Rainbow Babies
The night she died
“The nest of stars,” marjory wentworth
stars were nesting
near my window.
The wind was so still
that echoes of the sea
were the only sounds
rising from the earth
until the howl
of one human heart
filled the universe.
They call them rainbow babies because they’re born after the death of a previous infant. The term probably doesn’t apply to the death of a two-year-old, but it radiates through my mind, leaking color into every crevice. In memory, Lizzy is an abundance of every color. She’s a summer garden in full bloom. She’s a crystal-blue wave receding to reveal a coral-pink shell.
Gabriella is my rainbow baby, born after the death of her oldest sister. Technically, Cecilia was my first rainbow baby, born only a month after Lizzy died, but she didn’t feel like it. I was dead, and Cecilia brought me back to life with her life, but, still, I saw no color.
This past Easter, we learned that Cecilia can see color. This morning, we learned that she can count to 20. She seems to teach us something new about herself every day. She remains a great mystery, driving me to pray, inspiring me to find a better way forward for her, for us, and for our fledgling little family.
Gabriella is so like Lizzy, growing and thriving effortlessly. I feel I’ve become lost in a continuum of milky smiles, sleepy snuggles, chubby giggles, and a relentless desire to start crawling by 7 months of age.
For so long, it was just me and Lizzy. And then it was just me and Cece. Gabriella and I have never had that; she was born into a stable and established family structure and to a father who loves and desires her existence as much as I do. Playing with her big brother and her remaining big sister and laughing with her dad are as much parts of her life as nursing and cuddling with me. She’s our fourth child, and she simply belongs.
She wears Lizzy’s clothes and sleeps under Lizzy’s blankets. She reads Lizzy’s books and plays with Lizzy’s toys. And, despite these things, she is so utterly and unmistakably herself.
They’re called rainbow babies because of the beauty that appears after a storm. But that beauty sometimes occurs while the rain is still falling, and it doesn’t have the power to prevent another storm building on the horizon. It’s simply a glimpse of what’s real, of what’s beautiful, of what we all pray is somehow waiting on the other side.
Cece had a hospital visit this past Monday, and it was the least traumatic one she’s had to date. Peter and I worked for over a month leading up to the visit to prepare her for her procedures with a method called play therapy, and it was wildly successful. I’ve never known Cece to remain so secure and confident throughout a hospital day.
After a nearly 12-hour day, including travel to and from the hospital, Peter, me, Cecilia, and Gabriella cuddled on our bed to watch Moana. It has been over four years since I have watched this children’s movie, which was always Lizzy’s favorite.
Still emotionally raw from the hospital, I nursed Gabriella and held Cece and watched Moana leave her father, her mother, and her island to follow her grandmother’s spirit into the vast and summoning ocean. I cried quietly as Moana sang and reprised “How Far I’ll Go,” and saw, in my mind’s eye, an 18-month old Lizzy at the edge of the bed, riveted by Moana’s sea travels. I remembered how Lizzy used to sprint headlong into the ocean waves, utterly fearless, and how that same courage sustained her through her brutal and sudden death.
I held my rainbow babies while watching Moana and cried with and kissed my husband. I could feel Lizzy in every spark of color flooding out from our television, in every note of music pouring through the room.
I watch my rainbow babies, day by day, and hold them in my eyes. But Lizzy is in everything that I am and everything that I do. Because of her death, she has become what I fight for and live for in ways too powerful to describe. There is a unity there, beyond human articulation.
More than anything else, it seems, I think about how dark and painful this world is. I’m happier than I’ve ever been, but I no longer believe happiness, security, or peace are destinations that we simply have to work for to achieve. The world is too large, too horrible, and too complex. People are too full of anger and fear. Death and sin are too near, too frequently.
I feel that all that is light and life are mere glimpses and promises–whispered secrets of something too sacred for human speech.
