The Carousel

In her short life, I took my Lizzy to the zoo three times. The first time, she was no more than 3 months old and spent most of the time napping against my chest in her Boba wrap. The second time, she was 6 months old, and the amount that she was able to engage when she was just 3 months older was exponential. We had a fantastic time and took some wonderful pictures capturing the delight and excitement on her face when she encountered the different animals. The third time we went to the zoo, Lizzy was about 13 months old, able to walk up a storm, and her curiosity, joy, and thrill in that outing was boundless.

On this last trip to the zoo, we were headed back to the car, and we passed the zoo carousel, a beautiful contraption with every sort of animal available to ride, painted in gorgeous and vibrant detail. Lizzy’s father paused, reading the rules and restrictions, before lamenting that Lizzy was too little to ride the carousel and wondering if he could get her on if she was riding on his lap.

Since we were all hungry and headed home for dinner anyway, I remember telling him, “I promise we’ll do it next time. She’ll be older and more able to enjoy it then anyway. It’s not like we’re not going to come here tons of times as she grows up since I plan to get a membership.”

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Later, for our sixth wedding anniversary, I wanted to go to the aquarium, and we ended up buying a membership, figuring that even if we only came twice in one year, it was less expensive than buying full-price tickets each time. Lizzy was 15 months old and had an absolute blast. We went out to dinner at a Brazilian steakhouse afterwards, and my little girl sat peacefully on my lap, gnawing hunks of meat with gusto and a toddler’s culinary abandon. It was a nearly perfect day.

At the time, I never dreamed that within the span of a year from that day, I would lose my marriage, my home, and Lizzy. For several months before Cecilia was due, I had been asking my family to find a day that worked for them so that we could all go to the aquarium and do a fun day out for Lizzy before the baby came. The date we ended up settling on was the Sunday after Lizzy died.

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The day after Lizzy turned one, we had a late March snowstorm, and I bundled Lizzy up in her pink snowsuit and we took her outside to experience the snow. She was already a strong walker, but the snow was almost up to her thighs and her first attempt at walking resulted in falling face-first into the snow, all of which I happened to catch on video. It remained one of my family’s favorite videos of Lizzy, especially since it didn’t seem to phase her much at all. The next snowstorm was this past January, and I bundled Lizzy up, and we played outside for nearly an hour and a half. The wonder and delight on her face were indescribable, and she spent most of her time picking up and eating the snow, alternating with industrious shoveling and navigating walking through the deep snow banks. We went through six pairs of mittens since I had not yet bought her snow gloves. She was 22 months old.

When it snowed again a month later, I was having a particularly bad day of nausea. (My nausea usually remains throughout the entire pregnancy, coming and going.) I kept thinking the entire day that I should take Lizzy out to play in the snow nonetheless, but the sun went down shortly after we woke up from our nap, and I reasoned that I would just take her out the next day. But the weather warmed considerably, and by the next day, most of the snow had melted. At the time, I consoled myself and my feelings of failure by reasoning that Lizzy would have countless more snow days in the future.

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I suppose the lesson to be learned here is to try to live each moment to the fullest, since you never know when it all will end. Like everyone else, I just assumed my child would live, would grow up, and would bury me. But assumptions and wasting time carry their own critical punishments with them, and more importantly, give lie to that terrible phrase, “Everything is going to be okay.”

After Lizzy was born, I was euphoric for weeks and so madly in love with her that I couldn’t see or think straight. I remember panicking so many times throughout the two years that I had with her, fearing that the time was going so fast, that I wanted to go back or hold onto to these precious moments. She was growing and changing at a pace I could never keep up with, and I always felt as though I could never get enough of whatever stage she happened to be in at the time.

I would always use the same mental process to console myself in these panicking moments. I would tell myself, “Think of how much you still have before you, she’s only _____ years old, you have her whole life to look forward to, think of playing princess with her when she’s five, think of travelling with her when she’s a teenager, think of her wedding, think of being her doula when she’s giving birth.” And the comfort from this was always enormous and immediate, knowing that I had so much to look forward to, so much of life to experience still with Lizzy, that it wasn’t slipping away, that the majority of her life and experiences still lay before her.

I was a fool. A dupe. A child playing at this game of life and not realizing how totally I was about to fail and lose. Everything is not okay, and more than that, everything no longer has a chance of being okay.

My baby never got to go to the zoo a fourth time. Never got to go to the aquarium a second time. Never got to play in the snow a third time. Never got to play princess, or get married, or have a baby.

If life itself balances endlessly on this precarious blade between life and death, then we cannot console ourselves with times to come or with being okay. There is no consolation. There is only now and striving to live in it and be grateful for it to the best of our ability.

And if all I can learn from this is to not take each moment with Cecilia for granted–to not console myself with times to come, to not assume everything is going to be okay, then maybe, with time, the terror of living on this knife’s edge will diminish. I know, for me, that it will never evaporate fully.