I’ll Forever Be Tortured by Lily’s Eyes When I Told Her About Mommy

Lily was focused on one thing, the event Diana had been determined to stay alive for, but had missed by three scant days: Party party party.
Three years old. Daddy’s big girl didn’t come up to my waist, wasn’t close to seeing above the bathroom sink and finding her reflection, couldn’t have weighed 30 pounds.
This was going to be her first real birthday party. Common sense—belonging to anyone within a blast radius— dictated it would have been cruel to ruin the festivities for her.
I concentrated on the tasks at hand: Making calls to a woman who ran a funeral home out of her Brooklyn apartment (for a reasonable price she handled the cremation); following up with a Ninth Avenue bakery (confirming the color of the iced letters, the birthday message on the double-chocolate cake).
Peg, Diana’s mother, was in shock, numb with grief, exhausted by sitting witness to what her only child had been through. The chance to be with Lily—to help her granddaughter—was the only thing keeping her in one piece.
She and Diana’s friend Susannah helped Lily into a sleeveless formal dress. Lily preened in the midnight blue gown, marveling at the silk flowers around its waist. The frock was a little too big, its hem grazing the floor.
Lily twisted in place, swishing the tulle back and forth, giggling at the little rustling sounds. Her face glowed from some inner place, her eyes sizzled gray, their green flecks shining.
Ko—the sitter—asked Lily to hold still, dutifully worked Lily’s hair into pigtails—wait, there may have been a braid. I seem to remember a braid. Except her hair was so fine that a braid might have been impossible.
My sister, Crystal, supplemented her acting career by planning and working at children’s birthday parties. Her West Village apartment easily converted to a wonderland of toys, the perfect celebration spot.
When Lily arrived, parents were trying to keep their kids from looting the table of cookies and treats; toddlers were already berserk from sugar, running around, flapping their arms, wrestling on mats, crawling their way through the brightly colored play tunnel.
Guests had congregated, a few of my friends grouping off to commiserate with one another, Diana’s people from Narcotics Anonymous nursing cups of punch, talking with her friends from graduate school, everyone stunned, staring at one another, trying to figure out what to say.
Diana had been through chemo, radiation, two bone marrow transplants, all for what?
I remember a pair of long-arguing lovers making out in my sister’s closet. As if propelled from a cannon, Lily left me and Susannah and Crystal and her grandma behind, bursting toward the heart of the party. Some of her zags had to be pent-up energy: anywhere she looked brought someone she knew, a loved adult, another child she wanted to play with.
Of course, logic suggests she was searching for one person in particular.
The next morning, I watched Lily, splayed out on Mommy’s side of the bed, where she and Diana had always slept, entwined. The top of Lily’s head peeked out from beneath the comforter, her hairline was high on her skull. Hair—dirty brown, thin, and unkempt—was damp, curled in places from how she slept.
As soon as Lily woke, I began. “Listen to me.” My therapist, Dr. Mark Roberts, had provided the script. He was primarily a couples therapist. Diana and I had started seeing him during her pregnancy. After she fell ill, I just kept going, alone.
I stayed up late into the night, rehearsing these sentences, verbatim, into the bathroom mirror: “Your mother is in heaven,” I said. Lily was following along. “She was very sick and had to go away.”
I kept eye contact.
“She loves you very much. Your mom wanted to be here with you. She tried very hard to be here for you. We all tried as hard as we could. Your mom still loves you, Lily. She will always love you. She will always be in your heart just like you will always be in her heart.”
My daughter’s eyes are unnaturally large, and give her face a particularly moonlike quality.
For the rest of my days I’ll be tortured by how, in these moments, those eyes grew.
“Mommy’s gone? Where’s Mommy? When is she coming back?”
***
Studies show that losing one’s mother during an early age is likely to do long-term damage to a child’s self-esteem, to her capacity to express feelings and to trust.
The younger the kid is when she loses her mother, the more likely she is to develop anxiety and behavioral issues, as well as problems with drugs and alcohol.
Girls who lose their mothers are more likely to become sexually active earlier in life. They are more likely to have difficulties maintaining relationships as adults, and they tend to develop an unconscious fear of intimacy.
So then, like, what if the girl isn’t properly taught by her father to look both ways before crossing the street, and on a snowy day is eager to get to the park with her sled, and she runs into traffic, all while her dad is busy reading a text with yet another round of edits for a freelance piece that he needs done, as he needs that check to clear?
What about . . . if Dad reminds her to wear her scarf but forgets to say one word about her gloves, and she goes out and keeps her hands in her pockets to avoid freezing, but it’s still too cold outside, and she gets frostbite and loses the top of her right thumb?
If she grows up thinking pizza is health food? If she doesn’t learn to clean up after herself, doesn’t know how to make her bed, can’t put on a fitted sheet? If she gets the date wrong, forgets to carry the number into the next column?
