Meditation: Jesus arrives in the hearts of believers. This past weekend, I visited the Saint John Paul II Shrine in DC, followed by vigil mass at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. While Cecilia was asleep in her stroller, I cried my way through most of the exhibit on JPII the Great, a saint…
Meditation: Jesus enters the world as a helpless infant in Bethlehem. Lizzy was born on March 20, 2017, and Cecilia was born on May 5, 2019, so there is only a 1.5 month lapse between them. This means that I was significantly pregnant with both of them throughout two winters, two Advents, and two Christmases….
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…
Many times, I have mentioned the priest who has been with me through the death of Lizzy and the birth of Cecilia. He is the priest who came to the hospital to administer Anointing of the Sick to Lizzy and who came to the house five hours after Cecilia was born to baptize her, both…
Attending weekly mass has been a struggle for me since I lost Lizzy. This is not because I am losing my faith or angry at God. For whatever reason, that has not been my experience. I do not believe that God is responsible for Lizzy’s death; I believe that we live in a fallen world…
For the past five months, I have been having this recurring dream, or, rather, I’ve been dreaming a scene in a dream that is recurring, although I arrive there from different dreams on different nights. It is twilight, somewhere between sunset and dusk, and there is a glassy body of water in front of me,…
I keep waiting (despite my better judgment) for it to get easier, but nighttime is still by far the worst. I spin in circles with eyes wide open, laying there and waiting, waiting for my life to get worse, for the new unthinkable to happen: for Cecilia to die. They say the chances of SIDS…
The thing about grief is that you don’t only have to deal with your own grief; you have to deal with everyone else’s grief too. Sometimes this is a gift, when their tears or breakdowns reassure you how much your child was loved and wanted. But sometimes it is a burden, when their grief causes…
Since I was in high school, I have loved Michelangelo’s works, particularly his Pieta. When studying abroad in college, I had the privilege and the blessing of being able to personally see this great statue during our trip to Rome. Every Pieta is a depiction of the Virgin Mary holding the dead and crucified body…