if it feels like dying, it probably is

It's July 2nd, 2025. Earlier this week I had a dream about a baby. Two babies. Two babies and a woman. One baby was mine. She was born. She lasted a few breaths. Enough time to hold her. Enough time to love her. Enough time to tell her goodbye. She could have lived any number of wonderful lives. Instead, death was the only thing I knew about her. And because I could not let go, I walked the long and weary path to the altar of miracles. There I met a woman. Her baby was dying. Her baby wasn't a baby anymore, but a sunny, artistic, gangly child. She wasn't there. She was at home, waiting, for one end or the other. And because she could not let go, her mother had walked the long and wearying path to the altar of miracles.

There would have been enough miracles available that day, surely, if that had been the proper end. But instead the sight of this woman struck my heart open with wonder, not light pouring in through a window, but something so bright and warm it was as if darkness had never been made. I had come to ask for a miracle. I had come, clutching in my hands the blank pages of a story that had never been written, of a life that had never been, as if I could re-write all of time as easy as taking a photo to the hairdresser and saying look, here, like this. That's the life I want. This is how things were supposed to be. I got the miracle I needed, not the one I asked for. I sat in the dirt before the altar, and she sat before me. She told me about her daughter. I told her about mine, and in the telling my grief was made light.

She was born. She was beautiful. She was perfect. She took a few breaths. She pressed her little arm against my skin. It was long enough to love her. It took much longer to say goodbye. Because I could not let go, I walked the long and wearying path to the altar of miracles. But the woman did not walk driven by regret. She walked, was drawn in, by hope. She walked the long and wearying path to the altar of miracles because her child looked up at her one day and said: mama, I want to live.

It is July 2nd, 2025. I am here at the altar. I am sitting in the dirt. I am unclenching my fists, nail-marked raw. Earlier this week I had a dream that death was the only thing I knew about myself. I have walked a long way, and I have a long way to go. The miracle of will, of holding on through things I didn't know I could survive, has brought me as far as it can. But she came to meet me, this woman who I might have been, to teach me the miracle of letting go.