Fake it Until You Make it (Even if You Never Make it)

I loathe this term “the new normal.” The new normal is what I am supposed to be getting used to. Slowly, with time, I am supposed to become accustomed to Lizzy being gone. To the profile and prospect of what my life looks like without her. Five minutes from now, five hours from now, five weeks from now, five years from now. The new normal has an evanescent timeline. The new normal is like a skull painted with makeup, pretending it isn’t dead.

In the past few days I have learned that it is possible to busy myself with the continuum of normal nothings. I am proactive about the things that the rules of this world deem important. Go to my checkups. Go to therapy. Go to support groups. Take Cecilia to the pediatrician. Schedule more appointments. Cook. Take showers. Sleep. Externally, I am doing all of the things that this world tells me I need to be doing to heal. Internally, my mental television stays on one channel: Lizzy is dead.

I have learned that it is possible to carry on entire conversations with people and still be thinking of Lizzy the whole time. Memory after memory surfaces in a perpetual tide; no matter what I am doing or where I am going, I am thinking of her. I am remembering a time when she was here. When the most normal thing was for her to be beside me.

I think at this point, very few people could criticize me for how I am dealing with the death of my two-year old. After all, I am doing so many healthy, proactive things. There is no real way to tell that I am hanging on by a thread. And the name of that thread is Cecilia.

Cecilia is everything in a different way than Lizzy is everything. Lizzy will always be everything because she is Lizzy. She is the love of my life. She is my firstborn, my little blonde angel, my best friend, the immense and incomprehensible gift from God that I only got to keep for two years. Lizzy will always be my everything because everything that I am is because of her.

But Cecilia is everything that keeps me here. She is everything that is need, concrete and physical, bound by the rules and demands of this earthly sphere. She is everything that I need to convince me to get through the next day, the next hour, or sometimes the next minute. She is everything that I need to focus on whenever I stupidly envision the terrifying prospect of my future. She is the tether, the purpose, and the point. She is what I need to decide to keep doing these pointless, proactive things. Because for her, they are not pointless. For her, is, in fact, the beginning and end of what I need to answer my why.

I suppose I am living the new normal because when I wake, I no longer expect to see or feel Lizzy and then become crushed by her absence. I no longer expect to wake to my first daughter. The nightmare that never ends has stretched into a dull continuum where I expect the bleakness of life without her. An acceptance that repulses me has been shoved, choking, into my gut and it simply sits there, rotting. There is no peace in this acceptance. There is force, revocation of will, and annihilation of the desire to live. Except for Cecilia’s sake.

And this is the cognitive dissonance that characterizes my waking identity. I do not accept Lizzy’s death; I want to be with Lizzy, even if that means dying myself, but I have to accept Lizzy’s death in order to be with Cecilia, who is living. This is my reality. So if you want to talk to me about peace, you can take that word and choke on it.

My therapist asked me where in my body I feel the most pain about Lizzy. My first instinctual answer was my gut. And if I had to visualize the pain of losing Lizzy, it would take place in my stomach and intestines, which have caved in on themselves like something out of a horror movie and turned into an abyss, yawning and howling with freezing, echoing winds. The emptiness never goes away, and the ache of losing something so essential, so primal to my being is a wound that will never heal.

When Christ lay dead on the cross, a Roman soldier took his spear and pierced Christ beneath the ribs to ensure that he was indeed dead. Scripture tells us that from this wound, out flowed blood and water. I have this image everpresent in my mind when I think about losing Lizzy. I think of her loss as a wound in my side, from which I am continually bleeding out my life and my will to live. And no matter what I say, or what I do, or how “okay” I look to the world, this wound is bleeding. And I am afraid–very afraid–because when I look down the long barrel of the rest of my life, all I see myself doing is filling up the days with busy nothings until the sand finally runs out of the hourglass, and it can just be over.