The Invisible Hand

My mind balks anytime anyone uses the word “healing” to describe what I’m doing or need to do or what has to happen from here on out. And I get it, I really do. Tragedy, despair, and misery are fundamentally unsustainable. The average human person cannot maintain a state of any of these things indefinitely. Eventually, there comes a time when you either get medicated, hospitalized, or kill yourself. The only other option is to figure it out.

But what does figuring it out mean in the context of grief? We’ve already established that there is no going back. That the person that I was is effectively dead. So is this a phoenix from the ashes scenario? For some reason, I hate that idea. It’s repulsive to me. Why? Because the thought of going on at all without Lizzy is repulsive.

If I’m being honest with myself, I want my fate to be severe in the face of her loss because I feel that severity is appropriate in proportion to how much I loved her. A part of me still wants to be dead or institutionalized because I do not believe that recovery from her loss is possible. But there are two potential problems with this.

First, what really are my options in terms of continuing to love Lizzy and to honor her? Is it dying or being so broken that I cannot function in this world without her? Maybe not. But I also cannot feel or accept that it’s continuing to live or do anything approximating heal, grow, strengthen, or thrive. The world should have stopped with her death, but it didn’t. My life should have stopped with her death, but it didn’t. Where does that leave me?

Second, there is Cecilia. I’ve written before that it’s as though I’m living my life on repeat. Here I am, all over again, with one single child, a baby girl, slowly and inexorably falling in love with her day by day, just as I did with Lizzy. And if die for love of Lizzy while Cecilia is still alive, then I have failed both Lizzy and Cecilia as their mother.

But surviving and thriving doesn’t seem to be an option either. And yet I want Cecilia to thrive. And Lizzy, when she was here, did nothing but thrive. What for myself, then? What am I now? I have no definition or clarity on this. I don’t know how to be here, but I do it every day. All of the functional things that I do day by day to be in this world still feel ultimately meaningless. Even the things that I do for my health cause a stutter step before I remember that I need health of my own in order to nourish and care for Cecilia. Only then do I resume memory of purpose. But for the rest of it, it’s still as though I’m walking and functioning outside of time and meaning. As though I’m a ghost going about the same business I used to perform in life, only now I have no concrete effect on the world around me.

I don’t want to get better. I don’t want to heal. I don’t want to do anything that distances myself from Lizzy. And this is the crux of the problem of grief. Lizzy, the source of such pure love, has through her death, become the source of such pure pain. So now distancing myself from the daughter that I so loved also means distancing myself from the pain of her absence. I want to stay close to her, and therefore I must stay close to that pain. There is no alternative. Thus, I hate words like “healing” or “moving forward.”

I don’t want to go anywhere but towards Lizzy. So that either means going back towards both her life and her death, or fast forwarding through the rest of my life to reach her through my own death. And so, with every step I take, I waver in guilt, fear, indecision, and a crippling agony of the realization that Lizzy is not walking with me. I want to walk back. I want to go home. And I feel so utterly homeless without her. There is no clean answer here. There is no path forward that isn’t rife with guilt and confusion. I just want my baby back.

I guess my only option is to continue with what I’ve been doing. To do the things to make sure I don’t fail Cecilia as a mother and to give her a good life–ideally with a mother who isn’t dead or institutionalized or insane or a ghost. And I guess that working towards that goal by definition means that I have to become a new version of myself: not a phoenix, but maybe something less glamorous and more practical. A version that is loving and present to Cecilia, that is able to take joy in loving her.

The problem is that the new version of myself will always come with an invisible hand that, without warning, will begin to choke me with memories and visions of the daughter I lost. This hand decides to exercise itself at the most unpredictable and unforeseeable moments. I never know when it will wrap itself around my neck and constrict my airways. But I know that it wants to choke the life out of me. And I know that sometimes, I want it to. The invisible hand is like a fifth, unwelcome limb that is always with me, no matter what I’m doing. I can be doing the dishes, or staring at a sun hat, or drying off with a towel, and it will choke me.

So maybe that’s the answer. Maybe the healed version of Caroline comes complete with a ghostly appendage that has the ability to make time stop, cease whatever I’m doing, and live, for a few moments, either lost in the past or else out of this world completely. Maybe the healed version of me has a shadow that walks in the afterlife, occasionally tapping me on the shoulder. And maybe it’s okay that one day, when that shadow comes knocking, I will be more than willing to follow it home.