Canticle for Aviva

Lizzy was born one hour and fourteen minutes into the first day of spring: March 20, 2017. She was named Aviva, Hebrew for “spring.” She was baptized on April 22, 2017. She died on April 5, 2019, one week before Easter. Cecilia’s due date was April 22, 2019, but she wasn’t born until May 5, 2019. I was so terrified of losing her that I had her baptized within hours of her birth. In 2021, Easter falls on April 4, making Easter Monday the day I will remember lying down next to Lizzy while they turned off the ECMO machine and watched the artificially-supplied oxygen leave her body.

On Mother’s Day 2020, I visited Lizzy’s grave for the first time since her burial and planted lavender. Within a month, I was told that my lavender planting violated the rules of the cemetery and they had mowed down what was seen to be unruly growth. There were no questions regarding why I had planted the lavender, what the lavender meant to me and Lizzy, or why I can’t bear to find dead or fake flowers on Lizzy’s grave. On Lizzy’s birthday, March 20, 2021, I visited Lizzy’s grave and saw the gray and deadened stems of the once vibrant lavender laying flat and dull against the earth.

But there was not only death present on Lizzy’s grave this past Saturday. One of my lavender plants had survived and was pushing up leaves, despite the blunt and indifferent destruction of the mower. The plant was so green and strong and determined that I stared unthinking at it for several minutes before I realized my tears had dried on my cheeks, and I was no longer crying.

This week, we approach Palm Sunday, which marks the beginning of Holy Week, the most important and grueling week in the Church calendar year. Two weeks remain until we celebrate how the brutalized and restored body of Jesus Christ returned to life with holes in his hands, feet, and side as a sign that pain and evil change us forever. And then it will be Easter Monday, and I will be remembering April 5 as the day my little girl walked straight into the arms of the risen Jesus.

“I want you to start calling it her feast day,” my little sister said to me. “Saint Elizabeth of the Springtime ascended to heaven on April 5, and we should celebrate her sainthood on this day.”

Saint Elizabeth of the Springtime. This is the phrase to which I have held like a lifeboat in a foundering sea. In a dazed stupor, I sat on the church pew at Lizzy’s funeral, awash in pain so acute that I could no longer see or feel anything but the tiny white coffin which sat silently next to me. And yet, through this white fog of pain, Father Wyble’s voice came to me, and I sat forward in the pew, my hands grasping tight in front of me, and I heard, and I listened.

I have read and re-read Father Wyble’s homily in my darkness and it has never failed to shine a light. It reminds me that Lizzy herself is light–the light that returns in the spring to remind me that death is not the end.

What I want to say is this: the lawn mower didn’t succeed in killing all of my lavender because, I think, life is stronger than death. I think there’s a reason Lizzy was born in the spring and died in the spring. I think there’s a reason why she loved all plants and animals and gloried in all living things. I think Lizzy embodied the natural world to me and radiated the light for which I had been searching for my entire life.

And I think my beautiful baby, who was so full of light and life, has found new ways to communicate her life to me even though she’s no longer in her body. I think death is fundamentally incapable of making Lizzy shine less brightly. In fact, I’m beginning to think it gave her the power to shine with more radiance–and without boundaries.

These recent days have been so full of sunlight and warmth that it’s impossible not to glory in them. I take Cecilia’s hands in mine and we walk her tentative and stumbling path along the same perimeter of the land which Lizzy and I used to walk so confidently. Sometimes, I see Lizzy before us, pushing her pink stroller and collecting daffodils. I think, in many ways, she will be walking before us for the rest of our lives, shining a light, paving the way for her little sister who was born without sight.

Spring has been a forgotten season to me for most of my life, but I find that is now changing. Both of my daughters were born in the spring, and I believe one of them now to be a patron saint of the springtime. I think what Lizzy has to teach me and to teach the world about the renewal of life will continue to unfold as I age and Cecilia grows. For today, the setting sun slants through the still-bare branches, casting a dim halo around the buds still curled tightly in what seems almost a caterpillar’s promise.

Lizzy’s death nearly two years ago has taught me that I can die to everything that I knew to be myself and still live. That death, for all of creation, has always meant a pathway to a new type of life–perhaps a life unlooked for or unanticipated, and undeniably, a life outside of our means of control. Life finds a way. Life uses death to create new life–constantly. This is ecology. This is biology.

This is God.

So how can I sit here with the faint chill of the breeze caressing my skin and a softly waking Cecilia cooing beside me and mourn? How can I believe that Lizzy’s death, which has already found a way to bring new life–unexpected life–from it, will cease to do anything but this for the remainder of my life . . . for the remainder of human life? How can I put a limit on that which is infinite? One tiny human life . . . one toddler who only lived two years . . . Who can possibly number the seeds that will continue to be sown or the fruit that will continue to ripen because my little girl lived and died in this place?

What does Saint Elizabeth of the Springtime have to teach me and the world? That is what I am trying to tell you.

Everything. For all of time. We’re only just beginning to learn.