The Meaning of Life

When Lizzy was about five months old, I woke to her sunbathing and cooing in a pool of morning light streaming through our window. It had been our pattern to begin our morning with morning kisses and cuddles, but something about that morning was particularly special; she was so happy, so content to let me drowse, chatting amiably in the crook of my arm, having private conversations with the sun angels. When I finally woke, it was to her shining eyes and brilliant, toothless smile. She was so stunningly beautiful that I ended up taking somewhere around fifty photos and a video of her, bracing herself up on her chubby forearms, softly telling me what she was seeing and feeling. She was, very simply, luminous.

Now, in the same bed but in a different room, I wake each morning to Cecilia’s murmuring and kicky baby legs. She is so like her sister that this could be my life and she could be Lizzy, two years ago. But this is not then and Lizzy is not here and Cecilia is and this is my life. And helpless to that fact and helpless to her presence, I begin each morning kissing Cecilia all over her soft body, glorying in her smiles, and telling her how her sister, an angel of light, is with us always.

I wake, and I kiss her chest, her belly, and the bottoms of her feet, as her tiny hands wrap tightly about my pointer fingers and her tiny toes curl strongly against my lips. I trace the lines of her skull, the bones so soft it’s terrifying, her pulse beating strongly away within her fontanel. As I kiss her, I feel the firm plumpness of her cheeks, rub my nose gently against her nose, smell her milk-sweet breath, and listen to her laugh as her eyes like up like stars. I see her reach for me, arms open in anticipation, and as I lift her to my chest, I feel her breathe against me, a firm reminder that she is living and she is embodied. And later, mesmerized, I watch her lids droop in impending slumber, wondering at the soot-gray lashes that seem to grow just a tiny bit longer each day. I do not allow myself to forget that every second that she is here, breathing and with me, is nothing short of a miracle. Her beauty stops me constantly, and I must breathe, and remember, and keep going. For she is my world.

My father asked me yesterday if I would want to be dead if I didn’t have Cecilia. “Yes,” I answered, without defense or elaboration. “Well, at least you’re honest,” he said. Honest, yes, but I would be surprised if this honesty shocked anyone who knew me. If not for Cecilia, I would have wanted and maybe tried to follow Lizzy. Cecilia is why I’m here. Without her, my purpose would have been buried with Lizzy.

There are sometimes that I think I’ve spent my whole life searching for purpose, obsessed with trying to figure out “the meaning of life.” As a child, I think it was less urgent, but still I told stories and wrote plays and tried to understand the what and why of things through books and movies. Throughout high school, I loved literature, theater, and art because I believed they spoke in code about the things that really mattered. But when I went to college, everyone kept asking me why I had changed my major from English to philosophy, and invariably, I answered: “Because I want to study the stuff that literature can only write stories about.” By graduate school, this pursuit changed to theology. And afterwards, it was love, and then it was marriage.

But through all my schooling, through all the time I spent reading all of those books and the endless hours I devoted trying to discover the point of human life on this planet, I never reached true clarity of purpose. It wasn’t until the night Lizzy was born that the amorphous, existential ramblings of my life sharpened into one vivid, articulated definition the moment that I first held her. And through my 33 years of doing this thing called life, this is where my studies and my hours and my seeking has led me: the meaning of life was held manifest in Lizzy–in her smile, in her first steps, in her sweet voice echoing, “Love you, Grandpa!” every time I got off the phone with my father.

Lizzy was the meaning in my life, and somehow, simultaneously, she was the mystery that hinted at all meaning, for all times. And when I lost her, I lost not just the meaning of my life, but the meaning of life generally. But now, I am beginning to discover that Cecilia is also the fullness of this meaning and the fullness of my purpose, just as her sister was and will ever be. I find my clarity there in her fragile, pink fingernails, the perfect hollow of her bellybutton, the half-moon crescent of her chin, the deep and shy depressions of her dimples. Simply by being, she is everything. And without conscious thought, I belong totally to her.

Lizzy is the origin and essence of this belonging, and because she taught me myself in a way that 23 years of formal education could not, I will always owe everything that I am and that I have a chance to be to Lizzy. And, yes, to Cecilia also. For it is to them both now, my dead and living daughters alike, that I owe my life. But it is an owing without debt or possession, a truth of purpose and place that is carved out in the pathways of bone and marrow. I belong to them and they to me, and I find that this, both at the beginning and end of all things, is the meaning of life.