The Inexorability of Now Revisited
October 5, 2020 marked 18 months to the day since Lizzy died, making Cecilia 17 months old. With each day that passes, the fact of Lizzy’s death becomes just a little more concrete. By this, I mean that the utter despair, the raw and shredding grief, and the searing isolation become that much more ingrained into who I am and who I am continually becoming. Each of these things is so unbearable when death first occurs; what happens from then on is a forced regimen of learning how to bear this impossible weight. With each day that passes, I bear it. And although my strength has grown in ways I could not have fathomed, there is no healing the gnawing certainty that only one thing can ultimately resolve the paradox that has become my life.
With each day that passes, Cecilia grows just a little bit older and stronger. Her appetite, weight, and hair are growing by the day. She can now effectively butt-scoot/crawl her way across the room to get where she wants to go. She turns all of the pages by herself during our reading times, and plays alone in her pack and play, silently flipping the pages of her touch-and-feel books to feel the new texture on each page. She can pat her head, tummy, and nose on command, and mimic everything from hoots, clicks, and bleats to kisses, although her kisses still come out as raspberries. She uses her co-sleeper to pull herself to stand so that she can reach to grab a cross with a bedtime prayer on it off the wall. When she sleeps, her beauty still startles me, and when she’s awake, she continues to surprise me with what she’s showing me she can see.
She is, unequivocally, a toddler. I think every day about what I am going to do when she turns two. For eighteen months, I have needed Cece to turn two so that I can “have back” what I had, and yet some part of me has always known this for the fallacy it is. Lizzy’s friends are all three-and-a-half or four by now. I have been a mother for three-and-a-half years, and yet I only have an eighteen-month-old living toddler. What, I begin to ask myself, is so magical about Cece turning two in six months? It will not bring Lizzy back to life or undo what has been done. Why do I feel like there is just this ghostland in between now and then? Why do I feel that at least some of my fear will abate if I can keep Cecilia alive until her second birthday?
It seems to me that fear itself is irrational. No science, objectivity, or empiricism has the power to combat it. There is no argument that anyone can make to me to abolish my “what if’s”–both in reference to Lizzy’s death and Cece’s potential survival. There are, quite simply, no guarantees. There is only what has been and what is.
We are all products of the choices we have made and the choices others have made that have shaped the world we encounter every day. We have to live with the implications and consequences of those choices because there is no other option. I have spent so much of my life living for the future and dreaming of what I want and intend to fight for, but the only truth that really defines my life is that all I have, or ever will have, is the immediacy of now.
Perhaps the most important question in life is also arguably the most ignored, that being: how does one ensure that now matters? Now is all we ever have, and yet now is more often the burden that we wish will just pass us by.
I think I need to stop living for Cecilia’s second birthday or tenth or thirtieth. I think that each second that passes while she keeps breathing is a gift that is passing away before my eyes. She is here; I am here, and Lizzy is waiting. This is the curse of being alive: to learn to encounter the inexorability of now without fear or resentment or even hope for a better tomorrow, which may never come. I feel this blinding imperative to fight for Cecilia’s life, health, and future, and this fight, more than anything else, defines our waking hours. What defines our sleeping hours is silence, presence, and a consuming need for one another. I do not know how to walk this tightrope between planning for the future and cherishing the now. I know only that each night I fall asleep and each morning I wake up to the same three driving commands:
Never forget. Never surrender. And fall into now with your arms wide open.