‘They say Aslan is on the move-
C.S. Lewis, The lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe
perhaps has already landed.‘
And now a very curious thing happened. None of the children knew who Aslan was any more than you do; but the moment the Beaver had spoken these words everyone felt quite different. Perhaps it has sometimes happened to you in a dream that someone says something which you don’t understand but in the dream it feels as if it has some enormous meaning- either a terrifying one which turns the whole dream into a nightmare or else a lovely meaning too lovely to put into words, which makes the dream so beautiful that you remember it all your life and are always wishing you could get into that dream again. It was like that now. At the name of Aslan each one of the children felt something jump inside. Edmund felt a sensation of mysterious horror. Peter felt suddenly brave and adventurous. Susan felt as if some delicious smell or some delightful strain of music had just floated by her. And Lucy got the feeling you have when you wake up in the morning and realize that it is the beginning of the holidays or the beginning of summer.”
I think this darkness and pain is inevitable in a fallen world; the desire to strive to be more, to do better, and to try harder are the most beautiful parts of what it means to be human. They are beautiful because we fail, because we break, and because we die. Our desire to try again is the most poignantly lovely aspect of our humanity precisely because we are such absolute failures, so very constantly.
It’s all so painful to bear: to walk around with and wake up with and go to bed with. This inner brokenness in myself, in my husband, and in my living children. This inner beauty is so bright and so powerful and so colorful because the will to do better gutters like a candle flame and rages like a forest fire, one right after the other. We humans do not make sense to ourselves or to any other species.
We are so very broken.
It’s this conception of the unbroken, of Eden, of infinity, or of divinity that pushes us to reject our own brokenness and strive to be more than what we currently are. And this striving is heart-wrenching in its purity.
We cannot succeed fully, but we can succeed partially, and there are always ways in which we can succeed better tomorrow than we did today. The possibility and the promise of this are so radiant and so brilliant that we are blinded to everything else. We have so little time here, and we spend that time troubleshooting ourselves, each other, and the world around us.
Sometimes, Peter and I will watch Cece run as fast as she can towards the edge of the trampoline, only to stop mere centimeters before she falls through the spring-laden edge. She then returns to the middle only to repeat the process on a different part of the perimeter. She systematically tests her boundaries, increasing in precision each time, measuring and documenting in her memory exactly how far she can go without falling through and injuring herself.
What drives her? Probably the same thing that drives Peter and I to troubleshoot Cece from every direction, trying to encourage her independence here and trying to condition obedience there. We pour so much time and energy into trying to comprehend her, and so often, we’re left stunned and reeling because she melts down over something we couldn’t or didn’t control before it impacted her for the worse.
We are doing our best every day, and we feel helpless every day.
I don’t think it’s about feeling in control, and I know this is a laughable statement coming from my tyrannical lips. I think it’s about trying and trying again, especially in the wake of our failures. I think we can’t help but fail, and I think it’s all supposed to be hard. I think it’s being human.
We are so small–so small–against the thrust of eternity and against the breadth of the universe. We think we know what we are and what we mean, and we can’t possibly begin to understand. We try to control so much; we stake out our territory; we refine our “expertise;” we drown in our pride and smile like we’ve accomplished something. It’s mindless and terrifying and ridiculous.
I no longer believe that things can get “better” or “easier” as I grow older, once this or that aspect of my life or my environment falls into place. I think life is very literally supposed to be hard–because it’s not about pleasure or reward. It’s a battle from start to finish, and how fair we fight and how long we fight are how we are measured in the end.
This past spring, Peter and our 7-year-old son started a garden from seed. It’s gone from tiny, struggling seedlings to a veritable jungle producing more zucchini and summer squash than we know what to do with. Sometimes, Peter sits in our bay window looking at the garden and tells me how much work and time it took to establish the seedlings and give them everything they needed to thrive, and now it’s time to sit back and watch them shine.
Peter’s also raising quail for our family, and we’re eating quail eggs every morning and making zucchini lasagnas with quail meat for dinner. For breakfast, Gabriella munches on quail egg yolks and avocado while her big brother and big sister gobble down microgreens and quail egg frittatas. During snack one day, Cece exclaimed to Peter, “I love quail eggs! I will eat all the quail eggs! Quail eggs forever!”
