Love Has a Name

A strange peace has begun to pervade these past weeks. Grief for Lizzy is still omnipresent; all that needs to happen is a glance towards my shelf where I keep Lizzy’s things or a specific expression crosses Cecilia’s face, and the loss of Lizzy is renewed, fresh and abundant. I feel certain now that there is a strength needed to bear grief– a strength that grows with each impossible day that you spend in this impossible reality where one of your children is dead. I know that these days, I feel stronger and more able to pick myself up from the desire to collapse sobbing at each memory.

I am also honest enough with myself to realize that finally letting go of the belief that Cecilia could somehow, in time, replace some part of Lizzy has freed both me and Cecilia to pursue a relationship with each other that is no longer crippled by hopeless expectations. It took me over fourteen months, but once I processed the new grief of realizing that Cecilia can never be anyone other than herself to me, I have found myself swimming in new depths of love for my second daughter.

The days are starting to blend together. Cecilia’s hoots, bleats and giggles are providing a new soundtrack to my waking hours. Sometimes, I just let myself fall into her smiles, playing flipping and clapping games with her, or pretend-biting her baby toes, thighs, or ribs. Her laughter beats inside of me like the wings of a hummingbird. I watch the sun glint off the hints of gold in her silky brown hair as she plays with two spoons in her yellow duck baby pool. With two chubby palms, she grabs fistfuls of grass, and pivots a full 180 degrees on her bottom as she throws her head back, trying and trying again to look at the sun.

Quietly, I find it is easier both to be alive and to choose to live because of her. The choice I have made to continue my life since Lizzy died was always made for Cecilia’s sake, but it no longer feels like a burden. Before bed, her little fingers reach to turn the pages during storytime and she variously sighs, coos, and hums to mimic my voice whispering “Good night.” In bed, I run my fingertips down her slumbering back, stroke her gently from shoulder to elbow and dream of the life I want to give her. Her little body curls in abandoned rest against my chest, and I wish I could stretch myself to swallow, surround, envelop, or enfold her so thoroughly that no harm could ever come to her.

Lizzy’s amber necklace rests gracefully around her neck, as much a part of her now as it once was of Lizzy. She now rides in Lizzy’s bike seat and helmet every other day, humming in the breeze behind me as I pedal past choruses of morning crickets. And although I had to cry my way through cleaning up that seat and that helmet that once held and protected my first baby girl, I can somehow accept that they are now holding and protecting my second baby girl, and I no longer feel so sad when I look at them. And when I finally gathered up the strength to put Cecilia in Lizzy’s watermelon dress for the fourth of July, tears welled, then subsided, and Cece smiled and flirted–and I gave myself over to the pain of love, joy, and grief so thoroughly commingled that they can no longer be differentiated from one another.

How shall I say those things which cannot be said? Lizzy was my life, and then she died while Cecilia still grew within my body. And now Cecilia is my life, and Lizzy is the thing that animates us, and without either of them, I would cease to be. Love for Cece floods up within me from the wellspring of my love for Lizzy, and I cannot separate them. I cannot describe to the strangers who see me holding or kissing a single child that I am actually holding two daughters in my arms and showering kisses on siblings. There is no way to describe to those who don’t know me that my first daughter left her body to become the force about which poets, priests, and seers all sing. . . or that the love that ripples like an unbroken wave between me and my second daughter has a name, and that name is Lizzy.