There is No Going Back (Part 1): Nightmares and Negotiations

As the nightmare of Lizzy’s death unfolded before me at Children’s Hospital, it was like I was watching myself from the outside in. And perhaps the most perverse part of it was that after the initial shock and denial, I began to expect the bad news that just kept coming.

Every time a new doctor would come up to me or we would have yet another conference in that horrific conference room about Lizzy’s condition, I expected the worst. And I wasn’t surprised when the worst proceeded forward like a bullet train.

I knew before they told me that morning that Lizzy was brain dead. That none of the other possible, hopeful scenarios that we had all been spinning out in our heads the night before would come to pass. I knew that their “likely” worst case scenario had happened. I just didn’t know until they told me that it had been happening the entire time we were discussing which scenarios could potentially happen.

What I mean by this is that her brain was literally swelling out of her skull into her brain stem, causing total brain death, while they were telling us what a small chance we had of Lizzy coming back to us, even a helpless Lizzy in a wheelchair with a maximum of 40% brain capacity. The neurologists that day kindly made it quite clear that the Lizzy I had known and loved as my daughter was already gone forever.

I’m not sure when this word “forever” starts to hit or to sink in. Everything was so surreal when it was happening that it was almost like I was acting out a part in a play that would eventually be over and then I would go back to my life. I performed like the person that I thought I would be in this type of scenario, but then I would go home and Lizzy would be there and I would find that this was all some horrible, unbelievable alternate form of reality, and thank God I could wake up from it.

It’s two and a half months later, and I can’t wake up from it. I wonder if this is how people who commit suicide feel: that in killing themselves, they can force their broken bodies and minds to finally wake up from a nightmare that won’t end on its own.

And I find that this is where begging and negotiations and what-ifs and alternate realities all end: there is no going back.

Maybe we only realize this in the best and worst moments in our lives simply because they are emblazoned in our memories. I remember every detail of those days in the hospital just like I remember every detail of Lizzy’s birth and of how her mouth felt when she nursed and the precise sound of how she would laugh in delight when you caught her in a game of hide and seek.

I know this because I have begged in these dark, long, meaningless days to hear her voice again, to see her smile, to feel her strong little body asleep in my arms. I have sobbed and pleaded and desperately wished until I am raw with it and still there is no getting her back. I don’t get a do-over or a repeat experience. I get nothing but the dull ache and empty numbness of the yawning “now” from which she is absent.

There is no relief and there is no resolution. There is the continuum. The nightmare. And the conviction that comes with it that I can’t and won’t wake up and find myself at home. My home was in Lizzy and hers was in me. So if I want to go home, I must go to where she is: six feet underground and next to my grandfather.