The Concept of Need

When they told me that Lizzy was brain dead and there was no hope of her coming back, there were still things that I needed to do as her mother, and that I felt she still needed from me.

I needed to lie down and hold her while the switched off the life support machine. I needed to pick out the clothes she would be buried in and the readings, prayers, and songs that would be said at her funeral. I needed to write a poem to be her eulogy and read it at her funeral. I needed to select the photos of her living self to play in a slideshow at the reception. I needed to kiss her face one last time and put the letters I had been writing to her since she was 9 months old in her coffin. I needed to bury her.

The problem was that once all of these things were done, there was nothing left that Lizzy needed from me. When I realized this, I was at her burial, and they had given me, along with everyone else, a white rose to throw on top of her coffin. I thought to myself, “What is that going to do?” My baby is dead. She can no longer see or smell the flowers. I cannot hear her sweet voice saying “Flo-wer!” or watch her rush to pick it up. Lizzy was dead and no longer needed anything from me. All that was left was my need, aching, desperate, and overwhelming. And I decided in that moment that I needed to die with her. There was nothing else left.

So I laid down on the fake grass they had put around the hole in the ground that they had lowered my baby’s tiny white coffin into. And I just sobbed to Lizzy, asking her to let me die with her.

Of course, they would’t let me do that, and eventually, I was forced to stand up and go back to my pointless chair, and then eventually to get into a pointless car and ride to lay sobbing in a pointless bed, begging my sisters to just cut me open, take out Cecilia, and let me die with Lizzy.

I couldn’t accept then–and I cannot accept now–that Lizzy no longer needs anything from me. That Lizzy no longer needs–period. As her mother, I spent the last two years seeing to her needs, often before I saw to my own. I went from a double-track form of thinking in which everything that I did, everything that I ate, was considered with what to give to Lizzy to eat or to do while I was doing this or that. Thinking of how to occupy an incredibly bright and busy toddler is a full-time job in itself, and then I had the pressure of doing all of my own stupid, adult things as well. My mind went from working overtime almost 100% of the time to having nothing to do and nothing that seemed worth doing. I went from having a child that occupied almost 100% of my time to a child that was silently growing within me, giving me only occasional reminders of her presence when she stretched or moved, and needing nothing from me other than for me to continue to eat and drink.

When I think about how Lizzy no longer needs–the crushing reality of the fact is twofold.

First, I am not left with a house of well-used and well-loved items collected over decades of a full and complete life and ready to be passed on to the next generations. No, I came home to a miniature piano that Lizzy loved to sit at and play her plinking little songs. I came home to the big-girl car seat that she had only started using in recent months. To the high chair where she sat for most of the meals of her life. To a new double stroller that I would never use. To her stool in the bathroom that she stepped up on to brush her teeth. To her toddler-sized toothbrush and her training toothpaste. To her changing table. To a box of size 4 diapers that had arrived while we were in the hospital. To her desk and her little-person chair that she would sit at and color like a dream child. To her Winnie-the-Pooh nightgown and her pink Velcro sneakers. To all of her favorite books. To her pink play stroller that she used to busily push around and collect all manner of treasures. To her yellow rain boots that she had gotten for her birthday fifteen days before and had put on every day since.

When I came home, everywhere I looked was full of things Lizzy no longer needs. I could not walk for sobbing my way through the house, could not sleep for remembering all of the nights sleeping in this bed with her. And when I remembered that she no longer needed the college investment account or the savings account I had started for her on her first birthday, I had another of the many panic attacks I had been having since the hospital.

Second, when I talk about how Lizzy no longer needs, I think about how much I still need. We live in a world of need; I need to breathe, eat, drink, sleep, and eliminate. I need to maintain shelter and a stable temperature. And these are the bare basics. According to human consensus in the professional world, at some point, I need to continue to have relationships, a job, an income, a future. And the needs keep multiplying from there.

Cecilia, like all newborns, is the purity of raw need. She needs my body, my comfort, my milk, my protection, my care, my ability to keep her clean, dry, and warm. All children are need, and as a toddler, Lizzy needed more in many ways from me than Cecilia currently does. And so, instead of expanding my maternal capacity to care for a needy toddler and a differently needy newborn, my ability to respond to need has folded in on itself and I must simply repeat the last two years of my life–raising a single newborn to toddlerhood, caring for an only child instead of siblings.

My need to care for my two children has not dissipated. It is still so present, it threatens to drive me insane with its insistence. I need to be a mother to my two children, not just to one. And I do not know how to cope with the fact that one of my children has completely and utterly transcended the concept of need.

Lizzy no longer needs me. She doesn’t need anything I bought for her; she doesn’t need anything I intended to give her as she grew up and lived her life. She doesn’t even need to live by the rules of this world, the rules that we all are bound to, the rules that are all any of us know because we’ve never known anything else. Lizzy is so completely other now that I have absolutely no idea what to do with my desperate need to be needed by her. Likewise, I have no idea what to do with the raw magnitude of how much I need her.

My need for Lizzy does not dull with time; the acuity of it is not fading. I need Lizzy, physically, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually. I need her with a desperation and a desolation I do not know how to face. Need for her seems to consume all other needs, and simultaneously, the fact that she no longer needs at all makes me feel as though I cannot and should not and will not need–that is–need anything but her. All other needs feel variously pointless, pathetic, or even wrong. From the time I arrived back home after the hospital, I have continuously tried to explain that the only thing that I really need is the one thing that no one can achieve for me: I need Lizzy back.

I live endlessly in the suffocating reality of this need, and there is no coping, no way through it, nothing that anyone can say or do. I know, as surely as I know anything, that this need will not end. I will live with it until I die. And in the meantime, the only thing I know how to do is to fulfill Cecilia’s needs and repeat my mantra as many times as I need to in order to get through the days and nights:

Lizzy, I miss you. Lizzy, I love you. Lizzy, I need you.