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Cicada Summer

Dear Lizzy, It has taken me several weeks to work up the courage to write this letter, and it has proved even harder than I feared. I have been comparing Cecilia with you since she was born and even more so upon learning of her diagnosis. I have been trying to replicate experiences which you…

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Olympian

If you can’t fly, then run; if you can’t run, then walk; if you can’t walk, then crawl, but whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward. – Martin Luther King, Jr. July 2013: Sweat beads on my brow, dripping to pool above my lips, gathering in droplets on my nose. My breathing grows…

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A Good Death

There is a wrongness about death that feels inescapable, as illogical as this is. The entire structure of the created world is that of decay and regeneration, and yet, the death of a human person feels like it must be avoided at all costs. We cannot accept it. Something about it feels unnatural, wrong, inhuman….

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A Suffering With

The Latin root for the word compassion is pati, which means to suffer, and the prefix com- means with. Compassion, originating from compati, literally means to suffer with. www.compassion.com There are places in the human heart too raw and terrible to be translated into speech. There are times when the pain of a loved one is so mammoth…

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Infinitely With

For the first time since Lizzy died, it feels like time is moving too fast. Once, I imagined that next two years would be an excruciating turtle-crawl towards the two-year-old finish line. Instead, I find myself so busy that the days are blurring together in an endless continuum of whatever I can get done and…

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April 5

. . . and behold! a third theme grew amid the confusion, and it was unlike the others. For it seemed at first soft and sweet, a mere rippling of gentle sounds in delicate melodies; but it could not be quenched, and it took to itself power and profundity. And it seemed at last that…

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Touch the Sky

Look at where you areLook at where you startedThe fact that you’re alive is a miracleJust stay alive, that would be enough – “That Would Be Enough”, Hamilton Scarcely a month after Cecilia was born, I texted my big sister that just because Cece isn’t Lizzy doesn’t mean that she’s any less worth dedicating my…

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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,…

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I Arise Today

It is useless to say pain is like a shadow even though pain has become as constant and understated a presence as my shadow. It is pointless to utter that grief is like an amputation even though living without Lizzy is like living without an arm or leg; I have had to learn how to…

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Psalm 88

There is a term called “existential loneliness,” indicating that the very state of being human is to be alone, to suffer alone, to die alone. Some argue we are living in an epidemic of loneliness, even before this pandemic and social isolation. I have heard doctors refer to cancer cells as “acting out of a…