Do you think Lizzy would want you to…

be this miserable?

spend the rest of your life mourning her?

stop living?

I hate this question, and I hate its implications. It’s underthought. No, I don’t think Lizzy would want any of those things. I think that if it’s about what Lizzy would have wanted, then she would have wanted to stay with me or come back to me. Lizzy would have wanted to be with me. She would have wanted to be safe and home. She would have wanted to share meals with me, drink my milk, dance with me, laugh and play games with me, have me read to her, take a “tubby” and shower together, brush our teeth together, watch a movie together, or help me with whatever chore I was doing,

Lizzy was two. What she wanted was me–her mom–and she was not psychologically capable of some “Don’t cry for me, Argentina” version of selflessness. Maybe this is relevant for an adult’s death. An adult could have the mental wherewithal to think about what and how he hopes his loved ones will behave after his death. But my daughter was two years old. She wanted simple things. She wanted her mother. Instead, an insidious disease ravaged her from the inside out, systematically attacking each of her major organs until they collapsed. And now, there exists an impassable gulf of time and space between me and my baby.

I suppose if you’re talking about what Lizzy the disembodied soul or Lizzy the saint wants, I do not know, and I cannot speak to that. I do not know these versions of Lizzy in the same intimate way.

But I cannot help but think that you are asking me this question because you are at a loss as to what to say–because I have pushed you beyond your capacity to answer my existential despair, and so you are calling on Lizzy’s ghost or the sheer power of the memory of her to come to your aid and thereby emotionally control my response.

But Lizzy was two. Lizzy was brimming with life, and she generously and effortlessly shared every piece of that life with me. If it was up to what Lizzy would want, then she would still be with me.

Lizzy’s life was taken from her. The despair that this fact leaves me with is unquenchable and unsolvable. She was a beautiful, pure, perfect little creature who was brutally wiped out by a vicious disease. No one can fix this for me.

Just like no one can fix for me the fact that just continuing to exist, to breathe, to eat, to sleep, to talk to people–is work. It’s all work. It’s work just being here. There is literally nothing that I can do to fix the inescapable reality that my mind turns to every 1.5 seconds: Lizzy is gone. Everything brings my mind around to her. Everything I read, everything I watch, everything I eat, every minute of caring for Cecilia. Lizzy is in every molecule of who I am. And her absence is unbearable.

I no longer dream of a future, or have pretty visions of what or who I’m meant to be, of what my life is destined for. Now, it’s just a matter of spending out the sand left in the hourglass and how much I can maximize that time to do some good for my children while I’m still here.

I don’t know what else to say. If you want pretty promises or visions of hope, I have none to give you. Just being here is work. And I don’t have the energy to worry about the fact that I’m not doing this work on your timeline.