We have one massive pumpkin growing in our winter squash patch, and the nasturtium, zinnia, buckwheat, and borage are beginning to bloom. The garden is an explosion of green except for these small bursts of color and the rich yellow and white blooms of the winter and summer squash plants. Cece struggles to focus her sight and identify the green, yellow, red, white, and purple flashes in our garden. She smiles whenever you ask her how she is and says, “I’m doing glad.”
Gabriella uses baby Crookneck summer squash as teethers and scoots her way forward on tummy, side, or bum, determined to keep up with her bigger siblings. She is so like her oldest sister, and yet so perfectly herself. I can see her desire to explore, to experience, and to immerse herself in everything that the living world has to offer. Still so tiny, she lives in a such a massive world of color, of beauty, of gardens and abundance, and her thirst is so big and so constant. She is so like Lizzy, yearning to see how far she can go.
See the light as it
“How Far I’ll Go,” Moana
shines on the sea?
It’s blinding
But no one knows
How deep it goes
And it seems like
it’s calling out to me
So come find me
And let me know
What’s beyond that line?
Will I cross that line?
And the line where
the sky meets the sea
It calls me
And no one knows
How far it goes
If the wind in my sail
on the sea stays behind me
One day I’ll know
How far I’ll go
Lizzy went farther than any of us have yet gone. She knows and understands more about eternity, love, truth, and beauty than I can even begin to. She left her flesh behind, and I’m left in a world where children still suffer and die. These are not things that become easier to understand with time. Rather, they become harder with truth, like diamonds crystallizing.
I have two rainbow babies and a life filled with color and sunlight and growing things. I have a husband who works tirelessly to make my every dream come true–for whom I want to live and die and fight as long as I draw breath. I have everything I spent years desiring and yearning for, and still there is so much pain and so much brokenness in myself and in everyone surrounding me.
I think the point and the purpose of it all is to alleviate pain and suffering wherever we can. I think it’s to bind ourselves to those things that we hold most dear and most true and then to stand and to fight when necessary. I think we’re meant to build in the face of destruction and to protect those more vulnerable than ourselves.
Everyone that I know is in pain. Everyone is struggling–nearly all the time. I’m at the point where I want to be there to help, where and when I can. I want to channel my own pain into fuel to help alleviate other people’s pain, because I feel there is a mysterious truth there–a sort of secret weapon that has the power to end the battle once and for all.
It’s the same truth epitomized in crucifixion before resurrection–in placing your fingers in the five wounds before ascension.
So often, I close my eyes to see Lizzy dancing in a field of flowers, alight like a butterfly in a garden that never dies. She is dead and alive, in mind and in memory, buried and dancing. One minute, I am lying beside her in the hospital bed as the ECMO inflates her lungs and pumps her heart. The next, I am watering the grass above her grave with my tears. And the next, I am holding her as we watch a brilliant sunset bleed slowly into the mountaintops–as I promise her that one day, I’ll build for her a world full of gardens and animals and siblings.
Lizzy, I haven’t forgotten my promises to you. I haven’t forgotten you. Until you were born, I lived in a colorless world, and when you died, I stopped believing in color. Your little sisters are my rainbow babies, teaching me to remember in a world full of earthquakes and thunder. But you are still the sun breaking through the clouds, luminous and dazzling.
I work for you and towards you, Lizzy, and I will never stop. When my heart stops beating, I will begin walking. Your face and your voice will call to me, asking me to come “further up and further in.” And then I’ll start running–and, somehow, find I have wings.
Until then, continue to shine for me, bright angel. There are storm clouds here, in every direction. Pray your sisters make it through the hurricane. Pray the darkness teaches them how to light a candle. And when the skies clear, and the sun starts to show its face, pray that their color and their light teaches others how to remember.
