Unimaginable

I gave Celia a bath this evening.  I imagined having to scrub dirt from her little feet.  I fantasized about her excitement over the gifts from the tooth fairy I'd tuck under her pillow.  I pretended she grew to be a teenager, all sinew and sarcasm.  I guessed at the level of joy her own children would've brought us.  But the fact is, I don’t know what vegetables my daughter would have liked on her pizza, and I’ll never know how she’d have taken her coffee.  I couldn’t prepare a bouquet of her favorite flowers, I can’t conjure her shoe size or say whether she prefers to sleep on her left or right side. 

I can tell you about her hair, the color of generations, the soft bridge of her nose and the placement of freckles on her fingers.  I can describe the way her bottom rib always stuck out, just like mine, and about the soft pads of her feet.
I wanted her footsteps to fall where mine had been and where mine have never gotten to go.  I used to imagine her fingers pressing the keys of a trumpet and holding the base of a stethoscope.  I could almost hear the patterns of her voice as she learned to read aloud and I could vaguely see the bend in her knees as they grew courage to jump off the diving board.  Of course she would do all those things, the ones I used to imagine.  Because Batten Disease was unimaginable.
We've made it another year now, she's almost three.  We can’t talk blithely of next year and the year after that.  We can’t take graduations and eventual grandchildren for granted.  We have new anxieties, but we've lost others.  There is no more fixation on the “right” preschool, the best music lessons, the highest quality educational toys.  Worrying about those things is the province of folks who have the luxury of marinating in possibility, and for whom the unimaginable is still unimaginable.

But we're here now, March 2010.  And we'd been afraid to imagine she'd still be with us.

 

JEB