Lot’s Wife
Emily died in my sleep. I woke up to find I had become a mother, past tense. She was a delicate blue and perfect, a memory already and my first recognition of her passing had not yet worked its way through me. “This is not what I had in mind,” I thought. “I meant to be a mother.”
I stood over her, willing her to breathe, to move, open her eyes but my will and panic could not restore the order of things, could not make her open her mouth and pull in air, open her eyes and search me out with the bluest gaze. The jagged, jerking memory of that moment, where I recognized that I had lost, that the irretrievable had happened still seeks me out over fifteen years later when I remember, and the act of remembering tries to blast apart my life, rendering me back to the day I stood looking at my daughter, fixed forever, and dead.
But I am still alive. I am not fragmented in a way that cannot be pieced back together because the moment passes. I surge back into the present where the sounds of my life and the trivialness of chores root me to the present and I know that while I must always endure the unremitting weight of loss and grief I have also lived through it and so it must be, in some ways, bearable. Each day is a memory; each memory requires a bargain with yourself to keep moving. To slow my pace, to stand still would fuse me to that day and I would become inseparable from a place in time, unable or unwilling to move or blink until I was claimed by the moment, turned into salt, another monument to the sacrifice that was Emily’s life.
I have no memories of Emily’s life. There is no such thing as memory when you lose a child. There is only the grief of the life not lived. I wish and bargain to know things, know her smell, her weight in my lap, her way of saying “mama”. Mostly I wish to know her need of me. Who she might have been becomes an exponential life existing only in my head. Even that must be let go, buried along with her toys, her clothes, and her body. This all occurred in a second. She was my daughter and now she is dead. I did not blink and still she was gone. I stood over her alone, feeling the seconds unspool in front of me, understanding the interminable time that must pass now before I can be sure I lived through this and yet wanting to freeze time, hold still the sun and prevent the earth from arcing away a single degree while I marked this terrible event. I wanted the entire world to bear witness, yet I was alone. No one could see me rend or hear the great ripping sound of my life as Emily’s departure tore apart everything I had imagined myself to be. I picked up the phone for help, a lifeline. I picked up the phone and called my uncle. He came to the trailer and put us in the car. The drive to the hospital was unremarkable except for the lack of traffic on the street. It was as if Christ had come back and raptured out the righteous and left only my uncle, myself and my dead baby girl. It left me with the uneasy sense that my own unrighteousness had been passed on to my daughter and only my uncle and I were left to bear witness to my blame in her death. I could not know it then but it was as much the end of my life as it was Emily’s. I could not know it because I was only moving from second to second of my life, watching it act itself out in a pattern I could neither deny nor control. Emily was alive, now dead and I would have to bury her. I realized there would come a point that I would not see her again, that the time would rise up, very soon, when even the lifeless body I held would be taken, to be buried or cremated as I wished. But I could not have what I wished, that time turn itself around and that I wake a moment or a few moments sooner so that I could reach for my daughter before she was beyond reach, beyond the realm of irretrievability, perfect and full of breath. I turned to the nurse, handing over my daughter’s body, watching her disappear from my sight, dwindling to a pinpoint and gone, out of my life and line of vision permanently.
No one tells you how to bury. It is taboo to speak of the death of children.
We all want to outlive our progeny. It seems a sacrilege to imagine surviving when your child could not. To have done so, to have survived marks you as a leper, as if you are unclean or unfortunate in a way that might be catching. It also leaves you with a sense of your own inadequacies. I was not smart enough, strong enough or diligent enough to stave off death. A mother should be greater than the forces of nature. She should always die first, her life in lieu of her baby’s. I felt the stigma of the lone plane crash survivor who lives, who beats the odds for no good reason when everyone else dies. I was still alive, but I rued the beating of my heart and began willing it to stop. Any identity, any life I had claimed for myself disappeared into the earth with Emily.
My life prior to Emily’s departure was characterized by fear. I lived within the framework of the social conventions of the Deep South. My family, husband, and church had in mind a role for me to fulfill: daughter, wife and mother. To think or speak to things beyond these arenas was unimaginable. It would be like trying to describe a landscape you do not even know exists. There is no language for it. Identity came in the form of marital or familial ties. To describe my life my entire vocabulary would be one of servitude and deference. Men, the church, knew my heart better than I did, could entertain my happiness in a way I could not understand. I once attended a young woman’s “Christian charm school” where I listened to another southern woman explain that wives are “cheerleaders” for their husbands and that a woman without a husband is like a candle that gives no light. Mixed metaphors aside, I wanted to give light; I wanted to cheer my husband on. I did not think once how I might desire my own game plan, and that I might be entitled to the sun, not just the flicker of a flame.
