Life and death or death during life? Either or, we are unable to escape it or deny it, it is the one inevitable on the planet. Birth is another. Everything in between seems trivial now that I have become a mother. Sure there are joys and sorrows, successes and failures, but it is life and death that dictate our lives completely. They are punctuation marks. They complete the sentence. Poets and storytellers alike have glamorized both, making them seem almost mundane and minute. To the people wrapped up in the consequences of life and death, they are anything but. My realization of this came during the early morning hours of May 6th. Just like every other morning, my infant son woke up wanting to be fed. While tending to him, I heard my phone ring from the next room. I ran into the room and turned it off, because the end result of caring for my son was peace and quiet and far more important than whomever was on the other end of the phone. No sooner than I silenced it; it rang a second time. I answered, thinking that the person on the other end was trying to reach me for something more important than I had first thought.
At first, I couldn’t fathom what I was hearing on the other end of that phone. I couldn’t let it materialize into an actual sentence. I dropped my head down and cried and screamed and cried like my infant son would have if he needed changing. It was in response to the news coming over the line. My heart hurt with pain, grief, agony. I knew that when I heard the voice of my best friend’s mother on the other end something horrible had happened. She quietly called my name and quickly said “Dee Dee’s dead.” “Dee Dee’s dead!” she yelled. She got even louder the third time and screamed with tears into the phone. I felt her pain, we shared the same agony.

“How did it happen?” I asked.
“She was in a car wreck. She didn’t have her seat