Snow Angel

February 7, 2021

Dear Lizzy,

It’s been snowing a lot this winter. This morning, Cece and I awoke to the hushed weight of snow blanketing the skylight above our bed. I opened the window blinds and the trees were dusted in snow everywhere you looked. There’s nothing like the feeling in your throat and your heart as you watch snow fluttering down. It’s like a reminder of the purity from which we all came and to which we are all destined. And when the snow covers every familiar sight with a quilt of white, it’s like time stops and asks you to actually see the world in which you live–to see it and respond with gratitude.

Your little sister, of course, cannot see this magical world of white. Not in the way that you and I could, anyway. I tried to take her out to play in the snow earlier this week, but it didn’t work out very well. I think I wanted it to be like when I took you out in the snowstorm shortly before you turned two; do you remember? We got you all squishy in your snowsuit and snow pants and you toddled over to put on my Uggs because you loved putting on all of my shoes. We went outside and you laughed and played in the snow for an hour, going through five pairs of mittens because I didn’t have snow gloves small enough to fit your little hands. You kept cupping the snow in your palms and tried to eat it, like it was manna in the desert. You took your play snow shovel and helped us shovel the deck. And finally, you fell backwards into piles and piles of snow making unintentional snow angels, cheeks rosy and glowing as your laughter echoed to the sky.

Do you remember, my angel? I’ll tell you what I remember. I remember wanting to take you out the second time it snowed that winter and feeling too tired. So now all we have is that one day of you playing in the snow–that and the many pictures of you that day. It’s because of these memories that I take Cece out now, no matter how tired I’m feeling. I took her out even though she’s two months younger than you were and blind and still not walking independently. Your snow suit and pants were too big and too long for her and threw off the precarious balance she barely has. I couldn’t look at your snow boots after you died so I gave them away and had to use too-big rain boots for Cece, which kept falling off. And every time she looked at the sky, snowflakes fell in her eyes and made her cry. When I put her in the snow, she just sat there, paralyzed by all the clothes. She didn’t understand what to do and cried to be picked up. The only time I could get her to laugh was when I brushed snow off her bucket swing and pushed her back and forth under the snowy cherry tree.

It’s funny: I think someone reading this blog would think these pictures were all of the same baby. Since you died, I’ve avoided pictures and videos of you, but I think it’s time I start to look at them again. When I went looking for these, I thought to myself, “My God, they look so much like each other.” Inch by excruciating inch, Cece has been growing her way inexorably towards age two, where you will be forever frozen in time. She is now twenty-one months old, and she looks more and more like you every day. She’s even acting more like you, getting into everything, wanting me to read to her all the time, laughing and playing games and making huge messes. I have so much of what I lost in you back, and yet I have none of it back at all.

I think that’s why I wanted to write to you today: to see if you can help me understand this insane compulsion I have to try and recreate what I had with you with Cece instead. It’s insane because she’s blind with global developmental delays and in the beginning of kidney disease, but I’m starting to think it would be insane even with a sighted child who had no medical problems. It’s insane because you’re you and nothing and no one can be you for me, not ever. What is gone is gone, and there is no going back.

I find I stumble and fall short of trying to describe to people what we had, how precocious you were for a toddler, how deeply established and evolved our relationship was. How we knew each other. I think pity and guilt and sorrow at the tragedy of it all swims through people’s minds and makes them pretend to understand what I’m saying, because no one but you and me can explain what we were or what we had.

The thing is that I don’t have it with Cece. We have the same intimacy, the same depth of relationality and mutual need, the same profound joy in one another. We have this absurd bond of tragedy midwifing our relationship into existence. She’s the reason I get up every day, the reason I make myself sleep when the nights still cause me to walk like a ghost through the hospital during those last days with you. She is everything to me: everything, that is, except you.

Lizzy, I have to let Cece be Cece. I have to let go of trying to make her be for me what you were. The days are going to pass and eventually, she is going to grow older than sixteen days past her second birthday, and then I will officially have known her for longer than I knew you. What then? Will I finally allow her to be her, to venture into this vast unknown territory of raising a child past the age of two? Will she show me a depth of relationship I didn’t know or experience with you? Or will she simply show me another side of life, a side that I may not have experienced with you even had you lived?

I think the wonder of what it means to be alive is haunting me these days. The possibility open before me that the world changes and shifts and alters according to my choices is surreal; it’s like it shouldn’t exist. But it’s there–this possibility–of helping to shape and change the world around me simply because I’m alive.

