A Song of Dreams and Nightmares

The old house stretched, vast and creaking, before us. My little sister and I walked, brushing reverent fingertips across two-hundred-year-old thresholds and peeking tentative heads into music rooms and servant’s quarters. The timbre of the docent’s voice held the same rich quality as the mahogany banister, spiraling a dizzying three flights heavenwards.

Without warning, the room opened up onto a vast conservatory, glass walls arching to a luminescent and glittering sky. And then the glass was gone and the smell of fir trees and the sound of birdsong filled the air. Away to our left unfolded a mountain valley, snow-peaked caps tucked drowsily amid fluffy clouds and tumbling waterfalls scrambling like children down the evergreen slopes. I found myself standing on a rainbow of river stones, my bare feet immersed in a clear brook, toes cool and wriggling in the gentle rush of water. A school of fish darted past as the sun broke like a yawn through the mountain’s nap, and I raised my head to look into my little sister’s bright eyes, my smile widening.

We walked together through the stream towards the mountains as the waterfalls and birds danced in a symphony around us. Other people walked by us in casual and cordial disregard, too focused on the wealth of the valley to exchange more than a passing smile. While we walked, my sister and I talked of hopeful things, of promises and prognoses, of Cecilia’s progress and my dreams for the years ahead.

A man with unremarkable features and dull brown hair approached me, attempting to strike up conversation. I politely held up one hand in disinterest and kept walking, continuing my conversation with my sister. We passed him and kept walking. Suddenly, I felt my arm twisted behind me, his hand rough and bruising on my forearm. I disengaged myself from his grasp, wrenching myself free and, in the process, causing him to fall headlong into the stream. I kept walking.

This time, when he rose to his feet, he placed a box-cutting blade to my throat. He held the short handle concealed in his clenched fist so that only the blade was visible between his fore and middle fingers. In the span of a moment, three thoughts simultaneously poured through my brain. First: he’s done this before, and he knows exactly which vein to cut. Second: I’m only seconds away from seeing Lizzy. Third: if I die, Cecilia will be helpless.

Unable to decide between death and rape, I woke myself up. Cecilia lay sleeping angelically next to me, nestled like a baby hedgehog in the crook of my arm. I stared at the skylight above our bed for several minutes, attempting to make sense of my nightmare. The minutes passed, and I remained unable to negotiate the uncomfortable fact that the prospect of immediate death had brought me only inexpressible relief.

I feel like I keep trying to define the term “suicidal” in an attempt to understand if that’s what I am. Yet, I don’t want to die, and I don’t intend my death. I don’t use the prospect of my death to threaten or manipulate those around me. Most of all, I don’t even consider my death to be an option because there is simply no one to replace me in Cecilia’s desperately fragile life.

I don’t believe I’m suicidal because I don’t will my own death. But there is also no getting around the fact that the prospect of my death as something forced upon me brought me to a sense of nearly indescribable freedom and release. The thought of it just being over was more appealing than I want to admit.

I’ve spoken before about how I feel that any manner of choosing my own death would be the coward’s way out, and thereby dishonor Lizzy and totally abandon her little sister. The harder path is to live, to accept the vagaries of temporality, the indignities of the body, and the obscenities of a consciousness unable to process its own mortality. The harder path is to live with a grief that renews itself with every sunrise and force yourself to channel that grief into fuel that sustains your living child for just a little bit longer.

But for how much longer? I asked myself that question in the final hours of childbirth with both Lizzy and Cece. I asked myself that question while I lay in my little sister’s lap on the floor of the waiting room while they attached Lizzy to a machine that could inflate her lungs and beat her heart. I asked myself that question while they stuck electrodes to Cecilia’s eyes and concealed her screaming, purpled face inside a helmet that could monitor the electrical impulses coming–or not coming–from her eyes.

You don’t ask “how much longer” when you’re outside of time. This is what I keep telling myself, anyway. If Cecilia were forced to live the next eighty or ninety years without me, she would feel my absence color every moment. But Lizzy, bright angel that she is, may be spinning circles in a timeless garden, planting flowers for a reunion that will abolish time forever. For Lizzy, another fifty or sixty years may be only the blink of an eye.

There is, you see, no choice at all, despite what my nightmare would have you believe. I will spend the next decades of my life fighting for Cecilia with every breath that is given to me. I will spend it being the mother to Cecilia that Lizzy deserved. I will face every “how much longer” with courage and endurance. And then, finally, there will come an end, and I will no longer be condemned to a perpetual spinning out of time, for my time will finally be spent, and I will be free.

When I close my eyes, I can still see Lizzy lying on the table, her tiny hand in mine, her sunken and exhausted blue eyes begging a question I had no way of answering. Instead, I whispered to her that they were going to put her to sleep for a little while and take away the pain, but that I would be right there beside her when she woke up.

Now, I will live the next decades of my life knowing that to be the last time I saw the blue of her eyes and that I lied to her and to myself on that gray and swollen morning. For as time continues to pass and I live out my endless reprise of “how much longer,” I start to understand that I am the one who is sleeping, and when I am finally permitted to wake, it will be Lizzy’s face that I see.

All that lies between now and then is a spinning out of time–a promise and an answer, a breath and a song, a prophecy and a prayer in a pair of blue, blue eyes preparing to blink and finally wake me from this fading dream.