Life Is Fragile

After losing my daughter, I felt like all the meaning was sucked out of my life. Even now, I sometimes question the meaning of life.

Seeing your own offspring suffer and die makes everything else seem pointless. What exactly is the point of living if she cannot be here with me?

Liza Jane, one day old, held in my arms at the ICU.

Part of the healing process is learning to live among the living again. As time goes by, the pain is not as deep, but the loss of her will always be in my heart.

Talking about her, blogging about her, helps to keep her alive. This in turn keeps me alive and in a more stable place emotionally. Not talking about her can make me feel as if she never existed or is no longer a part of my life. And that is enough to make me feel like I’m going completely insane. She changed my life so drastically, being a mother changed my life so drastically, that to deny her existence is madness.

Liza Jane at about 3 weeks old

The book of Hebrews in the New Testament says we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses that is cheering us on. These are people of faith who have gone before us. It helps me to imagine my Liza Jane as part of that cloud, separated from me only by the thin curtain between now and eternity.

That curtain is really so very thin. Someone I used to work with had a quote on his desk that said, “Only your heartbeat separates you from your ancestors.” (unknown)  I didn’t understand this quote just a few short years ago. It seemed overly morbid and a bit pointless to me.

What it means to me now, though, is that life is fragile. We cannot tell how many days we will have on this earth until we too pass beyond that curtain into the next life. 

This is something that my daughter’s brief life brought sharply into focus for me: to live in the moment, appreciate and savor the little things about today, because we don’t know what tomorrow will bring.

If you have lost someone special, I hope you will have precious moments to remember that person. It's your turn: use the comments section below to share something special you remember about your loved one.