Shortly after Rory, our 19 month old son, died - one of the local birth centers called me. They said that a mother had delivered a baby stillborn that morning, and they couldn't find anyone else.

It's possible that you aren't aware, but when a baby is born dead, or dies shortly after birth, there is a volunteer association called, "Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep." They provide free professional photographers to take pictures of what will inevitably be the very first and last keepsakes a family will have of a baby that does not come home with them.

When Rory died, a dear friend of mine showed up with her camera, and took photos of our last moments together. They are among my most prized possessions and my greatest tools for stewarding my own grief.

I said yes.

I grabbed my camera and drove to the hospital and spent the afternoon with a still, cold baby in what was one of the most holy days of my life. It wasn't weird, or strange, or morbid. It was reverent. I took as many picture as I possibly could - I knew that there would never be enough. Her parents would always wish there were more. I took pictures of her fingers and toes and the way that her hair swirled. Her perfect lips. Her eyelashes. The milia on her nose. I still remember every inch of her, today, eight years later. I remember her name. I remember asking her mother and father to please hold their daughter and let me take pictures of them together as my own guilt and grief that I didn't continue to hold my son after his heart stopped beating bubbled up inside me, and how deeply I’d wished that I had. I remember their sobs and tears, a true baptism, and their wide open gratitude for something soft on the hardest, hardest day.

That night, I got home entirely empty and yet so full - of my own gratitude for being invited, and a deep faith in being in the right place, at the right time. I sat down at my computer to edit the photos, and worked for hours. I played with color edits, and black and white edits, and presets and color shifts. I couldn't make it look the way I wanted. I tried so hard and got so deeply frustrated. I wanted the photos I gave to this family to be perfect, and I was ready to give up. I couldn’t do it. I closed my eyes, and sat back in the chair, and tried to picture exactly how I wanted the photos to turn out. It was in that moment that I realized what was wrong. Why the editing wouldn't work. Why I couldn't get them "just right."

Because I wanted her to not be dead.

I was trying to edit her alive, and she wasn't. She couldn't be. She would never be. And that was all I had to work with - pictures of a baby who was no longer living, desperately wanting her to be alive, and I could not make it so.

Once I realized what was happening, I was able to cry - to weep for the child and weep for the mother and weep for the whole family and their loss, so fresh after my own. I cried out my sadness and my hurt... and then I was able to allow myself to edit pictures of a baby that was not living, and know that it was enough.

It wasn't right, but it was enough.

Recently, I ran into an old friend whose friendship had fallen away. It wasn't malicious or hurtful or intentional... just one of those things that happens in a long, full life made up of people that come and go.

My heart squeezed with longing and grief when I saw her. My eyes filled with tears when we hugged. We chatted lightly for a few minutes... and then she walked away, and I walked away, and it was over.

I sat and ruminated on the meeting, and the friendship, and the text that I could write, the letter I could compose, the bridge that I could extend. We could fix this. I miss you. You matter.

As my brain spun in circles, trying to figure out how to revive a friendship that I valued so deeply and still managed to let wither (I'm not a very good plant keeper either) I came to the self-same epiphany:

I desperately wanted the friendship to not be dead.

I wanted to find some way to edit it back to life, to resuscitate or resurrect or recreate something that was gone.

As soon as I realized it, another freedom opened up to me. There is grief, and sadness, and loss - it is sad when things die. But I am learning that I can stop trying to bring something dead back to life. I can love it for what it was, and long for what it could have been, and weep for the losing.

There is a freedom in letting that be the right thing, too.