This New York Times Magazine piece, “George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You’ll Read This Year,” came out back in January, ahead of the release of Saunders’s new story collection, Tenth of December, but I’m just getting around to reading it, as I’m still getting around to reading the collection. Memoirs are what I devour these days, stories by other mothers about other losses. But my mind has started to wander to fiction again, where, of course, all the real things also happen. In the article’s opening, Joel Lovell writes:

“We’d been on the subject of death for a while. A friend I loved very much died recently, and I was trying to describe the state I sometimes still found myself in — not quite of this world, but each day a little less removed — and how I knew it was a good thing, the re-entry, but I regretted it too, because it meant the dimming of a kind of awareness that doesn’t get lit up very much.”

Then, a few lines later, this:

“‘It would be interesting if we could stay like that,’ Saunders said, meaning: if we could conduct our lives with the kind of openness that sometimes comes from proximity to death.”

Then, at the end, Lovell quotes an old piece Saunders wrote for GQ about a trip to Dubai:

“‘Don’t be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.'”

This is all getting at what I’ve been feeling lately, so I’m grateful I didn’t in fact read this back in early January, but now, in early August, when the tension is greater, when the re-entry is bringing about both regret and faith in the future. While I’m not convinced that the kind of awareness that losing a child lights up could ever dim, much less go out, Ryan and I are also in the land of the living, more and more so each day.

I went to an adorable little girl’s first birthday party last weekend and I wasn’t undone, as I would have been a year ago, as I might have been six months ago. I did plan ahead and attended with a girlfriend who knew my story and would pull the parachute line with me if I need be. But I didn’t end up needing an escape route. I had a great time. The babies made me smile and I did all I could to make them smile. But these things have never been about the babies; they’re about the parents… who ask if I have children, who, after I tell them it’s a work in progress, respond either excitedly or, worse, with an air of fatigue, “Oh, it changes everything!” Of course, I don’t expect them to know that Lorenzo has already changed everything. If the moment is there, I’ll tell them about Lorenzo and often discover grace. Lovell describes this kind of feeling arising in Saunders’s fiction, “when we risk revealing ourselves to someone and they respond with kindness.”

Over the past year, I have spoken of Lorenzo and received an almost uncontainable amount of kindness.

Walking Ruby recently, I looked down and noticed half of a white eggshell lying in the green grass.

My first thought? LIFE.

I bent down to take a closer look and noticed Ruby sniffing a small grey mound, of displaced dirt perhaps from the construction site nearby. But then I saw the shape of a baby bird emerge from the mound. The bird from the shell. This moment was about death, in fact, not life. I cried. Not as much as the last time I saw a bird who had fallen from a tree, but a raw gasp all the same at life just leaving like that. Of course, the cracked shell shouldn’t be on the ground. It should be protected up high in the nest, left behind only once the bird was ready to take flight. I wondered where the mother was and how long she had stood there singing and grieving before taking flight on her own.

The proximity of life and death is a close one, especially when we are caught off-guard or as we await miracles. Ours is a society that will do almost anything for a miracle, holding out through unimaginable suffering when the odds are stacked as high as they go. I get it; it’s the ending to the story we all want. But it’s not what happens the far majority of the time.

Most of the time, the body follows nature, lighting a path, for those of us left behind, to that removed world. Then, it’s on us as the survivors to take slow steps back to the rest of you, to find the edge of the water and test the temperature, all the while letting our hands float back to the light.