If she leaps from seeking the approval of her dad to needing the approval of some dreamy guy from the junior college and is knocked up before she’s sixteen? If she doesn’t learn how to go along to get along?
If she is like her dad and doesn’t have an internal filter and constantly says the wrong thing? If she can’t listen, can’t hear what’s really being said to her?
If she does not understand or employ traditional feminine wiles that, offensive though it may be to admit, are necessary to getting along in a patriarchy? If she cannot use flattery and flirtation as tools—to entice, to defuse, to protect and promote herself?
Or, conversely, if she does not have confidence in her intelligence? If she doesn’t know when to speak up? If she is defensive, secretive, paranoid, unable to trust, unable to love?
If she makes bad deals, hurries into lopsided partnerships, capsizes friendships, torches important relationships? If she f***s up and f***s up and keeps on f*****g things up?
I couldn’t think this way.
***
There’s a long section in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami in which a man is forced to jump down a well.
The well is impossibly deep. When the man lands, the impact shatters bones in his leg. There is no light down there. The stone around him is impossible to climb. No food. Some morning dew he can lick off the stones, but not enough to survive on.
He feels around and comes across the bones of all the poor animals that have fallen down this well over the years. The nightmare of all nightmares. You could not possibly be more f****d than he is.
Murakami allowed this man to escape because his fiction doesn’t abide by the physical laws of our reality.
Reader, I was stuck inside the physical laws of our reality.
According to these laws, I was 42, a recent widower, deeply grieving. I had no full-time job, no investments, no retirement account, barely a dented pot to piss in.
Until recently, I’d been one of those fathers who sometimes, despite himself, referred to his infant as “it.”
Flat on my back in the lobby of our apartment building, it sure looked like I’d just destroyed half of my body in a freak accident, with my right elbow shattered and useless, and some kind of break—Jesus, I hoped it wasn’t a break—through my hip.
And I was solely and wholly responsible for the care, feeding, and well-being of this recently motherless, blameless little girl.
If it was possible to be under the bottom of the well, that’s where I was. Where we were.
F****d. We were deeply and irrevocably f****d.
This is the starting point.
***
You lie next to your daughter on the bed in the dark and feel the entirety of your obliteration. Seconds pass; somehow, this life does not end.
With your head turned off to the side, away from her, she can’t see that your eyes are misty. You notice, in a wet blur, that the inks in that rock poster glow in the dark.
Their effect may be smeared, but it’s still psychedelic: the neon green monster, the radiant pink pixie girl.
You stare at the poster and feel breath entering into your body again and you suck in this new oxygen, and gain enough strength, and you turn back onto your other side and look, and keep looking: your daughter’s lids fluttering, shutting, the final spasms wracking her body, those last traces of her energy draining, her form going placid, spreading out—as always—all over Mommy’s side of the bed.
How long I stared that night at the moony perfection of her profile, I cannot report. How long it took me to put myself back together, I similarly do not know. But eventually I did rise from the bed, onto the balls of my feet, so as not to wake her.
In the low light of evening, I scraped away the remains of her uneaten mac and cheese, washed by hand my few dishes and pots. I scarfed down veggie Pirate’s Booty, tried without success to get marker stains off the couch.
I laid out two cute outfits for her to select from in the morning (thereby helping her develop her own fashion sense). I used a straightened paper clip to withdraw the penny from inside my laptop’s DVR mechanism, which, earlier in the day, had been someone’s version of trying to insert a compact disc.
I watched a YouTube video about how to braid an oversized Barbie skull, but did not practice those steps. I thought for a count about reading a parenting blog, and instead scanned websites for deals on slept-on basketball sneakers.
In the reflection of my dozing laptop screen, I examined whether my hairline was receding from the temples. Leaving the apartment and going to the bodega for a soda was categorically out. Going down to the basement to put in laundry was pushing it.
Taking the trash down, leaving her alone for three minutes, was that doable?
I decided not to risk any of it, spent my energy busting out sets of prison-style stomach crunches, doing weird weight-bearing stretches on my late wife’s yoga mat.
I sucked air. I focused so my vision would stop being double, then stared at the orange wooden modules, stacked upon one another, that I’d found on the curb a few summers ago, right after NYU’s term ended, when students moved home.
The wooden modules served as a bookshelf, and on the middle shelf, specifically, I stared at that velvet box, bigger and sturdier than a shoebox, containing the urn with Diana’s ashes.
Okay. We weren’t under the well. Maybe we weren’t even in the well anymore. Even so, there was a pounding. I could hear it: the war drum from the other side of the tree line.
Its sound was getting louder, always, closing in.
I don’t want this. I don’t.
Charles Bock is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Beautiful Children and Alice & Oliver, and a creative writing professor at New York University. The father of two daughters, he lives in New York City.
This essay is an abridged excerpt from Charles’ memoir, I Will Do Better, published October 1, 2024 (Abrams Press).
All views expressed are the author’s own.
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