I’m sure now that this is the single most true way in which you remain alive: inside of me and Cece. Your life is the most powerful force I have ever experienced to give causation and meaning to my life. Sometimes I wonder if you’re somehow shaping the world through me; if the sheer beauty of your life has become a sort of internal compass for me helping me find the way home, helping me find myself. Maybe even helping me find the self I needed to become to be the kind of mother your little sister needs.

I’m not really playing with what-ifs much these days. The factuality of your death and Cece’s diagnosis are both so much a part of who I am and what my life is that I can’t really imagine a world anymore in which you’re alive and Cece is sighted with normal kidneys. I don’t know what that looks like or feels like. It’s a fantasy-land.

I do think a lot about how your presence would have impacted Cecilia. I think she’d be walking and talking by now. I think she’d be happier and healthier. I think it wouldn’t bother either of you that she’s blind; you’d play and laugh and fight and hug and do all the things sisters are supposed to do. And Cece would belong; she’d belong to you and me in an unquestionable and unquestioning way.

As it stands, it’s just me and Cece, with me trying to do the best I can with what I have. I think sometimes that you were given to me as a glimpse of what motherhood can be like and should be like. I suspect you were the point of it all: of my life, of living itself. You showed me that things I had only ever felt or wanted in my dreams were real and embodied in the mother-child relationship. I think I got to live my dream with you, Lizzy. For two unspeakable years, I was able to be who and what I was born to be. You came like a fire into my world, setting me ablaze with life, and then you left it like a comet, shooting towards some destiny too far away for me to follow. You left when I was literally anchored to this world by your sister. You left at the time when I could least follow you.

But I think I’m following you now. I think following doesn’t look the way I thought it did when you first died. I think I need to become a creature of light to follow you, and transforming myself into a creature of light was always going to be slow, laborious, and even tedious at times.

Do you remember your first New Year’s Eve? You were nine months old, and you held to my hands balancing, standing, and then letting go and taking your first steps without me. Pretty soon after, you were off and away, moving so fast, I could barely keep up with you.

Cece can’t see where she’s going so she’s afraid to walk. Your uncle made her a makeshift push-walker to help her balance and have something in front of her that will run into obstacles before she does. For the past week, she’s been using it at every opportunity. She’s so close to walking, I can feel it. I’m more proud of her than I can express. I know you would be too.

I think that’s what it boils down to, Lizzy. To follow you, to go to where you are, I have to become a creature of light. It was never going to happen where I just starting walking one day, like you. I think I’m more like your little sister, needing constant support, having to pick myself back up every time I fall, having to learn balance like it’s another language. I think to become who I have to become to follow you, I need to learn how to walk as you walked, and perhaps to see as Cece sees. Perhaps you both are the two sides of the bridge that is needed to bring me home to heaven.

There are days I wonder if Cece actually knows you better than I knew you. I feel the same light inside of her that I felt in you, and sometimes when I hold her, it’s like I’m holding you both. I think maybe you were the mystery of life revealed to me and Cece holds the key needed to unlock that mystery.

I think about the term “silent as the grave” sometimes and feel confused. I think it’s a dark and a frightening thing to feel like the world is silent once the person you’ve loved has gone from it–like you can’t hear that person anymore, ever again. But I have lived in and through so many different types of silences since you’ve died, and somehow, you manage to fill each and every one.

Take the silence of the winter woods this week. Cece sat quietly at my feet, paralyzed by the snow surrounding her. I gulped in breath after breath of chill air, feeling my lungs expand, tasting the smell of distant wood smoke deep in my throat. I stared at the circle of dead brush cloaked in snow surrounding me, wondering how something so chaotic can be transformed into a vista of such beauty. I breathed and I listened and I watched a blood-red cardinal hop noiselessly from snowy branch to snowy branch. And in every breath of silence, I could hear you.

Where there is beauty now, I see you. Where there is love or laughter, I feel you. Your presence colors my world at every turn. And the color I see as most truly you is the shade of sunlight reflecting off snow.

In another world, a different Caroline may have taken her two toddlers out to play in the snowfall and snapped perfect photos of her perfect daughters sculpting snow angels beneath the empty trees. In this world, I held my blind daughter silently as the winter woods cradled us with white, white arms and knew that our snow angel looks different than everyone else’s.

But I’m starting to finally feel like that’s ok. It’s ok that I’m not what I was or even what I should have been. It’s ok that Cece can’t walk yet and doesn’t want to play in the snow. It’s ok because whether or not you are in your body, you are still here with us, glimmering in every fragment of snow and sun and light. You are shining around us and within us, showing us how to be human, how to live, and how to die. And perhaps, one day, even how to fly.

Lizzy, be our light. Shine for us the way home.

I love you, snow angel,

Mama