The Alchemy of Grief

It has been some weeks since I’ve cried.

Now, it is true that I broke down when trying to clean and install Lizzy’s bike seat for Cecilia. It is true, too, that I have become seasoned at swallowing my tears and stifling the sobs that swell up from inside of me with piercing regularity. But I want to speak of really crying: of those moments when you simply give up, cradle your swollen head in your empty hands and let the pain take you under.

I cried yesterday.

But crying like that is nothing new and certainly achieves nothing better or different than before. I think I am writing about it because it happened for absolutely no reason other than the omnipresent and inescapable reality that I will never see Lizzy again.

I think we like to believe there’s meaning and sense and purpose to our existence: that 1 + 1 = 2 and “b” will follow “a”. Most people can trace hysterical sobbing back to a trigger and thus, somehow, make sense of it. Ideally, reason bids us to avoid that trigger henceforth and thus sidestep the consequent pain. This is rational. This is logical.

There are days when I feel that both reason and logic crumble and scatter like dust in the face of Lizzy’s death. Sometimes, surrendering to the pain feels like being swallowed, and there is a brief sensation of relief that comes in knowing that it’s over; it’s taken you under and you’re no longer in control. There’s a shameful and sniveling cowardice to it, but there’s also a hidden heroism. It’s as though some part of you knows that if you aren’t strong enough to surrender to it, there will be a part of you forever missing, forever a mystery. And that part just may hold answers to the rest of it.

Yesterday, I gave myself over to it. I finished an email, ran through the list in my head of what I needed to finish before making dinner, and stood up to change Cece’s diaper. Then I sat back down, covered my face with my hands and started sobbing my heart out. In the background, Cece played with her toys, and the sound of a mechanical female voice repeating “Red, red, red” over and over again filled my ears. Meanwhile, Lizzy was streaming like quicksilver through my brain, and the echoing desolation of knowing that I will never see her, never feel her, never kiss her again thrummed like a bleeding river through my veins.

It ended only because, even from across the room, Cece felt my despair and started to cry. I picked myself up, picked her up, apologized, then started to play “Row, row, row your boat,” with her. And then it was over, and we changed her diaper and went downstairs to make dinner.

There was nothing epic or dramatic about it. It is barely worth writing about. And yet, I feel there is something I want to say about it: about the near-meaninglessness of it.

And that something is this:

I am not healed. Not fixed. Not over it. Lizzy’s death and the expressions on her dying and dead face are with me whenever I’m conscious. They don’t get better or go away with time. It never becomes easier to remember the way in which she died. It never gets easier to accept that I am damned to live the rest of my life without her. The nights are still long, and I am still alone, lonely, and afraid.

But I am also strong. Stronger than I was, anyway. I sleep longer than I did and get sick less often. I push through the pain and swallow my tears and hide my hopelessness from Cecilia. I get up every day determined to do better, be more, be stronger, smarter and braver. I live for Cecilia, and I wait to die.

I don’t know that there is an upwards trajectory. I think maybe it’s all just everything, all at once, and you either sink or swim. I don’t even know anymore if there’s supposed to be a destination. I think I need to believe it in order to believe that I will see Lizzy again. But as for this experience of consciousness, I think maybe it’s supposed to be hard and easy at the same time. I think maybe I’m allowed to be a coward and a hero at the same time. I think that grieving Lizzy can simultaneously be the most important and least worthwhile thing that I do with my day. And I think that both a dead and a living child can be the axis upon which I spin . . . and be it at the same time.

Pain sometimes comes without a trigger or a purpose, and grief can both motivate and immobilize you. Sometimes, the only option left is to decide that your pain matters, and part of that is choosing to make it matter. Allowing its immateriality to become matter. To forge it into something tangible and physical–that makes biology more bearable. In the process, I think you will find that you yourself may become more real . . . and that there is only one force in the world that is strong enough to enact this alchemy.