watching myself as though I was far, far away and thinking about how the rose petals and stem would start to mold and disintegrate, staining the pristine, white surface of the coffin. Then I thought about Lizzy’s body when I had last seen it in her coffin and the feel of her cold and hard lips when I had last kissed her. I remember thinking how infuriating it was that people expected me to drop a rose into this hole in the earth that was about to consume my child. What the hell would a dead flower do?

Numbly, I stood and then walked with zombie footsteps to the dirt mouth before me. I could not register or feel Cecilia inside my womb anymore. The only thing that mattered was the six feet separating myself from my baby. I laid down next to the edge, intending to roll myself in. My little sister’s arms came around me as she sobbed, asking me to please stay with her. Several people surrounded me, trying to reason with me, but I could not see for the tears that blinded me or breathe for the mucus that streamed down my face. I couldn’t think except to know that I had to get as physically close to what was left of Lizzy as I could because maybe–somehow, someway–that would bring me back to her.

Over a year later, I have now read enough books about grief and trauma to realize that the only parts of my brain that could function at the time were the mammalian and reptilian brains in charge of emotion and instinct. In other words, I was neuro-physiologically incapable of reason or intellect at that time.

This past Mother’s Day, when I finally summoned the courage to look at Lizzy’s grave, I saw nothing remarkable. Red clay dirt dominated the space before the beautiful tombstone that I had designed. Sparse, prickly patches of weed-like grass rose in scattered and random profusion, contrasting with the perfectly-level green covering the rest of the graves. It was obvious that Lizzy’s grave was still very new to the cemetery.

I lasted long enough to place both my palms against her headstone before collapsing in sobs. Compulsively, I ran my hands over and over the letters carved like teeth into stone. They say that funerals and tombs and cemeteries are for the living and not for the dead, and I must say I found this to be true. I cried for the pregnant and witless ghost I had been the last time I was here. I cried for Cecilia, who sat playing in her carseat, cognitively oblivious to the fact that she will never get to meet her big sister. I cried for every person who never got to see and feel the light of Lizzy’s smile. But I do not know that I cried for Lizzy herself.

Cecilia started to fuss, and I pulled myself together to feed her. I thought about how Cecilia’s little warm body needed my milk to grow and keep thriving and how Lizzy’s body was ground-temperature and decaying ten feet away. Then I set up Cecilia to play on a blanket beside her sister’s grave, and set to do what I had come here to do.

When Lizzy was 16 months old, we visited a lavender farm. Lizzy was delighted by all the farm animals and spent the day playing in and wandering through fields of lavender. I probably have 100 photos of that day alone. Now, I will never be able to think of lavender without thinking of Lizzy. I cannot bear the thought of fake or dead flowers on Lizzy’s grave, so I purchased six different types of lavender, which is a perennial herb, to plant instead. The work of digging and sifting through dirt and stone was at once a welcome distraction and an aching reminder of how Lizzy and I used to garden together regularly.

I knew I was doing nothing that ultimately mattered, nothing that unmade her death, nothing even that she could see or smell or touch. I knew that I was doing it for me and maybe for Cecilia, who might one day visit and smell and touch the flowers that will now grow in abundance on her big sister’s grave. What I did meant nothing and did nothing–except, that is, to make me feel as though I had done something.

And that’s perhaps what I’m trying and failing to articulate. Death rituals are for the living, not for the dead. Lizzy’s body is what was decaying in that coffin underneath that red clay–not Lizzy herself. Her little, perfect body, which I grew inside my own, and which I fed and held and nourished and kissed and played with, is what is now decaying beneath the soil. Her perfect little body deserves every ounce of dignity, respect, honor, love, and peace that I can give it, and so I will give it. But that does not change the reality that Lizzy is not there.

Lizzy went from being inside her suffering little body to being inside and with me and Cecilia in ways no man or woman can measure. What is clear, though, is that Lizzy is infinitely with me and Cecilia; how this is or where she is located is beyond my scope of understanding. But I know for sure that Lizzy is not located in that grave. I also know that from the moment she died, she has not left me for a single second. And, now, with the functioning of my frontal lobe back, I can logically understand that throwing myself into her grave would not have brought me closer to her.

I don’t know that planting lavender on her grave brought me closer to her either. I don’t think that’s why I did it. Rather, I think it is becoming more and more clear to me that sometimes life boils down to making choices that just allow us to live with ourselves. So there it is. The ugly, common truth. I did what I did on Mother’s Day for me and not for my dead child. I did it so that I could breathe and sleep and walk through my days just a little bit easier. Because, ultimately, it is in those small moments when you have woken to a dark silence–and then that silence flexes, swells, and stifles–that you realize how utterly alone and ashamed and afraid you are, and it’s all you can do to just swallow your reflection.