20 Years of Mercy

Today is the 20^th anniversary of my youngest child’s death. 20 years is such a long time. Another lifetime ago. So much has changed in my life that it seems almost inconceivable that I am the same person who went through this loss. I am rather demonstrably not the same person who went through this loss. I am twenty years older. My children are all grown. My marriage has ended. I no longer affiliate with the church of my childhood and of this time period. I have an entirely different career, though I continue to write on the side. I began a hobby/obsession in Ironman triathlon competition that lasted through much of that time, though it is now waning in importance.

And yet, I only have to close my eyes to remember what it felt like to see my dead child, to hold her small body in my arms, to hear other people’s voices as if from a distance, to know that my life was over as much as my daughter’s was, to remember the stupid and unkind things that people said to me (God wants to teach you a lesson—you have to learn the lesson or other bad things will happen to you, you will be grateful this happened to you one day, you will understand why this happened to you one day, this will bring you and your husband and children closer together). I can even smell the hospital room. I can smell the baby smell that is just a little different with a baby that is no longer living. I can feel the grief rise up in me as I drove home, sobbing, without my child, and as I tried to explain to my children what had happened when I could not explain it to myself.

Yesterday, as I was thinking about writing this essay as I do each year, I thought that maybe I wouldn’t write it at all. I thought that maybe I had nothing left to say, that the wounds were all healed, that I had moved on from this loss. I thought that I hardly think about her anymore and that when I do, it doesn’t hurt like it used to. It is simply a thing that happened to past me, and that isn’t a real part of my current life anymore.

And then today hit and I got a bee sting on my bike ride and I felt like my life was falling apart. There is a list of household maintenance tasks that is growing and that I have not attended to. I am not taking care of the necessary things. I am bad at taking care of necessary things. It is my fault that I ignore things that might turn into problems. And this is what killed my daughter. This is what my mind tells me, even still, even after twenty years of telling it that this was a tragedy that was no one’s fault. I don’t know precisely why I blame myself, still. If I made a mistake, it was a mistake of trying too hard, not too little, of loving too much. I did not know this would happen and would have given my own life to stop it. But sometimes that isn’t one of the choices offered.

Did I kill her with the run I did that week, when I was so tired of being pregnant?

Did I kill her by not being faithful enough in some religious rule—though I followed most of them with obsessiveness?

Did I kill her by not paying enough attention to some signal that she or God or my own body was sending me?

I do not know. I can never know the answers to these questions. And I have long since accepted that even if I knew the answers in some scientific way, it would probably not change any of the internal emotional turmoil inside of me.

This month is now also the month of my first grandchild’s birth. Much of this month has been spent helping my daughter and her husband welcome their new child into the world, and doing my damnedest to help all three of them, staying overnight when I can manage it while still working my full-time job in finance, coming every morning for a few hours to take the baby so parents can sleep, and offering my limited advice about how to deal with problems, some of which are familiar and some of which are not.

This has been a month in which I remember keenly how much I love newborn babies. Everyone has an age they love, I suspect. I love all the ages, but the newborn stage is special to me. The slug-like, boneless body and the face with huge eyes of wonder, surprise, confusion, and annoyance. I make up stories for newborns, sometimes out loud, sometimes just in my head. I am a writer, after all. I read babies books, even if I know they are probably too young to understand anything other than the sound of my voice and the idea that this book thing is important to me to share with them.

I knew that I might have feelings about this new baby’s birth. I knew that it might cause flashbacks. And yet . . . I threw myself into it. Because that is who I am, who I have always been, who I was when Mercy died. I have tried so many times since then to die because life is so hard, but I am, obviously, still alive. And one thing this new life has reminded me of is the preciousness of life (yes, that cliché, a cliché because it is true). I love the experience of seeing the world through the eyes of a newborn, enough that I have been able to balance that against the occasional reminders of the past.

Did I live through a hundred versions of “will it happen again?” Yes. And yet . . . I did not turn away from the possible pain. If anything, I ran toward it. As if it were a race, perhaps a marathon. I measured out the pain and made sure that I could hold it, and I did just that. I welcomed a new life into the world with open arms.

I don’t often feel like I have a communication with Mercy. I would tend to say I am an atheist, though not a fervent one. An unwilling atheist, one who wishes there were something more, though any of the versions I’ve so far encountered since Mercy’s death are worse than nothing, so here I am, empty of faith. Still, Mercy did appear to me in the hospital room for a moment. If it is Mercy. All the caveats. Could be my imagination. Probably is wishful thinking.

If some version of Mercy is real, what she had to say about her new nephew and about him being alive and her not was simple: I don’t know why you’re always sad, Mom. I am not dead-dead. I am just in a different place. I don’t come here very much, but that’s just because I’m busy. Now you have him and you can be busy over here

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