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The Reciprocity of Need

When I was in college, I simply couldn’t understand why atheists got out of bed in the morning. What was worth living for? What was worth dying for? What mattered beyond material satiety? And if you believe that we were made from nothing and destined for nothing, then why didn’t you just kill yourself to end the eternal nothingness of your life–or worse–determine to take others with you in the process of satisfying that nihilism, like the gunmen at Columbine?

No, I concluded; it simply must be that every human being who chooses at any given moment to keep breathing is doing so for a reason. The question then became to discover that reason. For my undergraduate thesis, I wrote a paper positing that all major religions and some philosophies (such as Nietzsche’s Will to Power) were all aimed at accessing the same force: namely, a God beyond God. In this paper, I argued reorienting the definition of God to be “that for which the human being lives that is beyond him or herself.”

Lately, I have been remembering the acuteness of my desire to die the day we buried Lizzy. I remember struggling with the theological implications of suicide and finally determining that it was a logical fallacy to believe that Lizzy could not be anywhere but in heaven and that suicide could possibly send me there to meet her.

What kept me alive then was Cecilia, who, at the time, was only a faceless infant in my womb whom I hadn’t yet met–a foreign creature who seemed to kick and thrive in obscene ignorance of the fact that her sister lay still and cold underground. I lived then, as did much of my family, for the promise Cecilia bore within her: that life can somehow find a way, and that death has never held all the answers.

Last week, I spoke with another mother who has lost a child, and she told me a similar story: that when you no longer have a reason to live for yourself, sometimes you must choose to live for your other children. I find it easy to understand that I’m living for Cecilia. What is harder to admit is that there is virtually no part of me that is living for myself.

Cecilia is still not walking, although she is making steady progress with standing and cruising for longer and longer periods of time. I’ve been noticing her physical evolution in small shifts of behavior: things that only she and I would be able to recognize. One such thing is how she responds these days when I pick her up. Lately, when I go to swoop her out of her high chair or off of our bed, she wraps both arms and both legs tightly around my torso and presses her head deeply into my chest as though trying to burrow inside of me. My response to this is primordial and uncontrollable: I wrap both my arms about her little, clinging body and squeeze her tightly, pressing her head closer against me and telling her how desperately I love her. I feel her little self that was once inside my body now breathing and moving outside my body, but still essentially a part of me. In these moments, it’s as though there is no separation between us and nothing else I would rather be doing.

How does one describe hugging a fourteen-month old? Why does her frantic gratitude at being picked up translate into this instinctive yearning to fuse herself into me as though we could once again become one body by sheer willpower?

I cannot think clearly in those spaces where I am hugging Cecilia as urgently as she is hugging me. But afterwards, when her little body relaxes against me, and she settles onto my hip, I begin to think about the degree of need that Cecilia has for me. It’s likely no different than any other one-year-old’s need for her mother, and that is not the place where my mind wanders thinking on this. No, Cecilia feeling that she needs me to survive is nothing more than biologically normative and appropriate. It is the fact that I also feel that I need her to survive that is different.

What is worth living for? What is worth dying for? Before I became a mother, I had pretty philosophical answers to these questions. After Lizzy was born, the answers all melted into a single word: her. And when Lizzy died, the answer became Cecilia. And when Cecilia was born, the answer shifted to them.

We all need a reason to keep taking that next breath. For me, it is my daughters, dead and alive. For me, every single second that is given to me is one more second that Lizzy was not given. One more second that I need to make matter exactly because she was not given it and I, unfairly and stupidly, was. And every single second that Cecilia keeps breathing is one more reason to make sure that I do not waste a single moment of my life not speaking the truth.

The truth is that when Cecilia is hugging me, she knows only that she loves me and needs me and not that my reciprocal need for her is so consuming that it rages like a fire in my blood. She doesn’t know that her sister is dead or that she is blind or that she is the only reason I choose to keep taking that next breath. No. Cecilia is fourteen months old, and she knows only that she is so happy to be picked up that she wants to hug me as tightly as her tiny body can possibly manage. And for every single second that she keeps breathing, I will fight like hell to try and keep things that simple for her.

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