Mercy's Not Graduation

This year my daughter Mercy would have been graduating from high school, a fact that became painfully stark as those who had babies the year she died posted photos of the children’s high school graduation.

Sometimes I think about her as a newborn. Other times, I see kids who are images of who she might have been and I feel the ache of the loss of all the years in between. Not seeing her first steps. Not seeing her smile or say “Mama.” Not seeing her go to Kindergarten. Not seeing her play an instrument. Or learn to read. Or even not hearing her say “I hate you.” I often say that it’s not true grief grows smaller. It grows bigger with this kind of loss, every moment of every day added to the moments and days before which you also lost.

When Mercy died in 2005, I had a faith crisis, not just in my church, but in myself, in the meaning of life. I experienced an extreme existential crisis, wondering what the point of anything was, and also at the same time, extreme anxiety. I realized that the belief I’d had before that there was always a cause and effect that could be discerned, that the future was something that was guaranteed if you followed certain rules, wasn’t true. There were no guarantees.

I realized the truth I had denied to myself for most of my life: any of my other children could die at any time. I saw dangers everywhere. I didn’t want to send them to school, but I was also not convinced that I could protect them at home or keep them alive. What if they died in their sleep at night? Mercy had died at night. I began to have extreme insomnia, and I wandered the house at night, checking in on each child to make sure they were still breathing, once, twice, over and over again, because even if they were alive last time, they could still stop breathing in a moment.

For Christmas each year, I would pick out “memorial gifts” to send to other family members: angel trinkets or books about children dying. I’m not sure that these were appreciated or understood. I was trying to share my new truth with others in a kind of evangelical approach. But no one wants to know how close death can be. Most people don’t experience life that way, and don’t want to. Most people tell themselves another story about death: that God intended it, that there is a lesson to learn, and that then you get to move on. I never felt able to move on.

Eighteen years later, after arguing with my now ex-husband about who got the graves near our daughter’s burial plot (we each get one), I often feel nothing at all about my daughter’s death. I have blessedly let go of the constant existential dread about anyone dying at any time (not because it’s any less true, but only because it’s harder to stay alive while carrying that around). I find myself only occasionally agreeing with what other people say about grief. Yes, in time, it gets less painful. Yes, sometimes you grow to be bigger than the pain. I’m still not sure I think any of these things are signs of growth. It’s just a survival mechanism. You learn to live on because you have to, not because the trauma made you wiser or stronger.

I often find myself wondering what my life would have been like if Mercy had lived. It seems like I believe that all the bad things that have happened since then would be gone. But yes, also some of the good things, like the Linda Wallheim books and a lot of my essays like this one. I often think about time travel and grief and about alternate timelines. But I also know that I don’t get to live anywhere but on this timeline. I still find myself in denial at times, and I don’t know that I believe in stages of grief. There are just reactions, and you’ll go through all of them and keep going through them until you are also gone.

In that tender, painful year right after Mercy died, I often found myself trying to prove to the universe that I would have been “good enough” to mother Mercy. I don’t find myself needing to do that as much anymore. We talk less about her as a family than we used to, and I don’t think the other kids feel the weight of her shadow as they once did. That’s probably good. It’s healthy, but I am still suspicious of this, too. It is survival. That’s all.

If she were here with us, maybe everything would not be different. Maybe. But she didn’t graduate this year. She won’t be going to college. She rests instead under a stone that says “Mercy and goodness will follow me all the days of my life,” and she does still follow me, for good or ill

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