Paranoia is quickly becoming panic as the Coronavirus threat sweeps through the United States. I’m watching it happen with a curious apathy that looks a lot more like exhausted resignation than blind fear. It would be more logical, I suppose, to spend my days and nights in utter terror of losing Cecilia given the fact…
The weather has been warm enough that the daffodils have started to bloom again. As I approach Lizzy’s birthday 13 days from now, I watch the bright yellow trumpets of the daffodils flutter in the breeze and memories, like echoes, begin to dance before me. I can see Lizzy leaning down to smell the odorless…
The day before yesterday, Cecilia, my father, and myself spent the day at NIH’s Eye Institute having our worst fears about Cecilia’s lack of vision confirmed. The NIH physician-scientists were very gentle, very kind, and very thorough. After reading through the records from the long string of doctors Cecilia has been to in her very…
If you have come here seeking some faint shreds of hope, I will give you what I can: my honesty and my experience. It is true that you will never recover from the loss of your child. It will never get any easier. It will never be fixed or undone or remedied. You can never…
It is seared into my memory–that last night at home with Lizzy–that blue and broken morning when we went to the ER, and those terrible, endless days that followed. I can tell you every detail, down to the smell of the hospital, the expressions on the faces of the doctors, the cadence of their voices…
As a child, adults told me to “face my fear,” but I could never help thinking that if they actually knew what I was afraid of, they would tell me to run instead. Fear has been the ever-present phantom of my life: slithering through my childhood, seducing me in adolescence, and insinuating itself into my…
Yesterday was ten months to the day since Lizzy died. This means that for approximately 300 days, I have cried every day. The early days spent themselves in oceans of tears, inexhaustible and draining. Then, like a criminal, I began to hide my tears from those who already felt so helpless to soothe them. Eventually,…
When I walked out of Children’s Hospital the day we turned off Lizzy’s life support machine, I said to my little sister, “I never want to see this place again.” Then Cecilia moved inside of me. I paused, then qualified my statement: “Unless, of course, Cecilia ever needed it.” Two weeks ago, I found myself…
Meditation: Jesus will return to the world on Judgement Day. When you are inside of time, and–more deeply–when time is your master, it becomes increasingly more difficult to conceive a state of being that is timeless. Death takes us outside of time. Heaven is timeless. So too, will the world become timeless at the end…
The rain, cold and crawling, drizzles in pit pats against the flagstone. The porch lights shimmer and reflect, casting shadows into the deep recesses of the giant pines. I walk slowly up and down the front path, Cecilia crying fitfully in my arms. Walking outside in the rain is a last resort in an attempt…