Fast Forward

I do not dream about Lizzy.

Correction: I have had one dream about Lizzy. She was alive, in my arms, the Monday before the Tuesday morning that I took her into the emergency room. Lizzy, me, and my dead, beloved grandfather (he was alive in my dream), had just gotten off of a plane and were at an airport. I could physically feel Lizzy in my arms, clinging onto me like a little monkey, being her usual loquacious self. I told my grandfather what would happen and that we needed to get to Children’s Hospital right away to see if earlier access to antibiotics, oxygen, and IV fluids could make a difference–could possibly save her life. He listened, carefully, intentionally, then agreed to drive us to the hospital. Then I woke up.

Lizzy is buried next to my grandfather.

I do, however, dream about Cecilia. Often. But most often, Cecilia is older than she actually is–closer to Lizzy’s age and size. I’m not sure if this means that the baby that appears so often in my dreams–my baby–is actually a fusion of both of my girls. Last night (or more accurately, this morning), in my dream, I was telling my cousins how remarkable it was that Cecilia was only six weeks old and she was walking already. She was even able to take steps backwards without falling. She was so advanced for her age!

Cecilia is exactly six weeks old today, but she is nowhere near walking. Lizzy took her first steps, independent of me, at nine months old, on New Year’s Eve. But the Lizzy/Cecilia hybrid of my dreams is nearly always mobile, very curious and independent, and always going off on her own to do her thing. There is, needless to say, a lot of anxiety in my dreams about where she is and what she is doing. And when I find her, I always sweep her up into my arms, asking where she’s been, and the weight and strength of her feels like Lizzy.

When Lizzy was born and throughout the early months of her life, I would always think about how excited I was to do this and that with her in the future. Then, I would take a step back, breathe, and remind myself to cherish and be with Lizzy in each moment of her development, no matter how excited I was for her to get to a certain age.

With Cecilia, it is even harder to cherish the moment. There are twin tines of a pitchfork goading me on, keeping me in a suspended state of fear. The first tine is the need to keep Cecilia alive past the age of two–to get her through certain benchmarks of health and development because the older she gets, the stronger, the less susceptible to death through disease. The second tine is to get back to where I was: to have a two or three year old toddler and be pregnant with a sibling for that toddler. Together, the tines of this pitchfork keep poking me–forcing me forward with the need to make time pass.

And so very often I just think about having the power to fast forward time. To get through the next years of fear, terror, and unknowing until I can reach some sort of plateau where I am at least less afraid, and back to where I was: about to have two children.

Now, I realize that I have no husband or prospect of a husband to give me another child. And this is one more massive stumbling block in the desire to get back–or forward–to where I was.

But if I had that power, then I would logically be able to rewind time too, and I would probably spend the rest of my life rewinding time, trying to fix or do things differently over and over, in millions of different iterations, in order to prevent Lizzy from dying. If I had that power, I’m not sure Cecilia would ever grow up, or even get to the point where she was born. Because somehow saving Lizzy would always be my first priority.

Still, when I look down the long barrel of the next two years–years colored by the terror of Cecilia dying at any moment from some unpreventable thing–I wish I could just skip them. I wish it could be over. And then I allow this logic to unravel, and I realize that I when I look down the long barrel of my life, a part of me wishes I could just fast forward it as well–just skip through the rest of it to my death, to a time when I could be with Lizzy again.

But that’s not how we work, and that’s not how time works. Each and every part of me and part of my life now includes a deep and incurable suffering that just wasn’t there before. And it is my choice to use that suffering as a goad to keep Cecilia safe and prepare her to successfully navigate this world: to be able to be okay when I leave it. And, just as importantly, it is my choice to use that time to do enough good that I have a real chance of ending up where Lizzy undoubtedly is when I die.

As far as I can tell, this is the only path that allows me to be with both of my girls. And whether or not I like it, this path is immutably and eternally stuck in the present.