Death changes you

Death changes you.  In fact, it consumes you.  It eats you whole and spits you out leaving you to pick up shattered pieces of your mind, heart, and body.  I’ve been swallowed by death and I’m not who I used to be.  Death is a shadow that is always there and never goes away.  I carry it around because it is my daughter. 

Life and death dance and flirt around each other.  The dark and the light interweave and coexist.  For there is life in death and death in life.  The death of Quinn will always live within me, who lives.  She was created inside of me and died inside of me, and it is through me that she will live. 

I live in a strange world where sorrow and joy constantly intersect.  It is inside the love that I feel the deep sorrow.  It is because of joy that I feel pain.  Even in a moment of joyous bliss, the darkness of death sobers me. 

Death has shaken me to my core and stripped me raw.  I have learned lessons that are both humbling and terrifying.  Life is sacred.  Pregnancy is fragile.  Children are miracles.  The breath we so casually take for granted could slip away when we least expect it, dancing into the air then disappearing.  Death is in the future of all that lives.  We don’t know how closely our life has danced with death.  How many times have we escaped death and not known it?