How Do You Eulogize a Daughter Who Never Lived?

On this episode of Our American Stories, Jeremy Lott never got the chance to hear his daughter cry, watch her crawl, or hold her for the life he and his wife had imagined. Diagnosed in the womb with a rare fatal condition, their daughter, Cecelia, was stillborn in July 2017. Yet during her short life before birth, she danced to Irish music, responded to familiar voices, and left an unforgettable mark on the people who loved her.

For our Final Thoughts series, Lott shares the moving eulogy he delivered for his daughter, Cecelia Little Lott, and shares what it means to say goodbye to a child whose life, though brief, profoundly mattered. Originally adapted from an essay published in The Federalist.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:26):
This is Lee h Habibe, and this is our American Stories,
and it's time for our Final Thoughts series, where we
bring you the final thoughts of folks who are dying
and tributes to loved ones who've passed. A eulogy, a poem,
anything and everything that stirs the soul. This week's Final

(00:47):
Thoughts feature came to us from the terrific website the
Federalist dot com, where a father named Jeremy Lott shared
his eulogy to his daughter Cecilia, who passed away in
a stillborn birth. Jeremy recorded his eulogy as he delivered
it at the funeral, and he graciously shared it with us.

(01:11):
All here's Jeremy.

Speaker 2 (01:13):
I was going to say that the text of this
eulogy is included in your booklets, because its delivery is probably.

Speaker 3 (01:20):
Going to be as much of a struggle as the
writing was.

Speaker 2 (01:23):
And I was going to tell you to feel free
to read along or just tune me out and read
it later. But there it ends with a bit of
a cliffhanger, so you might want to listen. How do
you eulogize a girl who never lived? She never crawled, walked, spoke, cried,
We don't even have honest dates for the tombstone, since

(01:45):
that clock starts at birth. By the time of her delivery,
my daughter had left the building. Start with her full name,
which she would have hated at times, because children.

Speaker 3 (01:56):
Tease Cecilia little lot.

Speaker 2 (02:00):
Cecilia is perfectly lovely, so of course my wife Ange
came up with it, but that middle name would have
dogged her. Have a look at her parents of their
wide frames in my truly enormous head There's no way
our little girl would.

Speaker 3 (02:13):
Have been little for long.

Speaker 2 (02:15):
That part of her name would have been a running joke,
like a bouncer named tiny. The headstone isn't ready yet
because those take time. Here is what will eventually be
is inscribed in grantite for future generations to puzzle over.

Speaker 3 (02:30):
She danced an Irish jig and was a Peek a
Boo champion. There are a couple of stories there.

Speaker 2 (02:38):
Many philosophers have insisted that every new human is a
blank slate, a tabula rasa, but mothers have always known better.
They know that each of their children has a distinct
personality that they see manifest even in the womb. Of
the three brothers, lot I was the one who was
active at all hours. I rarely slept in euro or after,

(02:59):
to my mother's gris consternation. My cousin Jenny recently had
a healthy baby boy named Aiden in the womb. He
hated intrusions on his space by any but his mother.
When the doctor puts sensers on her belly to get readings,
he targeted and successfully kicked them off. I see soccer
in his future. And our little girl, Cecilia loved to dance.

(03:22):
We discovered this when we were in a route to
her fatal diagnosis at Swedish Hospital in Seattle. We made
some stops along the way, including one in Annichordus. On
a whim, we went to.

Speaker 3 (03:34):
A night of Irish music there.

Speaker 2 (03:35):
She was only sixteen weeks old, and yet Anne discovered
she was kicking and more or less in time to
the beat. She loved moving her long legs when she
heard Irish music. She also grove to Latin music. And
you know she was a true Washingtonian because she seemed
to appreciate grunge. While bad eighties soft rock left her cold,

(03:58):
she responded to other sounds as well. An She thinks
she might have been shy.

Speaker 3 (04:03):
Or perhaps intently curious.

Speaker 2 (04:06):
When there were familiar voices around here, she would be active,
and the presence of new voices she would pipe down
and listen. She knew her father's voice when I read
books out loud to and she kicked. We attended a
conference and Cecilia was getting a little rowdy up in there,
so I leaned into my wife's belly and said, knock
it off, Cad.

Speaker 3 (04:28):
She surprised both of.

Speaker 2 (04:29):
Us by doing just that. But you probably want to
know about the peekaboo right. Ultrasound is an amazing technology
we see by way of sound waves and reconstructions on
a screen. We could see evidence of a pregnancy before,
but now we can see life in the womb.

Speaker 3 (04:47):
It's right there on the monitor. You can almost touch it.

Speaker 2 (04:52):
One of the things on that monitor that struck many
viewers about Cecilia is what she did with her hands.
She did intelligent things and playful things. She folded and
steepled her fingers as if in thought or prayer, and
she liked to put her hands in front of her
eyes and take them away as he looked at her.

(05:15):
She did this peak of a routine so often that
it sometimes made it hard for us to get a
good look at her. When she was still with us,
we shared Cecilia's story with people. The great interest in support,
in money and prayer and in so many other forms
was surprising. Here you have this little girl who would
not lived her much longer. She would never grow up

(05:35):
and make her mark on the world. She might not
even see daylight. But people wanted to know about her.
They wanted to help in any way that they could,
as you'll see from the children's books on the table
to be donated to the library in her name. They
wanted to commemorate her. Like so many other things about
this pregnancy, Cecilia's in surprised me.

Speaker 3 (05:58):
I had assumed that she faded away, But like.

Speaker 2 (06:02):
Philosophers, we writers imagine, and mothers know better, Ange tells
me it was a bang, not a whimper. As so
many things failed her, Cecilia gathered up all of her
strength and kicked really hard in protest one last time.

(06:23):
It was the internal equivalent of that one left to mark,
and after that she was gone. Right now, the news
of her ending fills me with great, unimaginable sorrow, but
I hope that will eventually give way to fatherly pride.
Of course, no doubter of ours would ever go quietly

(06:46):
into that good night.

Speaker 3 (06:49):
She was fierce and we loved her fiercely, and that's
all we could do.

Speaker 4 (06:55):
Thank you for coming, and thank you Jeremy for sharing
that his eulogy to his daughter Cecilia, and thanks to
the Federalist dot com for providing it. Jeremy Lot's story
Cecilia's story here on Our American Stories, Lee Habib here again.

(07:32):
Our American Stories tries to tell the stories of America's
past and present to Americans, and we want to hear
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