The Inexorability of Now

My picture of what I want to be and what I think I can be has never matched up in my head. Like blind seer, I grasp clumsily at the fractured memories of what has been in order to justify my prophecies on what will be. There is no harmony and little reason in this, only vain posturing.

I was sure that the stretch of time between Lizzy’s birthday on March 20 and the anniversary of her death on April 5 would be hell on earth for me. And certainly, waking up on March 20 to an Amazon email about what makes 3-year-olds so awesome was not fun. But I think I thought the day would be worse than it actually was.

I had planned on visiting Lizzy’s grave for the first time on that day. This plan, like everyone else’s plans, was cancelled due to Coronavirus quarantines. Instead of grieving my dead toddler, I have spent the past days and weeks stockpiling the freezers, researching Cecilia’s suspected genetic condition, and preparing and freezing baby foods that may or may not help to preserve Cecilia’s eyesight for just a little bit longer.

I told my father today that I feel as though I am running as fast as I can right now and getting nowhere. I am busy from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep, and I still feel as though nothing that I do is making a difference. I am too busy to grieve, too busy to think, too busy to cry.

A year ago, the world stopped around me because my baby died. My family stopped going to work, everyone moved into my sister’s home; we went nowhere and saw no one. We hysterically and frantically washed and sanitized everything with medical-grade soap and alcohol wipes and anytime I took Cece to the doctor, we came home, stripped clothes directly into the wash, got directly into the shower, and washed all items that had possibly been exposed to pathogens.

I feel I am living my life on repeat. All of these things are happening around me right now–again–and people are suffering and dying and paranoid and alone. I think I had mistakenly believed that if I could get through the first year without Lizzy, then somehow, someway, things might get better from there. Life, it seems, never tires of proving me to be terribly, terribly wrong.

I don’t know what to say or how to feel about Coronavirus. I think about what I would have said or done or felt if the doctors at the PICU had told me that there were so many sick children that there was no life support machine for my baby. This is happening to people right now. A year ago, I at least had an entire hospital turned upside down to do whatever they could to save Lizzy’s life. And they still failed.

Please understand that I have no answers for you.

Unfortunately, I don’t even have comfort to offer. Life is work and suffering and death. Life is a perpetual struggle to keep afloat a sinking boat that will inevitably, in time, sink. It gets to the point where you begin to feel that the dying and the dead have the better end of the bargain.

What does one say to a worldwide pandemic? How do you visualize millions of people dead? This is not the first time we have had to face such an impossibility. How do you measure a rough million slaughtered in Rwanda in 90 days in 1994 or a staggering 20 million murdered in the Soviet Union under Stalin’s regime? Who is left to tell their stories?

These days, I feel a burning drive to tell Lizzy’s story. The simple, uneventful story of a little girl who died before she really even got to live. Telling her story doesn’t bring her back, but it does ease the desperate and constant desire I have to talk about her. Just for a little while.

That’s the whole point, isn’t it? Just for a little while. That’s what our choices boil down to: this constant managing of now–how to make it more bearable, more tolerable, more pleasurable. That’s what we do with the eternal now; we make mental bargains with ourselves about how to make the now pass, bribing our childlike brains with this or that reward to get us through the perpetual unpleasantness of now.

I haven’t been crying about Lizzy lately. And I find that that, too, takes its toll, one way or another. If I don’t cry or speak or write about her, I begin to fail mentally and emotionally. My psychological reserves dry up and I begin to crack from the inside out, as my heart and my brain founder–parched and swelling. It seems that Lizzy isn’t just my suffering and my love and my child; she is also my strength, my hope, and my will to keep going.

There is no conquering the inexorability of now. It is what we all must face, all of the time. I think what matters is how you manage to comport yourself while facing it. I cannot change what is happening in the world around me. I cannot save these people’s lives. I cannot even change Cecilia’s condition and magically grant her the sight that even the world’s best ophthalmologists cannot return to her. All I can do is face my constant now without allowing the shadows of what has been or the ghosts of what I think should be to torment me into immobility.

I may hate my now and hate my impotence in facing it. But what I feel doesn’t actually make a speck of difference. Now will keep crushing me under its powerful heel unless I learn to grow the strength to withstand the weight.

Four days ago, had she lived, Lizzy would have turned three. And eleven days from now, I will have to remember how the world shattered and ended and has never actually recovered. Meanwhile, in this no man’s land in between, I have no choice but to drift, breathe, and struggle to gain the stamina I will need to face a lifetime of this.

There is no other option.