There is only the room dressed in a sea of blue. I have called forth Mary and Archangel Gabriel. I know Gabriel isn't the Archangel of healing but it is who I feel is meant to be there. Her arms, her protruding brown belly, her naked body stretched out onto some makeshift, metal crucifix. She is unaware and struggling to breathe. Her voice has been silenced. I read their eyes and watch the rhythmic dance of duty. A cord stretches between us all. It is tangibly present in this moment and one breath can break it. Sirens sound announcing life in limbo and I am helpless, unable to move or scream except inside my mind.

I go back again and again to a woman standing in the corner of the room. I see only her eyes. She looks at me with reassurance. I keep going back to her because after that moment, I don't find her again. I wonder now if she was really there and who she was. Angels do manifest.

Loudspeakers frantically call for the cardiac team and within seconds another team of doctors rush in and surround her. I do not move. I do not want one second of attention diverted from her. They bring her back and begin looking for him. Layers of life cut and the blood my child flows into plastic canals. Dissected, I see them place pieces of her into hanging bags . . . pathology reports to come. Out of flesh and blood, they find him and pull him from the arid darkness of her now abandoned womb. Forced into light and cold, unsure he leaves his body and watches from some unknown heaven the frantic frenzied attempts to revive him, to pull him back to a world he hasn't decided if he wants to reside in. I am praying so loud the words echo in my hollowed mind. There is only them: my child and my grandchild. Nothing else exists in this place. I look around and scream into the eyes of this blue room but find no pacifying kindness. The room seems to stop breathing with this little boy without breath. His cut cord lies on the severed belly of my unaware daughter. There is a gift in not knowing. She is wandering in the realm above. I beg them all with my eyes. Eyes that are desperately holding back my tears. My job is to be strong. In the language of the soul that only eyes can read, I beg them to save this child . . . I beg until I realize it is not them that holds him.

"Let him stay God. Please choose here Jacob. Please live." I pray in spastic circles and in the sound of silence there is a language and a voice only God can hear.

We can live lifetimes in the space between silence - where time ceases to exist. A cry is born, weak and wounded but born all the same. The room is bathed in sighs; in the common breath we all held waiting for his.

I may never be able to fully express the gifts I gained; nearly losing two of them in less than an hour. I am forever altered. I, too, was born and then reborn in the time of his birth. I realize that Jacob had a choice and he made a choice to stay here with us. I also realize that am nothing in the hands of the Divine and that His/Her breath is mine and yours, Angela's and Jacob's.

My gratitude is inadequate. Still, I thank them with words and hugs. I walk away and back to the same chapel that in December I prayed in. I prayed then in this same hospital that my mother live and I prayed later in gratitude for letting her stay. I find Mary. I find her compassionate, open arms. She never leaves us. I am on my knees weeping deep, wide, humbled tears of gratitude to a God who chose to listen to one woman's prayers.

The fragility of life, our connectedness, the value of life never more apparent than in this moment. I am softened and the skin of my heart has been pulled apart.

After writing this, I take a shower. My mind does not stop. One of my ego's greatest sins is that I have to understand and place meaning on all things. Someday, I will learn to just allow the experience to be. I am not there yet . . . still an infant in my spiritual evolution.

I think again and again about my humility and my gratitude to Divinity-to God for saving Angela and Jacob. I realize that in my powerlessness I am offered lessons, wisdom, insight. I have spent my lifetime trying to save and that has delusions of grandeur written all over it. The lessons have been there too, only my ego refused to let me see them.

It started with my sisters, then my nephew and when that didn't work I tried to save my own children. Then through work, it became other people and other people's children. I tried to save them all as if saving them would make me invincible to that which breaks us. My heart was cracked open more times than I can remember by failure and grief. I failed and fell but tried again and again to save when the only savior out there isn't me, at least not me in a singular sense. It is universal, collective, whole.

I still don't have a face for Divinity-for God, I suspect there really isn't one. I learned a lot in a span of 36 hours. So much in fact, that the surrendering of this little lesson is but a single star in a sky of lives.

What I've learned is I can only love in grateful resignation.

I know why the faithful bow.