Joy of My Desiring
Before the start of the holidays, my therapist told me that Jewish tradition believes we will be held accountable for the joy that was offered to us which we refused to experience. I admit this concept has dominated much of my free thought throughout this Christmas and New Years.
The problem, however, is not that I don’t receive the joy when it is offered to me. Indeed, I throw myself headlong into joy both with Cece and my family when it comes my way. No, the problem is that I regularly experience grief and yearning in the midst of that joy.
I have written before that time is a circle. My experience with grief has not been linear, nor has my experience with joy. It is impossible for me to be tickling a giggling Cecilia and not see her big sister reflected in her laughing face. It is impossible for me to help Cecilia unwrap her presents on Christmas morning and not imagine Lizzy by her side guiding her little sister’s tiny hands.
In every moment of loving Cecilia, I am grieving Lizzy and wishing desperately that she was still alive. Similarly, in every moment of loving Cecilia, I cannot ignore the desperate craving inside of me to feel the bubbling pressure of an infant moving in utero or the gentle suction of a newborn at my breast. In loving my only living daughter, I am constantly wishing both that her big sister would come back to us and that I can one day give her a little sister or brother to somehow compensate for that loss.
Does this mean that Cecilia herself is not enough? I told my father that I feel this to be an adolescent question. This is similar to asking if love is ever enough. Love, by its nature, will always be bigger than “enough.” Love is inexhaustible, infinite, eternal, strengthening. Love’s nature is to grow and grow and the moment it stops growing is the moment is starts to become a little less like love and a little more like death. Love never stops wanting to be bigger, to ever increase in passion, profundity, and fecundity. And I think this very fertility, this yearning, this desiring is at the heart of my joy.
Is it possible to experience joy without wanting more of it? Nearly every moment that I had with Lizzy brought me pure joy; it is logical that I would want more and more of it–and her–and that this wanting cannot and will not cease with her death. Similarly, the joy that both Lizzy and Cecilia have brought me has engendered in me a starving desire to have more children–a desire that I have questioned and doubted given Lizzy’s death and Cecilia’s diagnosis–but that remains with me, stubborn and unyielding, in every waking moment. In this is also the need to give Cecilia back something of the sibling that she lost, that she never met, that she doesn’t consciously know even existed.
It is not that I don’t love or take joy in Cecilia. It is that in loving and taking that joy in her, there is an inextricable need attached to the joy that requires me to fight for the life that I want for her. This life, by its nature, is impossible, since I cannot return Lizzy to life. But it is still a possibility for me to give her siblings one day, and it is this yearning, combined with a ceaseless grief for Lizzy, that colors every beautiful moment with my living daughter.
Perhaps every book, movie, or tv show that depicts unadulterated joy is simply a lie. Perhaps it is humanly impossible to experience joy without the simultaneity of grief and desire. It may not be as acute for others, but I suspect it is there nonetheless. Can you joy without desiring more? Can you joy without the memory of what has taken joy from you in the past? I suspect all of these emotions are connected, and unavoidably so.
What I do know is that the desire that ripples through my joy like a bleeding river drives me towards an eternal becoming, a version of myself that is always growing stronger, smarter, better, and braver. The grief that deepens and devastates my joy drives like a spear through the core of my being, pinioning me to a focus that is nearly supernatural. Grief and desire twirl and thrive, red and golden, heated and breathless, swirling to form a cascade of intention, creation, and impetus to fight for the world I want for Cecilia.
In his Will to Power, Friedrich Nietzsche spoke of a “becoming that knowns no satiety, no disgust, no weariness.” Is this eternal becoming both part of the secret of life and also the answer to why joy can never just be joy? Nietzsche envisioned a superhuman capable of exercising the capacity of will in such a way that the mutability of life is swept up in man’s evolution with intention rather than dominating it with an inherent tyranny. A philosopher’s idyll, yes, but we see a similar concept in Christianity.
“Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” is a musical piece attributed to Johann Sebastian Bach. At the heart of this piece is the conviction that Jesus Christ came to not only give joy to the world but to fulfill man’s insatiable desires, to bring an end to our eternal becoming by making our becoming for once comprehensible to ourselves. To make even death into an act of becoming, and thereby to bring joy to man’s greatest fear, light to our greatest darkness, and mutable life to immutable death.
In some ways, all of this is to big for me to contemplate or comprehend. My reality remains that when I joy, I joy with want and grief. I know that the words “Joy to the World” make me think of the Crucifixion, and I wonder what Mary thought when an Eastern king gifted her newborn son with a substance used to anoint the dead. I know that Lizzy streams like a symphony through every cadence of Cecilia’s laughter and my as yet unborn children dance like phantoms waiting to be seen in a distant Dickens-esque Christmas future. I know that, for me, joy is desire, and desire grief, and it all is lost in the eternal becoming that cannot achieve satiety while this heart still beats.
