Six Candles

March 20, 2023

Dear Lizzy,

Today, you would have turned six years old.  It is a struggle to imagine how beautiful you would be with your sunlit hair and oceanic eyes. It is harder to imagine how your personality would have evolved over the past four years, how much more Lizzy you would have become in that time. In the hospital, the neurologists told me that if you survived, you would not be the Lizzy I knew and loved; you would be a fraction of that vibrant little girl.  The brain damage was too severe; your heart had stopped for too long.  I still think about having had that version of you, here and alive and part of our family.  You would still have been Lizzy to me.  Instead, you are frozen at two years old, ageless and dancing through fields of ethereal wildflowers.

I looked for daffodils today but found only buds on the trees and hydrangeas.  I want to plant a field of daffodils for you, so that when this day comes each spring, I can remember you pushing your little pink stroller around, gathering daffodils in its canopy.  I want to plant beds of lavender cushioned by white stone so I can sit among them in the twilit sun and remember you smelling sprigs of lavender.

I woke to the familiar empty darkness this morning and walked through that shadowed place where every movement slows because its senselessness is crashing down upon you.  After you died, other parents who lost children told me that the grief never disappears; it just changes through the years.  I am approaching four years to the anniversary of your death, and my life has changed so much in the past year. I have never been this happy, and my grief has never been deeper.

The sharp and toxic shock has faded.  But I still live within and beneath the oppression of the reality of death—of its proximity and its power.  I can never truly escape it.  The burden of your absence from my life has never grown easier to bear; it has merely grown more familiar.

But your sisters are here, and they are more real and familiar to me than I am to myself.  In May, Cece will be four– twice the age at which I lost you.  And in December, Gabriella was born, so like and so unlike you in appearance.  I think we were all grateful that she was a girl.  There was the feeling there of needing to have a girl to replace the girl that was lost.  But rainbow babies never really work that way.  Do I have two girls now like I should have had almost four years ago?  Yes, but now I should have three living daughters—not two.  And Gabriella is so perfectly and purely . . . Gabriella.  She will never replace you.

Still, so many things are the same.  Her radiant smile when she wakes to find my face staring at her in adoration.  The nursing bump on the perfect “m” of her upper lip.  Her starfish hands kneading gently at my breast as she nurses.  The inexhaustible thirst she has to be up and about and on her way to explore the world.  But she has her father’s eyes and hair and his energy and strength.  She’s the most efficient nurser and the most active of my daughters, and she’s put on weight faster than you and Cece did.  She’s wondrously healthy.  She’s stunningly alive. 

On St. Patrick’s Day, I made corned beef and cabbage, and I wore the shirt I wore to your second birthday party.  I haven’t worn it since that day.  We dressed your sisters in shamrock pajamas and took family photos in front of an evergreen tree in the big backyard of our beautiful new home.  I find myself more able to do these things—to wear the clothes I haven’t worn since your death and to hang pictures of you on our walls.  To look at your pictures without wanting to dive into the abyss and to welcome the tears when they come. 

This is what I mean when I say my grief has deepened with my joy.  The happier I become, the more I feel your absence, the beauty of your life, and the desire to join you in death one day. With my marriage, our new home, and Gabriella’s birth, my passion and purpose for my life has taken on the thirst of wildfire.  I have so much to do, so much that I’m here for, and so much that I want to give my children. 

But I cannot help but feel that we would be a happier, more balanced blended family with you alive.  I cannot help but think of how much you would love our home, our yard, our gardens, our proximity to the beaches—about how you would be a perfect companion to your new big brother and be able to keep pace with his energy and intelligence. I will always feel that your absence is glaring, obvious, and utterly inescapable.

Cece is starting to have real conversations.  The other day, she told me, totally spontaneously, “I love you, Mom.” She’s growing more able to articulate her wants, needs, accomplishments, and struggles.  She’s learning how to run through the grass and jump on the trampoline by herself.  She loves bonfires and tractor and wagon rides with her new dad and big brother.  We live five minutes from the beach, and we can hear ospreys calling as they coast overhead.  The pine trees grow densely in our yard, but we have a few spots with bright, day-long sun where we want to start vegetable beds and squash patches.

After you died, I asked my big sister if surrounding myself with plants, animals, and babies could help to mediate my grief.  She said, “Of course,” and I find this to be more and more true with time.  But the deeper truth is that you made me into the mother that I am today, both with your life and your death.  You crystallized my dream of how I wanted to raise my children because of the person you were and are and ever shall be.  That dream hasn’t changed.  Instead, it is motivating me every day to be better, more loving, kind, patient, and hard-working.  To do whatever it takes to give my children that dream.  The dream that began because of you.

