I found this piece from Guilt & Pleasure literary magazine deeply moving. It spoke to me. It's not about losing a baby. It is about life and death, losing and changing and searching and finding and the unexpected. The whole issue of this quarterly magazine is quite impressive - it's called The Death Issue. I love the way it talks about death with candor, with ease, acknowledging that it is part of each of us, always will be. There are photos, too, even photos of people after they've died, not gruesome, actually kind of sweet.

Here are some pieces from the essay, written by Minna Proctor, that really hit home for me. Beautifully written, too...

"I keep coming back to the idea that there’s something fundamentally revolutionary in compassion."

"We are ultimately utterly alone. It’s as much a curse as a gift. But we’re not prophets, and we don’t have to take to the desert. We build communities to take shelter in them..."

"Atonement is just hunger. Remembering the dead — there was nothing to remember; we were in it, sitting together in her dimmed bedroom, the dead all around us, our shadows, their echoes, my dying mother, my unborn son, this twilight space between life and death."

"His voice, a bold, weeping tenor, cracking under the weight of the mourner’s prayers, lifted to the sky. He blew the music up there and then carried her, too, up past the treetops, and he took her away. She was really gone."

"My son was never a choice. Stopping the pregnancy was never an option, and how I felt about the baby was already more than how I’d ever felt about anything. It was love or truth, an absolute belief in the invisible. It was religion. Now I understand."

"My son was born three weeks before my mother died. Time enough for her to see him alive; time for her to realize that seeing him wasn’t enough; time enough for her to forget him and forget the sadness of losing him to the future; and time for me to watch my mother and my son exchange places. For three weeks, these two helpless, overwhelmed creatures had the same desperate faraway look in their eyes. They spent three weeks watching each other — time enough for eternity."