Goodnight, My Angel

Goodnight, my angel, time to close your eyes
And save these questions for another day
I think I know what you've been asking me
I think you know what I've been trying to say
I promised I would never leave you
Then you should always know
Wherever you may go, no matter where you are
I never will be far away

--“Lullabye (Goodnight, My Angel),” by Billy Joel

Dear Thi,

Every night, there is a thunderstorm in our bedroom. To lull Luc and Dannica to sleep, we’d put on the soothing white noise in the background, muffling the sounds of Daddy’s nightly routine to freshen up and finish doing the dishes before settling in. We discovered that Dannica likes to listen to songs by Celtic Woman, and so your daddy made a playlist for her that we’d play on the speaker to get her to fall asleep through restless nights rough with teething pain and sleep resistance. When the song, “Goodnight, My Angel,” would cone on, my heart would seize up a little as I am transported back to the day of your funeral service when we had it playing for you.

In the third year, the grief softens, like holding a treasured photograph with edges singed by fire, tracing your finger along the blunt, jagged edges ravaged by a past wrong while the heart of it remains intact. We’ve experienced a strange year, with a global pandemic forcing us into a slower pace of life. Your father and I have been working from home since California’s shelter-in-place in late-March, around the time we also both changed jobs. 

Around the holiday season, we strung up lights on the outside, shopped for a Christmas tree, decorated the hall, and made a gingerbread house with your siblings. 

 

 

 

We hung your commemorative ornament up high on our fresh noble fir. I think of you often throughout the year, even though my visits have grown more infrequent to your gravesite, but around Christmastime is when you’d more often cross my mind. Instead of the expected sense of dread and a pervasive grief that blankets my mood, I once again find wonder in the sparkling holiday lights and feel the warmth of the season’s spirit. 

 

 

My heart swells with joy when my children’s excitement over sticking on gumdrop candies becomes contagious, and I experience the magic anew when I discover firsts through their eyes.

 

 

Perhaps people wonder what your mind is like after you’ve dealt with trauma. Even after you’ve roughly recovered, able to go about your daily life appearing to be normal, there are times when anxiety pulls you back down into the dark. In moments of sweet solitude as I sit in bed and nurse Dannica, I’d imagine your lonely soul outside, tapping at the window, wanting in on a bonding moment that we two had never been able to share. Even when I gazed at Dannica’s peaceful, sleeping form and felt her weight and warmth safely nestled in my arms, I would think that I was dreaming it all up, like one of the many dreams I had before she came along, where I’d have a baby girl, only to wake up to the emptiness of a desperate yearning. With our health at the mercy of the pandemic and an overwhelmed healthcare system, I’d mentally put myself in plights during the worst times in human history: when mothers would have their babies ripped from their arms as looters ravaged their homes; when children are forced to take to the streets and beg for food, dying of hunger before they could reach leftovers carelessly flung in their direction by a disinterested passerby; when the bodies of little kids would wash up on shore during wartime, bloated with seawater, or hastily dumped into a ditch already piled high with corpses. Their faces and shapes would so sharply become those of my own babies suffering the same fates while I watched on, a helpless ghost unable to save them or even soothe them in their final moments.

Imagination can be a fearsome beast when it grows dark wings of despair experienced. All this from a sense of helplessness of having no control over the grander scheme of things. This is the year I turn forty: four full decades of having experienced the up’s and down’s of what life has to offer, and what it could take away. I resolved to live and love hard in the next decade, not just to survive, but to experience. It is this strength in the face of adversity that I hope to pass down to my children, so that they cherish life as a gift and not become defeated by it. 

Dear Thi, you weren’t able to experience this gift. You were a wish started but unfulfilled, a dream that slipped through my fingers like fine sand. But you remain a memory in my heart, and as years soften the grief, so too do I feel that I am stroking your indignant spirit, placating our mutual anger at this lost opportunity. I promised I would never leave you, and I never will be far away. So goodnight, my birthday girl, my angel baby. It’s time to close your eyes.