You will always be my dream daughter, Elizabeth.  Not just because you motivated and inspired a dream vision of what I want to build for my family, but because the first months after your birth were so dream-like, intoxicated as I was by waking up next to you every day.  Your every movement and the smell of your milk-sweet breath was mesmerizing.  I was helplessly in love with you, helpless to follow your desire to experience as much of the world as you could.  We spent those two years doing everything together, and the gift of being your mother was like a dream, something of which I was sure I wasn’t worthy.

I think I’m still trying to live up to the honor of being chosen to mother you, Cecilia, and Gabriella.  My daughters surpass me so naturally in every way that I cannot help finding the greatest meaning and purpose in my life in serving them, loving them, and offering them everything I have to give.  The magic of motherhood began inside of you—inside of me—and persists, like an unquenchable flame driving every choice I make. 

I wanted to die when you died, and the mother I was to you did die that day.  Had I been less fortunate or had fewer people who loved us not existed to shepherd us through the valley of those endless shadows, Cecilia and I would not be here today—alive and making choices.  Gabriella would never have come into being.  This is the magic and mystery of the universe; this is the wonder of being human.  There were so many places in the months and years after you died where I wanted to give up, where I thought I had, and then I found myself choosing to eat or breathe or get out of bed for Cecilia. 

And that choice has led to the existence of this new, wondrous little person that is Gabriella.  She and Cecilia will have their own lives one day, their own choices to make, their own griefs to endure.  God willing, I will be there for as long as I can, helping where and when I can.  And when I am no longer here, I will remain in their hearts and minds, speaking with a different kind of voice.  This is what you are to me–what you do for me.  You drive me to become better for my living children every single day.

Every child shapes her mother.  The mother I had to become for Cecilia is radically different from the mother I was to you.  With time and suffering and joy, Gabriella will inevitably shape who I am to become.  And like rock against endless ocean, I will continue to smooth and curve and—ever so slowly—erode to become one with the forces that shape me. 

This is what you realize when you’re awake and aware throughout the birth of your child.  The pain and the blood and the exhaustion place you close to your mortality, and you stare at it, open-eyed, between contractions.  Then the force of your biology overtakes you, your brain shuts off, and you have to surrender to something that is happening to you. You surrender to your lifeforce being taken and given to this new person whom you haven’t even met, who you know you will inevitably become helpless to love and to serve. 

I felt the same way when you died.  I was swept up in a current of something that was happening to you, so much bigger than myself and bigger than anything I could do to stop it.  The one thing I wanted to do—to end my own life to follow you—I was unable to because Cecilia’s heart was beating inside of me. 

I have never known such helplessness. 

Three times now, I have emptied myself into these tiny creatures, these daughters destined to become their own little selves.  My brain and my body are so taken over by what it means to be a mother at this point that everything that came before you feels irrelevant.  I don’t know why I was born—except to do this, to be this.

And that’s part of the wonder and the terror of it all. We don’t choose to be born, and we don’t choose our deaths.  For most of us, these are things that just happen to us and that seem to define us more than anything else.  It helps keep us in perspective: that nothing really belongs to us; that everything is actually given; that the only valid choice we are left with is to give ourselves in return.  It is the only thing capable of bringing true joy.

If, then, by my life, or by my death, I can better serve my children—both living and dead—I will do what I can.  For me, there is no greater purpose in my life than this.  To give endlessly of myself, and through this, to become myself. 

I have encountered many moments where rage and despair caused me to want to turn my back on my faith and walk away.  You, I think, are the reason I remain.  The experience of mothering you has allowed me to believe that the relationship between God and man is that of parent to child.  It has allowed me to understand my brain and body in ways I could not comprehend before I became a mother. 

And so, the gifts you have given me continue to multiply.  You have given me myself as a mother, my dreams for my children, and my faith in the God that is the source of all reality.  You have taught me how to surrender, first to birth, then to love, and finally, to death.  In the course of your short life, you have revealed mysteries that have haunted poets, mystics, and martyrs throughout the centuries.  Their stories echo through the ages; your story is imprinted in my flesh and the flesh of your sisters.  Because of this, you have not died, and you cannot fade. 

Sunlight is streaming through my window, and your baby sister is nursing at my breast.  One day, I will tell her your story—our story—and the story of our family.  I will allow my words and my choices and my flesh to write a future that would not have existed except for you—to become a mother that only exists because of you—and to prove to the world exactly how much the life of a two-year-old little girl can matter.   

Happy Birthday, my darling.

                                                                                                                        Forever yours,

                                                                                                                                    Mama