What Should Have Been

I could not write a post yesterday. In fact, I could not write, read, think, or do much of anything other than stare numbly at the ceiling or sob hysterically. This is because I received a call yesterday that devastated my day.

Around noon, I picked up a local number that I thought might be Cecilia’s pediatrician calling me back. Instead, it was a woman from my parish who saw that I had recently registered with them and that I had a two-year old daughter around her daughter’s age and wanted to set up a play date.

I had to tell her that Lizzy had died in early April, and so therefore we could not schedule a play date. I started crying while saying this because I cannot handle telling people who don’t know about Lizzy that she died.

The poor woman felt so horrible and apologized profusely and kept asking if there was anything she could do. I kept telling her it wasn’t her fault, she didn’t know, and no, no one can really do anything. It was a short phone call. After we hung up, I began sobbing hysterically and called my sister, barely coherent, to tell her what had happened.

The simple version of all of this is that I cannot accept that this is my life. The way that phone call should have gone is for me to be so grateful and love to schedule a play date for Lizzy because I feel maybe I’ve been neglecting her somewhat since Cecilia’s birth and it would be great to set up something that is just for her.

Instead, I returned to feeling that I just should have died with Lizzy because I do not want to be here, I do not know how to be here, and the picture of my life without Lizzy here is so ultimately bleak that I cannot accept it. I hated myself, I hated my life, and I just wanted to fade into numb despair at the prospect that this is now who I am and how I have to live. Pretty much the only thing that got through to me was my sister saying that I had to get through these conversations so that one day I could schedule a play date for Cecilia.

That concept held enough power to make me not want to die on the spot, but it could not salvage the rest of the day, which I spent crying.

The reality is that this is my life now. I am a ghost of who I was. My life before Lizzy’s death is like the dream vision of someone else’s life. Lizzy is now this profound, incomprehensible gift that I was only given for two years. I don’t know who I am anymore. I don’t know how to be here without her. I cannot accept her death or the concrete reality of my life without her. It is all beyond me.

I am lost in what should have been. I feel such pity, anger, and despair when I think about who I used to be. And I feel totally confounded by whatever and whoever I am now.

I know there is no reclaiming what I’ve lost. It doesn’t mean that I’m not still trapped in who I should have been, and what my life should have been. Grief, it seems, is a bountiful smorgasbord of what dish of horror I get to consume today.