50 Days
Day 50. Fifty days without our beautiful Zuri.
Fifty days not hearing her giggle, or whine, or sneeze, or sigh in her sleep.
Fifty days at the dinner table, without her yelling at her high chair for the next bite of food, without us eating with one arm, without us taking turns to hold her.
Fifty days without ducking away for a quiet moment to nurse. Fifty days without her biting me while nursing.
Fifty days without getting up in the middle of the night to feed her. Fifty days not waking up to her babbling coos. Fifty days without the older Zs tromping down the stairs first thing when they wake up, bursting through the door and fighting to play with Zuzu.
Fifty days not tracking what Zuzu is staring at with eyes and mouth wide open – every sight a wonder.
Fifty days not taking walks with her weight against us, her fears and comforts shifting our steps and shaping our paths.
Fifty days of the sorrow of fitting all into a sedan, of leaving the house with too little to carry, too little to plan ahead for, too much silence.
The living out of grief has looked so many different ways these last fifty days. In the first weeks, grief was googling, “Funeral for a baby.” It was shopping for black clothes for my broken-hearted children. It was a thousand other things, too sacred to share here.
Today, grief is a house that stays tidy for more than an hour. Grief is fewer chores, fewer dishes, less to launder, less to keep track of and replenish. Grief is walking up the stairs, no longer craning to hear her cry.
Tomorrow, next year, 5 years from now, 10 years from now, it will be something else. There will be many more wounds to the heart.
Loss is a desert that spreads out before our family, spanning our lifetimes. We can talk about the contours, we can dissect the shape and number of the sand dunes, and we can describe the sensations of thirst and swollen tongues and stinging eyes. We can even look forward to that destination beyond the wind-whipped plains. And we do. Yet after all the talking, after all the words, thousands of miles of sand still lay before us, and there is nothing to do except to walk through it, step after step after step.
Yes, we receive comfort on the way. Yes, there will be springs in the desert. And yes, we know this is not the end of the story. Yet as long as we live, this desert will be our temporary dwelling. There’s no airlifting out of it, no bypassing it, no other path.
I do not doubt Heaven for a second. In the meantime, I will ache for my precious daughter every day.
He weeps with me. May my tears be worship to Him.
“And I know now about helplessness – of what to do when there is nothing to do. I have learned coping. We live in a time and place where, over and over, when confronted with something unpleasant we pursue not coping but overcoming. Often we succeed. Most of humanity has not enjoyed and does not enjoy such luxury. Death shatters our illusion that we can make do without coping. When we have overcome absence with phone calls, winglessness with airplanes, summer heat with air-conditioning – when we have overcome all these and much more besides, then there will abide two things with which we must cope: the evil in our hearts and death. There are those who vainly think that some technology will even enable us to overcome the former. Everyone knows that there is no technology for overcoming death. Death is left for God’s overcoming.”
– Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son