11 years ago, I woke to find my infant daughter Emma not breathing. It took awhile to accept that she was gone. I did cpr, John called 911. The paramedics worked on her in the ambulance. The doctors worked on her in the hospital. But there was no sign of life, no response to our urgent attempts to breathe life back into her little body. And so we let her go, once we knew she had already gone, we let her go.

One thing that was excruciatingly hard to accept was the fact that I wasn’t there with her, holding her in my arms as she passed from this life into the next. The pain of this part of the story came back up for me again just last month. My grandma passed away on January 2. She was in the hospital, and my grandpa was there, but he was sleeping at the end. He feels so bad that he wasn’t holding her hand. And as he shared his pain at not being able to be there for her, I remembered that I shared in that pain. Even while knowing how hard it will be to let go, I think it is natural to have the desire to be as close as possible to our loved ones when they approach death’s dark door.

But we can’t go through that door for them or even with them if it isn’t our time. Even had I been holding Emma’s body in my arms, there would have been a point where her spirit would have left me, where she would have had to go on alone. Death is a door we walk through alone.

All of us will reach that point. Life is temporary. But until that moment we live and we don’t live alone. I feel like traditional Christianity often puts an emphasis on our life after death. That it is at the end of our life that we truly begin life anew. But lately I find that I want to focus more on the life that we have been given now. Every day we awake with the gift of breath in our bodies is a day that we have been given to live.

This morning as I reflected on Emma’s death, remembering that day with an oddly comforting sense of nostalgia, I wondered what I will feel when I reach the end of my life. When I look back on the days, months, years of my life, what do I hope to see? What is it that I want to be able to say? And I think, that when I reach death’s door, I want to pause and look back to see all the relationships both in my past and present and say: “I have loved well, and thus, I have truly lived.”