In the early months after Lizzy’s death, people would ask if I prayed or talked to Lizzy as a spirit, soul, angel, or saint. I always said “No” in response to this because Lizzy was still too human, too real, too much a toddler to be a spirit. Every second was rampant with memory of…
Elizabeth Aviva Fiada was born into this life on the first day of spring, 2017. She was beautifully and fittingly given the middle name Aviva, or springtime, in Hebrew. Later on that spring, on the 22nd of April, she was born into the divine life of grace at her baptism. In the springtime of 2019…
What we celebrate today as Halloween has its origins in the Celtic festival of Samhain, when people lit bonfires, told ghost stories, and dressed in costumes to ward off ghosts. It was celebrated on October 31 (the day before the Celtic New Year on November 1) as the final celebration of the harvest before winter….
I watched Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ last night. I know some people may think this was a very unwise decision, while some people may get it. For me, it was a way of entering into my faith, especially Our Lady’s experience of suffering through every single step of her Son’s Passion. It…
“How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when, in your heart, you begin to understand… there is no going back? There are some things that time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep… that have taken hold.” – Frodo in The Return of the King…
For six months I have lived with the terror of fearing that I may have done something or not done something that contributed to or caused Lizzy’s death. For six months, people surrounding me have gone down countless theoretical rabbit holes trying to define the “what-ifs” and “what-could-have-beens” that may, given the butterfly effect, have…
Today is six months to the day since Lizzy died, five months to the day since Cecilia was born. This past Thursday, we received and reviewed the autopsy results with the primary doctor on Lizzy’s case and the pathologist who did the autopsy. The short version is that the autopsy didn’t reveal anything absurdly rare…
Tomorrow, on October 5, 2019, Cecilia will be exactly 5 months old, and it will be exactly 6 months since Lizzy died. In those 6 months, I cannot count the number of people who have heard about Lizzy’s death and told me, “I’m sorry.” It is, after all, the polite thing to say in such…
I identify myself as Roman Catholic, and I take my faith very seriously. But the truth is that I am a person of weak faith who has always struggled with believing. In late high school and early college, I fell away from the Church and identified myself as agnostic bordering on atheistic (I think I…
Of all things that a two-year old is, silent is not one of them. After Lizzy died, I could not fathom the silence. It was ringing, deafening, inescapable. I could not understand what our lives were composed of without Lizzy chattering away, getting into everything, and busily exploring her world. What was life without this…