The Futility of Tears

Yesterday was ten months to the day since Lizzy died.  This means that for approximately 300 days, I have cried every day.  The early days spent themselves in oceans of tears, inexhaustible and draining.  Then, like a criminal, I began to hide my tears from those who already felt so helpless to soothe them.  Eventually, I began to hide my tears even from Cecilia, for I did not feel that an infant should have to bear the burden of so much grief. 

For ten months, I have cried in the small, frozen minutes between when Cecilia has fallen asleep and I lay wakeful and meandering between heaven and hell.  I have cried upon waking in the empty hours of the early morning, hiding from what I’m afraid will be reflected in the mirror and praying, like a child, for the sun to rise and turn my demons into stone.  I have cried in the mornings, with sunlight streaming onto the beaming face of Cecilia, unable to ignore the invisible and silent echoes of Lizzy rubbing her eyes with tiny fists and asking, “Egg-ies?” I have cried while singing Christmas carols and while eating a casual salad, and I have cried in front of strangers asking me if Cecilia is my first child. 

I feel there should have been an end to these tears: some amorphous destination where justice finally kicks in and says you’ve had enough.  But it turns out that grief is as unfathomable as the ocean, and this salty frame of membrane and bone can produce tears as effortlessly as it makes saliva or urine.  It is perpetual; there is no end to grief, and thus there is no end to crying.  No place where you have suffered enough and can finally rest.  I think, in a way, the activity of life is a perpetual state of restlessness, where even sleep is somewhat of an illusion.   

If death is the only rest possible, then, it follows that I must continue crying until I die.  But even in this recognition do I find myself pinioned between two forms of futility.  First: that I am helpless to avoid crying about Lizzy.  Second: that the crying itself, is utterly futile. 

Not once in ten months has crying succeeded in turning back the clock or resurrecting Lizzy.  At the end of each bout, I find myself empty and disgusted with the wasted time, the misery, and the utter pointlessness of what I have just done.  I begin the laundry list in my head of how my time could have been better spent and of what still needs to be done to care for myself, Cecilia, or my family.  I wish I could say that crying serves a purpose; that it is cathartic and provides something of relief for my embittered and self-pitying mind, but I cannot.

Or, rather, it can help, in the same sense that scooping out small bucketsful of seawater can help to keep a sinking boat afloat.  Each time I cry, there is a little less water drowning myself and the boat, but the boat is also just a little bit more submerged than it was before.  To grieve is to drown slowly for the rest of your life; to drown and to wait for the moment when your lungs finally give up.  Death is the only release from grief, but I no longer find this to be a morbid consideration. 

There is no going back, no changing what has happened, and no undoing the past.  There is no resolution and no option but to move forward with what has been and what is and to pray with fury and forbidding that nothing like this will ever happen to you or to those you love again.  It is to stare unblinking into the blinding light of the future, hoping that your shaky legs can bear the weight of your fear without betraying you into weakness.  And then the future becomes present, and the present past, and everything seems to be okay, until the day when something comes along to make everything forever not okay.  And this, my friends, is what we call being “human.”

When I speak of the futility of tears, I mean that they serve no purpose, not even the vague resemblance of catharsis.  They are supremely non-utilitarian.  And I am at a place where this frustrates me so deeply because the act of doing is the only thing that keeps me from foundering in the wasteland of my fear and my weakness.  Only through filling my days with those things I can objectively consider to be healthy for myself and Cecilia do I reach a point of exhaustion where my day can end with crying about Lizzy and I can avoid falling asleep to the dull ambience of self-loathing. 

Crying does nothing but waste my time, energy, strength, and will.  Crying takes me from Cecilia, suspending myself abhorrently in the myopia of self-pity.  And I could laugh out loud with the irony of how totally unhelpful my crying is to Lizzy, who is now the constancy of unbounded joy and beauty without the constraints of time or flesh. 

And yet . . . I cannot help but cry for my child and for myself.  I am human, and I am a mother.  I can no more help it than I can help taking my next breath.  If my motherhood of Lizzy has become obsolete, I still sense that there is a new type of motherhood to be reached through crying about her.  But I no longer kid myself that I cry for her.  She does not need pity or grief; she is joy without limit.  I do cry for myself, and, to a lesser extent, for Cecilia.  I cry for the life I thought I would have, the future we might have had, the aspects of Lizzy that would have unfolded as she grew.  I do not think there will come a time when I cannot grieve that I did not get to explore the boundless beauty of my firstborn. 

I wonder if being human means just accepting these paradoxes as our lot.  I loathe the futility of my tears and yet crave the fragile promise they contain. I have spoken nothing but contradictions in this post, and yet I have spoken nothing but the truth.  I have only these momentary thoughts that serve neither as questions nor answers, but, like a painting, as brushstrokes illustrating my ever-changing present. Quixotic and evolving, these moments elude my grasp, dancing like butterflies out of my reach, until, with soundless strokes of wing and color, they finally fade from view. 

This is what it means to be alive: to watch these moments, try to possess them, and to fail in the trying.  Lizzy was like this beauty: elusive, boundless, and impossible to contain.  She was never mine to possess, and yet she will always be mine in a way she was never anyone else’s.  She is the type of beauty to which you reorient your entire life and the kind of truth that forever redefines you as a person. She is that which I cannot stop seeking, even though I know I can no longer find her here. 

And so I find her where I can, in the rhythm of the keys as I type about her, in the clothes that she wore which now clothe her little sister, and in the photos of her which I cannot look at but which give me comfort to know that they are there. 

I see Lizzy everywhere.  I can hear her voice.  I can summon her like a ghost, but there is nothing ghostly about her.  I can still feel the plump roundness of her cheeks as I kiss her.  I can still see the cerulean brilliance of her eyes and the impossible dusky length of her eyelashes.  I can hear her laughing, watch her bring her fists to her mouth in delight at being discovered in her hiding place.  I can see the exact precise position of her hand as she reaches to pick up a seashell for examination, droplets of sun-soaked water falling from her perfect fingers.  I can hear the cadence of her saying “love you!” as we hung up FaceTime with my father and feel the soft warmth of her cuddling close to read The Runaway Bunny.  I can hear her asking me, “Forever?” and me responding, “Forever and ever.  That is how long Christopher Robin loves Pooh-bear and that is how long I will love you.”

A dripping sun melts its pink lips into the horizon as seabirds wheel overhead, calling out to one another the way home.  Pointless tears slip down my face, but this time, I surrender myself to their futility. After all, there are some things worth wasting your time.