My marriage took seven years to dissolve and erode into dust. Emily’s death blew even that last shadow from our lives. Until then I was content to merge with the patterns of life until I appeared to be nothing more than a material after thought, like an appliance humming in the background, hardly commented on but functional. I thought nothing, did nothing. To speak seemed irrelevant as I felt like there was nothing for me to comment on. My days and nights were housewife and then wife, only to be housewife again when the sun rose and my husband went to work. Entering a room or attending a family gathering I rarely spoke, afraid that the sentences coming out of my mouth would sound alien and strange until everyone knew that I was as empty as I felt and that the language I spoke was really not a language at all but something unintelligible, garbled mutterings about laundry, recipes and toilet bowl cleaners. I knew no politics, no literature, no culture and mostly, no desire. I began marking time and waiting for something I did not even know existed: My life.
Emily was a miracle to me, to us. I was told I could have no children. My body was a mass of scar tissue from a brutal childhood assault and the subsequent reconstructive surgeries that tried to piece me back together as if they could somehow return me to my former state, whole, sane and fertile. The surgeon had wanted to remove the damaged tissue and organs, warning my parents that I would suffer the rest of my life if they kept things the way they were. But my mother declined, thinking I may one day want to have babies, part of “God’s master plan”. I worried that God’s plan seemed to require terrible sacrifices and wondered how learning to walk, sit and stand again fit into the divine fabric of the universe. I figured out pretty quickly that I would always be at the mercy of my family, decisions about my life would not be left up to me and the ability to prevent anyone from hurting me was beyond my control.
But Emily broke me open and poured in light. My child and her life was a wilderness I could explore, describe and delight in. I began imagining who she might become, how her voice might alter the timbre of the world, shaking loose the conventions I had bound my self with and how she could set her feet and her mind wherever she wanted, somewhere beyond the trailer park and the fear and stigma of being poor white trash. She could be more than the sum of her parents, her life adding up to something I could not fathom for myself. All I had to do was be accountable to her, turn her loose to her own desires and keep her safe.
I was incapable of any of that. I let her go while I slept, a life unformed as the breath snared at the edge of her mouth. I am speaking only of a moment, really. That is all it takes for someone to die. And the mother I was became different than the woman I am, transformed as Saul on the road to Damascus when God called out to him, splitting and recreating him just by speaking his name. Emily’s heart and breath stopped and I was recreated, in the moment it takes a child to die, in the breath it takes to call out, “Mama.”
It is a desolate country, the one given over to you by grief. You can spend your whole life walking and you will never find the other side of it. And it changes you. If you can remain upright and keep moving you learn to live with it, you learn what is hard and what isn’t. I found out it wasn’t hard to leave, wasn’t hard to let go of a barely adequate life. Whatever language I had used before was replaced with a keening, articulate and wild. I became a terrible woman. The only way I knew how to stay alive was to burn to the ground the woman I once was. I had been Emily’s mother, I had been afraid to alter the pattern of my life and my family’s life, committed to the order of things. I had been content to stay and give Emily the tools she would need to build her own life while ignoring the needs of my own. Instead, she left the tools with me, and both of our lives up to my imagination. I had choices. Stay and endure the slow death of an inadequate, unremarked life, always and only the mother of a dead child or leave, like Emily, to what is unknowable, eternally alive and completely of my own making.
So I walked out, walked away and refused a backward glance, learning the lesson of Lot’s wife that to look back at the moment of your annihilation is to become fixed to that spot in the ground forever. I Let Emily remain the monument and I kept on walking.
My daughter’s death restructured me in the way a storm restructures a landscape. Nothing can survive unchanged and it takes ages beyond our ken for the earth to reclaim what it has lost. Even when it recovers, its horizons and its colors still show the shapes and the scars of that storm. I show the shapes and scars of Emily’s life and her death. These were her gifts to me. I am remarkable because of them.
