Storytime

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

– Joan Didion

The night felt full and ripe with promise. I gazed around the nursery, softly illuminated by a conch shell lit from inside like the ocean home of some watery sprite. The crib loomed silently to my left, its Beatrix Potter linens tucked away in perfect lines. The changing table stood to my right, fully stocked with organic diapers and Burt’s Bees Baby onesies. I rocked myself slowly, my hands caressing my swollen belly in unconscious rhythm with the rocking chair beneath me. I stared, fixated, at the dollhouse-shaped bookshelf to which I had meticulously glued wooden ABCs before painting them in a rainbow of pastels. All of my favorite books from childhood rested on its shelves, waiting with the infinite patience of the written word. I stood, then crouched laboriously before the shelves, selecting a book entitled, An Egg is Quiet. By the dim light, I began to read in a gentle voice. When I reached the last page, I whispered to the unknown occupant of my womb, “Hello, little one. I’m your mom, and I think I’m finally ready to meet you.”

A nine-month-old Lizzy squealed and writhed on the bed, giggling in a hysterical attempt to escape more tickles. I swooped her up and plunked her on my lap, saying, “Now, for the very first time, Mama is going to read you one of my favorite books from when I was a little girl.” I began rocking gently as I read aloud, “The Gunniwolf! There once was a little girl who lived with her mother very close to a dense jungle.” Lizzy swayed with me as Little Girl sang “kum kwa, khi wa” and chuckled as I snored “hooonk-shooo” when the Gunniwolf fell asleep. She burst into peals of delighted laughter as I tapped on her thighs “pit pat pitty pat” each time Little Girl ran from the Gunniwolf, and she couldn’t stop laughing as he lumbered in pursuit: “hunker-cha, hunker-cha!” And when Little Girl finally reached home, and I closed the pages on what would become Lizzy’s favorite story, she took the book, looked at me wordlessly with a plea in her starlit, brilliant eyes, and opened it once more.

Each step into our bedroom hit me like a shockwave, and I staggered, struggling to breathe through the sobs that swelled mercilessly up my throat and seemed to lodge in my brain, rendering me incapable of thought. Everywhere I looked, there was Lizzy. My living Lizzy, stepping onto her stool to brush her teeth, systematically unloading her clothes from her drawers, dragging her little white chair over to sit down for dinner. Like a zombie, I picked up her toothbrush and walked forward step by anguished step until I stopped, put my hand against my mouth in horror and looked at our rocking chair. A living Lizzy sat in my lap as we read Each Peach Pear Plum again and again and again. My living Lizzy pointed out the little white mouse on every page of Goodnight Moon, whispering “that’s a mouse,” and cooing “I no move” each time the Gunniwolf caught up with Little Girl. I stared and stared and could only conclude that my living Lizzy was in every molecule of our room–in every grief-stricken cell of my body–and not in the body she had vacated, which lay cold and alone in the mortuary of Children’s Hospital, awaiting an autopsy.

A newborn Cecilia shrieked and wailed in my arms as I sought vainly to calm her, rocking gently back and forth, back and forth. Quavering, I began to sing “A River Lullaby” from Prince of Egypt, and as her cries grew quieter, I offered her my breast, and she settled in fitfully to nurse. I kept rocking, willing the ever-present memories of Lizzy to abate, shying like a coward away from the endless, shredding pain that grated ever at the fringes of my consciousness. Reaching for my phone, I pressed play on the audible version of C.S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed, a series of notes he drafted after losing his wife to cancer. I cast my drowning mind into his grief like it was a life raft. I spent hours like this, nursing Cecilia and listening. . . listening to Victor Frankl and Elie Wiesel recount their experiences in the Nazi concentration camps and Anne Frank and Edith Stein draft their questions and meditations while in hiding. I listened to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn chronicle the atrocities perpetrated on prisoners in the labor camps of the Gulag Archipelago and Immaculee Ilibigiza describe what it was like to hide for 91 days with seven other women in a bathroom that was 12 square feet while the Rwandan holocaust outside bathed their country in the blood of its citizens. I listened because I was searching for stories that were worse than my own and human suffering that exceeded mine. But the more I encountered, the more I learned that my grief–so acute and so all-consuming–was no more than a tear in the ocean of human suffering.

