Beachcombing
August 6, 2018, Georgetown, South Carolina
A 17-month-old Lizzy tromped fearlessly through the shallows of the deserted island in the opposite direction of our companions on the shelling tour. Still smiling from the cresting waves of the boat trip, Lizzy picked up one tiny, pink-flip-flop-clad foot after another, splashing merrily. The sun twinkled rainbows across the surface of the water as I followed in the wake of my little adventurer. A week-old, embryonic Cecilia stirred in my womb, unknown to all except herself and the cosmic consciousness of her Creator. The radiance of the sun, the coolness of the water, and the stark white thrust of the dunes could not tear my focus from my firstborn, my little angel of light who walked ever before me into the wonder of the world, smiling, exultant, and utterly, profoundly–unafraid.
August 23, 2022, Cape Charles, Virginia
The sand bar stretched for a mile before and behind me, pale islands of silt peeking through the waves, which curled in caressing circles as the tide met the land. The shore lay hundreds of feet away, and yet I walked through clear water lapping at my knees, peering through the scintillation of sun that concealed shells, shimmering fish, and minute blue crabs beneath the water’s surface. The sand squeezed, fine and silky, between my toes as I walked, for once unthinking and unafraid, looking for the telltale white of an oyster shell or grey shadow of a whelk. My six-month pregnant belly cast shadows to the side, my waddling gait less pronounced in the sway and pull of the gentle waves. Sand pipers alighted on wet sand to hunt for crabs while ospreys dove nearby, calling amid the cloud-full sky.
Visions of Lizzy high-stepping through the shallows of South Carolina swam before and beside me, her presence never far in moments of peace and beauty. Scattered between the vivid images of Lizzy came snapshots of Cece, sitting at the edge of the bay, exploring rocks and shells by feel, dancing feet suspended in the air between echoes of her giggles. Both my girls danced within and around me, although Lizzy’s body lay 300 miles north in a cemetery while Cecilia danced to Mozart symphonies in her grandmother’s living room and played with her new big brother. My husband lay a mere hundred feet from me, crawling military-style through the marsh grasses to harvest the mussels that clung at their base, foraging dinner for us that evening. In this moment, of all my children and my husband, the precious life that most demanded my attention was the fetus stretching in the amniotic sea within me, pulsing a tempo impossible to ignore, physically present in the deepest caverns of my being.
This baby, this new little human person who is constantly growing and thumping and swimming his or her way to meet me, is as irreplaceable, as wondrous, as shockingly unique as my girls. For the past eight months, my life has been so overwhelmingly busy, it is hard to think for long about this new life, to feel the inevitable fear, joy, and pain that a pregnancy in the wake of a child’s death must bring. But the immanence of life is like the immanence of death–it cannot be ignored. Each day, the moment approaches where this child will need to exit my womb to enter this world–the same world that killed Lizzy and gave Cecilia blindness and kidney disease. The same world that holds such beauty and wonder and peace, that contains sunlight and tides and towering oaks. The moment of this child’s birth will remind me first and forever that this child will be born to die, that I myself will die, that my husband, my remaining children, and all of my loved ones will die.
Summer is a time of burgeoning life, seen in the rich fertility of blooms, the ubiquitous green, the blue vaulting sky cradling an abundance of bird life. Ever before, I was pregnant in the fall and winter, giving birth to two spring babies. Now, I am pregnant in the summer, expecting a baby shortly before Christmas. A baby with a different father, born to a grief-stricken mother, a blended family, a blind sister, a dead sister. Together, we weave a tapestry of broken threads, cut short or frayed by suffering, loss, and isolation. Pain has made us what we are. And yet, I have never felt so much joy, so much gratitude, or so much strength in conviction regarding my path and my purpose in this world.
They say that the greater your capacity for suffering, the greater your capacity for joy. I cannot but admit the truth of this. What people speak less about is the fear–the stark reality that the more love and joy you are given, the more you are capable of losing. When you have experienced loss, the razor’s edge between life and death is never far from your conscious mind. So many things that could happen in the blink of an eye, in the cancerous appetite of six or seven months, to simply snuff out of existence, to consume, to empty, or to eliminate. Disease, accident, disaster–these things happen every day to someone who loved someone else. It is our fragility that makes life precious, something to be valued, something that can be taken away. My own life remains the least priority to myself, the lives of my children and my husband so utterly eclipsing my self-regard that I have to remind myself my life is about more than mothering children and staying alive for them for as long as they might need my help.
This in itself is a novel shift of perspective for me. To see my life as valuable beyond motherhood–beyond my visceral reality as a vessel of life; to acknowledge that once poured out, a mother is never empty, but filled–unimaginably full–with the life she has helped engender. To live inside this conundrum that you birth babies not so that they can one day die, but so that they may experience life in between birth and death, that you may be privileged enough to share in that life, to see that life as a sign of something more, of some destiny beyond death, beyond the grasp of death to convince you that it can end everything.
Death has not ended Lizzy. It lacks such strength. She is a part of our family, my firstborn, our angel of light, our saint of the springtime who is with us in all that we do. Death does not have the power to undo Lizzy’s life, the presence that remains, forever imprinted on this world, because she lived and breathed and laughed and loved. These are the things that are immortal.
And yet I am mortal, and I cannot help but be afraid. This is my third child of my flesh, this baby that moves inside me even as I write this, this little person that could not and would not have existed if not for the choice of my husband and I to love one another and to will another life into existence. I cannot escape it; in willing this life, we are accepting the fear of losing this life, the suffering that must follow if we are forced to watch something happen to this child that we cannot stop. My helplessness terrifies me.
In processing my grief over the past three years, I have worked to acknowledge the lack of control that I have. But with this acknowledgement comes the reality that there exists a fundamental chaos at the root and heart of human existence, a chaos which cannot be governed or technologically mediated or sidestepped. Getting married is terrifying. Getting married after abuse and divorce is more terrifying. Having children is terrifying. Having children after the death of a child and the genetic disability of another is more terrifying. How do I confront my terror in the face of chaos? How do I begin to become the kind of mother this new baby deserves–the kind of mother that all of my children deserve?
I have a great deal of fear and very few answers. I am filled with and surrounded by more love than I have ever experienced in my life, all made possible by this incredible man who chose to dedicate his life to me. I find myself taking that love, from my girls, from my new son, from my husband, and swallowing it greedily, day after day, as thought I cannot consume enough. I can no more say no to accepting their love than I can to acknowledging my fear. I do not know how to love this much or this powerfully without being afraid I will lose it.
Fear played no part of my two years with Lizzy. I think, in many ways, I was a child when I was her mother, unable to fathom the road that lay ahead. Lizzy herself was fearless, powerful in how she loved, inexhaustible in her thirst to see and be part of this world. She is a mystery that continues to unfold within my heart, to teach me the meaning of love and fearlessness. Because I think there is a relationship between love and fear; you cannot love without fearing loss of that love and of the beloved. But if death cannot hold the power to undo what love creates, then fear must hold even less power. So my only choice is to walk ahead as Lizzy did, through clear and murky waters alike, to confront this next adventure, this next summit of love, this next sibling of Lizzy’s–to walk, perhaps, into deeper waters, where dwell greater mystery and wonder–and to allow the unseen to engender a new kind of faith.