From Cradle, to Bedside, to Grave...

"The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). - Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory
 
Sophia has ups and downs daily, sometimes hourly...she can barely catch her breath wrenching, choking on her own secretions, her body slowing down running to pause.
 
Every one of her last breaths wrapping themselves around my heart, like a vice in my chest tightening, and tightening...my free flowing tears lubricating the sense of loss that grows with every moment closer. I can barely catch my breath in-between 'change'.  All either one of us can do is breathe...
 
I am a mother witnessing her child die.  Labor, glorious labor…it’s three stages of agony with a beautiful outcome. Witnessing your child die is a cruel form of labor with an outcome no mother wants.  It’s laborious in its truest, rarest, rawest form.   The pain and agony shifting from uterine and cervix to chest and throat…the contractions becoming more intense the closer death seemingly gets. 
 
In child birth, we experience early labor, active labor and transition.  Parenting a child with a life limiting illness we go from cradle, to bedside, to grave. 
 
I’m at bedside…vigil.  The sunshine currently streaming through the windows creating a halo above Sophia’s head, teasing me with a heaven on earth I only wish we knew. 
 
Forty five hundred heartbeats an hour dropping to twenty seven hundred…fifteen breaths a minute dropping to eight, the cradle rocks…