Father Steve, a hulk of a man with a voice that had the gravel of an ancient river, had wanted to touch so many with his heart, and here it broke on a street in Rochester, as if he tired from carrying more than that muscle could bear. And Nur had resurrected herself so many times, I truly believed—despite all I knew—that she would live forever. As she was going, my soul went limp, aching for the glory of this unrepeatable spirit not to fade like a sunset behind the cold mountains.

Then to learn that Adam and Denise, who believed that the presence growing inside her was their child, who spoke to this unnamed aliveness nightly as it began to form, who wondered with glee at who might be growing eyes and lips to meet them—to learn their child will not be.

By what miracle of chance are we watching and they suffering, are we here with our pain of loss and they gone, not to feel pain anymore? Why can’t I cry? It cuts so deep. But no release. Pain without tears is a saw with no oil. Yet somewhere I know that to cry for someone who has died is to open the heart’s loneliest chamber so that they, no longer in bodily form, can enter. These deeper tears are the work, and the wage is that the person gone then lives within us. They breathe when we breathe. They are the unexpected urge rising in our voice.

It seems life is a dance turned war turned dance: all of us on the front line, side by side, arms locked with those we hold dear, all of it beyond our control, never knowing if the sister to the left will be dropped by disease or if the strange friend who never complains behind us to the right will be driven insane. We’re asked to feel it all: accepting this is nature’s way, knowing it could be us, feeling the loss of those whose grip is suddenly not there, and treasuring all the more the lonely awesome fact of our own survival.

There is nothing more to do but step forward together—and, when necessary, alone. We never held anything back each time we were together. This is love. Father Steve taught the big rural farm men how to love. And Nur taught us how long a spirit can stay on Earth like a songbird inside an empty sack. And what might that little child forming have taught us.

Perhaps they’ll meet on the other side. His heart. Her eyes. The child unformed. Perhaps they’ll seed a woman who will seed a saint. They say children who die in the womb become God’s smallest angels. I imagine them wingless and voiceless. God’s tiniest minnows.