“I do not believe in angels. Am ambivalent about souls, hopeful but ultimately unsure. Thus his potential nothingness, his erasure, is the hardest aspect of grief for me to reconcile. He was my child. I believe that he mattered, that he was someone, a boy all his own, even if the world never got to unwrap what he carried latent in that small self, that tiny body broken by birth. I believe this, but I do not know how to believe the rest…the what he is now, the where he might be. My unbelief wounds me. I fear that I long for something that is utterly gone. And I fear that he is not utterly gone but out there alone, somehow, needing his mother. I fear that I am failing to mother him, and I fear that I am trying to mother something that is only a memory, not even a spectre.”

Lisa, Glow in the woods