Infinitely With

For the first time since Lizzy died, it feels like time is moving too fast. Once, I imagined that next two years would be an excruciating turtle-crawl towards the two-year-old finish line. Instead, I find myself so busy that the days are blurring together in an endless continuum of whatever I can get done and how quickly I can manage it. Cece turns two years old in five days. Sixteen days after her second birthday will then begin to pass–until seventeen days pass–and then I will have known Cece for longer than I knew Lizzy.

I feel ready for none of this.

I wonder if it is a common theme in mothers, or maybe in humans generally, to feel perpetually behind the mark. I asked my father about this once: if his thirty years of extra life experience had taught him that there comes a time when an individual can grow satisfied with who he or she is or what he or she has achieved. The most I can gather is that with the completion of one or more goals or tasks, another two or three arise. As a result, we spend our entire lives fighting and striving to be more: better, stronger, wiser, kinder. The horizon continues to recede as we sprint endlessly towards the setting sun, waiting for the day our legs finally give out.

I never thought I would be this busy or be trying to do so much. It never occurred to me that I could react to Lizzy’s death in a way that made me desire to fight so many battles. I thought I would live the rest of my life afraid of the death that lurks around every corner and waits in every shadow. Instead, I find myself feverishly pursuing the future that I wanted to give to Lizzy, only now I have redesigned it for Cece. In two years, I have moved from the total immobility following Lizzy’s death to a very real fear that I could live another six decades and still never accomplish everything that I feel I must do to honor Lizzy and create the world I want to give to Cece.

For more than two years, I have avoided going through Lizzy’s clothes. I have avoided looking at the drawers that contain Lizzy’s clothes. However, last weekend, I forced myself to go through these clothes because I could no longer bear the thought of them sitting there, uncared for, anymore than I could ignore the reality that Cece can now fit them. It was as excruciating as I expected it to be, with me silently sobbing into 18-month old watermelon and crab dresses and begging Lizzy to help me find a way for us to be together again. But there were also ways in which it was as liberating as it was excruciating.

Now, every morning, I go to the same drawers that I used to go to for Lizzy’s clothes to dress Cecilia. So many of Lizzy’s clothes fit Cecilia beautifully, and I kept those that were too small but reminded me helplessly of Lizzy. I gave the rest to a friend who just had a baby girl. Cecilia’s clothes are now well-organized, easy to find and match, and I have plenty of room to find and store everything. I have two shelves of Lizzy’s things that sit above my bureau and which I periodically take down and clean. It is important to me that Lizzy’s things are taken care of, but the clothing that was sitting ignored in those drawers smelled musty and nothing like Lizzy. Now, they have regained new life in Cece and another little girl, and those that were too precious to part with will be kept with Lizzy’s other things and tended accordingly.

I cannot quite describe what it is like to see Lizzy’s clothes on Cece. I think that’s why I’m writing a post about it. Cece is so like and so incredibly unlike her big sister in both looks and personality. But to see and touch something on Cece that I last saw and touched on Lizzy feels like a gift. It feels like Lizzy has found a new way to be with her little sister and me. And I think that’s what is important about these clothes and these days leading up to Cece’s second birthday: this sense of being with.

In graduate school, I learned that love always takes the form of a “being with.” The meaning of the word compassion can give us unique insight into this claim. Passion is literally suffering, making com-passion, a suffering-with–a being-with the other in his or her suffering. I could tell you endless stories of compassion: of my little sister lying with me in a hotel bed near the hospital as we both gasped despairing sobs into a dull and hopeless night or my big sister walking by my side as I entered my room for the first time without Lizzy and felt every detail of her former presence like a razor blade to my veins. I could tell you how my father held me as I screamed my throat raw in horror at the hospital ceiling and again as he tried to hold me against the cardiac arrest that had stopped Lizzy’s heart for eight minutes. I have many stories like these, all of which show one thing: that my family deeply understands what it means to suffer-with, and that this suffering-with is one of the most pure forms of love.

But there was another who was present with me throughout all of this pain–who suffered it with me, but did so unwillingly because she had no ability to exercise capacity of will. From the moment Cecilia was conceived, she has been intimately with me, but unlike most babies in utero, Cecilia suffered her older sister’s death with me; she felt each sob wracking my body, each wave of nausea, each panic attack, each hypoxic moment when the crying was so intense that I felt sure I could not remember how to breathe.