I hung up my cell phone on the doctors from NIH. I picked up Cecilia and walked to our rocking chair and began to read to her. I don’t care, I decided. I don’t care if Cecilia can’t see a single color or picture on the pages I’m reading to her. I will read to her anyway. I will read to her until she can tell me what she can see and what she can’t, and then I will keep reading to her. I will learn Braille and then teach her Braille. We will read aloud after dinner instead of watching a television that she can’t see. I will read to her when she’s tired or sick or heartbroken or stressed out. I will read to her during dialysis or while she recovers from a transplant surgery. I will read to her when nothing is wrong and we are both happy, and we will live for a while inside these stories.

And so I read to her morning, afternoon, and night, and when she got her glasses, I calmly put them back on her every time she ripped them off, not knowing whether or not they were helping. After a while, she would reach for her glasses on her baby piano next to our rocking chair and hand them to me to put them on her for reading time. We increased our reading from three times a day to five times. I read to her every time she was upset or having trouble falling asleep. I read her board books and paperbacks, hardbacks and sound books, music books and tactile books, pop-up books and puppet books, braille books and illuminated books. We read Dr. Seuss and Usborne, Eric Carle and Sandra Boynton, alphabet books and nature books, fairy tales and Aesop’s fables. I bought her books for every season and switched them out holiday by holiday.

By the age of one, Cecilia had learned how to turn the pages of every type of book without tearing them. She could even turn the thin pages of my bible without tearing them. Reading became her method of bonding with her aunt and her grandfather. Any anxiety, fear, or unease dissipated the moment a book opened and a new voice began to read its contents to her. But I still read to her every day, multiple times a day. Eventually, Cecilia would take breaks during our reading sessions to lift her face to me and offer her sweet, perfect lips for a kiss. When we were finished with each reading session, she’d wriggle in my arms until she could face me and wrap all four limbs around my torso in a huge bear hug. And then I’d just laugh and hold her, smile and rock her, and sometimes I’d sing, but sometimes I’d rest in the quiet peace of her embrace.

A few months ago, Cecilia started to read aloud to herself. She tries to mimic the inflections, tones, and voices that I use when reading to her. Her animated baby babbles while flipping the pages of book after book are some of the most beautiful sounds I have ever heard. These days, she knows that she can get me to read one more short book even when I’ve told her it’s time to do something else. She simply seduces me with a hug then twists to grab the short, rhyming board books I keep in the pocket of our rocking chair. She can mimic most animal sounds and knows all the places where the giant roars “Fee Fi Fo Fum!” or Peter Rabbit scrambles to escape Mr. McGregor. Sometimes, she heaves a big, contented sigh after each book. At the end of a finger puppet book called Poppy and Sam and the Bunny, she curls into a ball on my lap to hide, giggling, from the puppet bunny who always asks her for a kiss at the end. Then, she pops up with a huge smile to receive her kiss.

Every time someone learns that Cecilia is blind, they ask me about music. With an open and a willing heart, I relate that even though I am not a musician, I play music for her regularly, share with her my favorite musicals, play with her on the real and baby pianos, and have a series of musical toys and books to which she has constant access. I want Cecilia to have as much access to music throughout her life as I can give her. However, I feel that the real way I can enter into her world with her is through books.

I have always been a bookworm and always known I would share my love of books with my children. Lizzy loved books and loved being read to but was much too busy for most of her life to bother with books before she was about 20 months old. Then, she couldn’t get enough. With Cecilia, I’ve read to her daily almost every day since I learned that there was something wrong with her eyes. Now, she’s older than Lizzy was when she died, if only by a week, and it is clear that reading is Cecilia’s favorite activity and books are her favorite toys. Reading has become my gift to her, my precious time to spend with her every day.

Together, we read stories of sea-faring snails and crafty, trickster mice. We read about a starfish who dreams of shining like a real star and a little bat who is too afraid to fly because he can’t see very well in the dark. We read stories of a Bulgarian woman who tricks a dragon into giving her 100 bags of gold and a little monkey who makes his rounds of the circus on his way to say goodnight to his mama. We read stories of a brave fish who faces his fear of the dark and a little bunny who tries to run away, only to find his mama wherever he runs.

