Today is six months to the day since Lizzy died, five months to the day since Cecilia was born. This past Thursday, we received and reviewed the autopsy results with the primary doctor on Lizzy’s case and the pathologist who did the autopsy. The short version is that the autopsy didn’t reveal anything absurdly rare…
Tomorrow, on October 5, 2019, Cecilia will be exactly 5 months old, and it will be exactly 6 months since Lizzy died. In those 6 months, I cannot count the number of people who have heard about Lizzy’s death and told me, “I’m sorry.” It is, after all, the polite thing to say in such…
I identify myself as Roman Catholic, and I take my faith very seriously. But the truth is that I am a person of weak faith who has always struggled with believing. In late high school and early college, I fell away from the Church and identified myself as agnostic bordering on atheistic (I think I…
Of all things that a two-year old is, silent is not one of them. After Lizzy died, I could not fathom the silence. It was ringing, deafening, inescapable. I could not understand what our lives were composed of without Lizzy chattering away, getting into everything, and busily exploring her world. What was life without this…
The final struggle that I discussed that day with Father Wyble was an issue that has consumed much of my thoughts and time since I lost Lizzy. It is the question of my vocation. For nearly 15 years, I have believed that being a wife and a mother was my vocation. With the birth of…
The day before Cecilia was born, tears streaming down my face, I remember repeating to Father Wyble, “I just need her to come home to me.” After a pause, he responded quietly, “We have to remember that this is not home.” What do you do with that? What do you do with the idea that…
There were four major takeaways from my conversation/confession with Father Wyble the day before I went into labor with Cecilia. And I return to these four concepts again and again, as I try to process my grief. The first concept is that the death of Lizzy is my cross, which I will carry for the…
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…
I’ve been watching every DVD that I own as part of the fruitless and often ineffective system of distraction that I’ve developed. In this process, I discovered that I had three copies of Hamlet. So I watched all three. What I remember about Hamlet from my brief highschool obsession with it was that Hamlet, though…
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…