And then my sisters were there again–with me–pushing against my hips and providing counterpressure against my back as I labored to bring Cecilia into this broken, broken world. And then she came to be with us all, in the lingering shadow of her sister’s death, and she breathed and she cried, and she was . . . and, for a time, pain gave way to joy.

Just as Lizzy was with me for nearly every single second of her little life, Cecilia has been with me for every second of hers. Without thinking or trying, she gives all of her little self to me at every moment because this self-giving is as natural as breathing to her. Sometimes, she sprint-crawls across the bed to wrap her little toddler arms as tight about me as she can and hugs me with all the strength in her shining little heart. Other times, she proffers a dimpling cheek for a kiss, then giggles helplessly as she receives one. Last night, she practiced walking to me by herself again and again and again, tottering and wavering until she collapsed in my arms, and we greedily fed off of one another’s delight and pride.

Lizzy took those first courageous steps at nine months of age. For Cecilia, it has taken two years. Similarly, it has taken two years for me to go through Lizzy’s clothes, to move from immobility to ever-increasing productivity, and to learn how to stop my dizzying momentum whenever there is an opportunity to simply rest in being with Cecilia. And along the way, I have found that Lizzy is continually showing me new ways in which she can be with us both.

I have long believed that there is no stronger testament to love than physical presence. No gift compares with the self-giving of being present to and with another person. This, of course, begs the question of what happens to love when physical presence is no longer possible. I do not pretend to have the answers; what I have is only a suspicion.

Yesterday, Cecilia wore a little teal tunic-dress with a ballet neckline at the back. This dress was Lizzy’s, along with a pair of simple grey leggings beneath. I watched Cecilia work hard practicing walking in this dress all day long, watched her flip it up to show me her bellybutton, watched her wave it like a tent over her head to play peek-a-boo. Cecilia is not Lizzy and wearing her dress did not give me Lizzy back. What it did was make me smile more times than I could count. Every time I looked at Cecilia, I did not see Lizzy; rather, I remembered Lizzy in that same dress, playing and twirling, and I held that memory side by side with the new ones being forged by Cecilia. There was no going back or moving forward; rather, it was a feeling of being infinitely with Cecilia in Lizzy’s dress; of Lizzy being infinitely with us in Cecilia’s first steps. It was simultaneously the cessation of time and the coalescing of presence–a being-with that superseded all other thought and emotion.

My suspicion is simply this: death severs physical presence, and, in the process, amplifies presence itself. For most of us, death is the greatest mystery. For me, part of this mystery is the reality that Lizzy is becoming more present to me with each passing day. She is not fading; on the contrary, she is becoming stronger. Nor is she limited to her grave; I see her everywhere. She is in her little sister and her old clothes, her first baby blanket and her big-girl car seat, the yellow of daffodils and a budding cherry tree, her little white chair and young tomato plants.

But mostly, she is an imperishable flame within me, kindling me to action, to strengthen, to fight, and to become. For me, Lizzy is not just the reason I fight, she is becoming reason itself–the logic of love, the logic of presence: a presence that death can neither subdue nor extinguish. A being-with that goes deeper than marrow or arterial pressure, and a mystery of being-with and becoming-for that will continue to unfold.

When faced with such a mystery, we humans have but one logical response: gratitude. And so I will be grateful for each of the next five days and the sixteen following that–I will be grateful and I will fight, because love has brought me to this battle and there is no way out but through. I will fight, and I will die fighting, because, in the end, I know I am fighting for the only thing worth fighting for. My daughters are the twin torches by which I guide my life, my sun and my moon, my horizon of infinitely becoming, and allowing this becoming to matter because it has made me infinitely present to the gift of life itself–of their lives–and of my life. A life guided by the presence of a child who is no longer physically present. A being-with deepened by the reality of a child who cannot see.

I will tell you something. I understand nothing about my life. Nothing, that is, other than to fall on my knees in gratitude for what has been given to me. I’m becoming less and less sure that my understanding matters at all. What matters is being with Cecilia as she turns two and then being with her when she hears the ocean for the first time. And when I see Lizzy in the sky and the waves and the sand, I will recognize the perfect symmetry of the world for the message it is from God: a love letter still being written, a being-with and a becoming-for that may take an eternity to unfold.

And, perhaps then, I will begin to understand what it means to be a parent.