Conversations with a Priest (Part 3): “This is not home.”

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 this world–the only place in which things are familiar, comfortable, known, and assessed–is not actually your home?

I had a nightmare a few months after Lizzy was born in which I believed I was dying, to the point of only having a matter of hours left to live. There was so much terror associated with death, because, when imminently facing it in the extreme sense of reality that dreams have the power to convey, I was about to go to a place in which I knew no one and nothing. In fact, it was that very fear of nothingness that was so crippling. I had never been frightened of death before in the entire course of my life until I had this dream. After this dream, the haunting suspicion that maybe there is nothing after death has, regrettably, stayed with me.

At the time, I told myself this fear was so acute because I was only 31 and had so much of life left to live, not to mention my husband and Lizzy both depending on me. But to this day, I still fight this fear. It has never left me.

And so the concept of our true “home” being after this existence, after everything that we think we know has passed, is not an easy one to sit with. I suppose it’s just one more way in which our faith is hard–sometimes harder than I can bear to manage.

Personally, I have struggled with the concept of “home” for most of my life. I have lived with many different family members and friends in a myriad of houses, none of which have ever truly epitomized “home” to me. In some ways, I have been searching for “home” all of my life and have utterly failed to find it.

Until Lizzy, that is. When I gave birth to Lizzy, I finally found home within her. I came home to myself as well–to the version of myself I had known I always wanted to be and someday hoped to become. Simply by existing, she showed me the path to myself. So much of what I was finally made sense because she was. It was like I had been waiting my whole life to feel this way and to find her, and now that I had, I could actually start living. Lizzy was home to me in a way that no place or person has ever been.

So what does it mean that after two years, that home was ripped abruptly, violently, and traumatically from me? What does it mean about me? What does it mean about “home”? I do not have these answers. What I do know is that Lizzy took the concept of “home” with her when she left. I know that wherever she is now, my home is there with her. This is the fundamental reason why it is so hard to continue to be here and to continue to be generally.

Now, I know the next natural question is whether or not I have found another sense of “home” within Cecilia. But if I’m perfectly honest with myself, the answer is no. Perhaps this is because I gave birth to Cecilia a scant month after I lost Lizzy, or perhaps it is because Lizzy was my first child. I do not know. I know I want to provide a real home for Cecilia, and I know that this desire drives me to keep going on days that I just want to stop. I know that Cecilia deserves a home just as much as Lizzy did. I also know that I belong to Cecilia and Cecilia belongs to me in the same way that I belonged to Lizzy and Lizzy belonged to me. But, no, I did not feel the same sense of homecoming with the birth of Cecilia that I felt with the birth of Lizzy.

So I go back to the greater question that I need to answer for myself: how can I reconcile myself to the fact that my true home is not in this world? And if heaven was my home before Lizzy died, and Lizzy was the only real source of “home” that I have ever felt in this world, then it becomes doubly true that my real home is to be found in Lizzy, who is, to the best of our knowledge and faith, in heaven.

This logic is very clean. It is, as always, the emotional reality behind the logic that is both cluttered and chaotic. Both logic and faith are telling me how I should feel. But what I really feel is lost. I feel that if Lizzy is home and heaven is home then I should go home without delay. But Cecilia is keeping me here. I fear and doubt that I can provide Cecilia with a home worth living for. I struggle each day with this tug-of-war between my dead and living daughters. Everything inside of me is screaming to go to Lizzy and everything inside and outside of me is screaming stay with Cecilia.

Lizzy and Cecilia crossed through birth–their transition into this world of being–in order to be with me. I now feel that I need to cross through death in order to exit this world of being and enter the only reality where Lizzy is now present. And yet, I am capable of recognizing that it is not yet time to do this, if only because Cecilia, like Lizzy, has not yet had a chance to really live. And for both Lizzy’s sake and Cecilia’s sake, she deserves to be given that chance.