For a little while each day, we live inside these stories, and we find ourselves within them. As she grows and begins to speak, books will be how we learn about the world together. I know that for me, books have been my lifeline to sanity through a grief that never ends. I read stories about people who have suffered more than I have to keep reminding myself of what has been given to me and of the reality that Lizzy was loved every single day that she lived. I read these stories because they help to shape the kind of mother I want to be to Cecilia and the kind of person I want to be in this world. I read because when I read, I never stop learning.

On May 21, sixteen days after her second birthday, I held Cece in my arms after reading to her. We were rocking in silence, content to simply be with each other. Not for the first time and not for the last, I chose this moment to tell Cecilia the story of her big sister’s life and death. I haven’t told her this story since she was a very little baby, but it is hers by right. And mine. It is ours, for Lizzy lives within us in a way she lives in no one else. I cried as I told it and held Cecilia, her two-year-old weight and fullness filling my arms as Lizzy’s once did. I don’t think my arms have ever felt so full and so empty at the same time. I will keep telling Cecilia the story of Lizzy and the story of her birth as she ages, increasing detail as she asks for it, until this story becomes as much hers as it is mine.

For the past two days, I’ve been reading a book by a young North Korean woman named Yeonmi Park called In Order to Live. She recounts a life of brainwashing and starvation in Northern Korea before being sold by human traffickers in China as a child-bride when she was only 13 years old. Her first experience with sex was watching her mother being raped in front of her before being sold into a slave marriage and raped herself. Eventually, they escaped and crossed the Gobi desert into Mongolia before reaching South Korea. She now lives in the United States as a human rights activist, trying to promote awareness of the various forms of slavery that are still common in the world and dreaming of a way to free her people from North Korea. She is seven years younger than me.

Yeonmi named her book In Order to Live after the Joan Didion quote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” For Yeonmi, this looked like her older sister and herself shuddering in the freezing dark of their home in North Korea telling each other stories in order to fight starvation and the fear that their parents, imprisoned by the regime, would never again come home. For most of us, stories look like the shows on Netflix or the occasional book for pleasure reading or continuing education. Most of us don’t tell stories to survive.

But we should. And here’s why.

Neuroscience has classified language in the hemisphere of the brain that is associated with reason and logic and is used to process the emotion, intuition, and instinct that dominate the other hemisphere. The limbic brain, or the reptilian/emotional brain that drives instinct and emotion, cannot use language effectively. It is the neocortex that processes higher-level thinking like logic, philosophy, empathy, and morality. The neocortex takes the experiences of the limbic brain and translates them with language.

In other words, our ability to use language to process survival is what makes us human.

Cave drawings in Lascaux and Chavaux, France, from approximately 30,000 years ago indicate some of the earliest evidence of human storytelling. Our desire to recount our experience through the medium of story continued to define us and chart the course of our evolution as distinct from that of other mammals. Now, modern neuroscience tells us that victims of trauma and abuse need to recount their stories in order to process the trauma and then safely file it away. What this essentially means is that as humans told stories throughout our evolution, the act of storytelling itself became inextricable from mental health.

So I guess that’s my point. To make sense of her life, Yeonmi Park needed to put language to what had happened to her. To make sense of my life, I started this blog. At first, I wrote long letters to Lizzy, then to Cecilia, and then I wrote on this blog. But I didn’t just write. I read the stories of other people who had suffered more than I had suffered. I put my suffering in perspective and allowed that to shape how I told my story. Now, I think that telling my story and reading the stories of others together shape the reasons why I did not die–physically or mentally–from grief.

If you are here because of your experience with grief, this is what I have to say to you: tell your story. But don’t just tell it to a friend or a therapist or a spiritual advisor. Put it down on paper. Put language to your grief. And you will find, in the process of finding words to describe your life, that you will end up making choices about your life that you didn’t know you needed to make. And it is those choices that very well may impact your ability to survive yourself.

Yeonmi Park did whatever was necessary in order to live. Joan Didion believed that we tell ourselves stories in order to live. The unsaid piece from both of these incredible women is that we must also tell our own stories in order to live. That telling our stories is itself a form of survival. That human life is so full of pain and suffering that language is necessary to translate it into something that has purpose. And that telling our stories doesn’t just help us to survive; it brings meaning to our survival.

So don’t stay silent.

Tell your story.