The last picture I took of my son was 36 hours before his death. We had just gotten our rental car, and were all tired after a 15 hour travel day. I was looking forward to getting on the road and beating Bay Area traffic. It had taken a long time to get our luggage, to get our car, and now my partner – meticulous as always – insisted on doing a thorough check of the car body for dents or scratches. I took a deep breath and tried to find a way to enjoy the wait.

I walked around the back of the trunk, which was open like a wide yawn, waiting for our luggage. It was immaculate and huge and inviting, so I put the kids in. They were ecstatic. I watched them play a bit, happy that we’d found something free and fun in this last moment of waiting before a long drive, and then pulled out my phone to photograph them. It was just too cute to miss. My daughter sat towards the back, making ridiculous faces (“Can you please just smile normally for one of them!”) My son sat right at the front, hands posed on the edge of the trunk, looking straight at me and smiling. He was so poised, so utterly gorgeous. I took three shots, Nahara in a different silly position for each. And in each Shefa is leaning forward, locked in a radiant, loving, direct gaze with the camera. It felt unusual even then.

After he died I remembered this photo; at the time I took it it was immediately uploaded to Facebook as part of the album I had made to document our plan to spend the month of November traveling. I knew it was a special photo of him and I was glad to have it, glad to have it be the last. But there was something else.

I remembered right before that photo, while Yaakov was in line to get the car from the rental agency. I had taken the kids to the bathroom where I changed Shefa’s diaper. We had been traveling since 5am Florida time, and when I dressed Shefa early that morning I had put him in a onesie. As we traveled, I realized that I hated it. It was a hand-me-down that I hadn’t properly inspected, and it was a bad color for him. It was stained, too small, and worse of all, the shoulders had this annoying, fussy little puff detail that I could never abide in baby clothes. I don’t usually have such strong feelings about my kids’ clothes, but this was beyond the pale. And I don’t usually travel with a clothes changes in my diaper bag, but today I had a full change with me (because you just never know on the airplane.) So, even though the day was almost over and it would mean another thing to wash, even though it made no sense to me at the time, even though it was a small detail that I judged as petty for me to put any energy into at all, in the bathroom of the car rental place, 20 minutes before I was to take the last picture of Shefa’s life, I changed his shirt. My whole intuition screamed at me to do it: Right now you have a choice! Choose it!! I’m glad I listened.

His new shirt was not my favorite, but it was sweet. It fit him well. It was charcoal grey and had dinosaurs on it shouting “ROAR!”, which made me smile and think of the way he loved to shout, just shout a long loud shout, his eyes glinting with power and joy as if to say to the world: I am here! I am alive!  Why my intuition chose this thing to guide me on and not other things is a mystery to me. But it comforts me. If there was something you could have done to save him, your intuition would have told you.

It didn’t. It told me to change his shirt. It told me how to prepare for the last photo of his life.

And I know I would cringe every time I saw that photo if he was still in that ugly onesie. It would feel like I hadn’t taken proper care of him. It would feel like the last days of his life had been ugly, and stained, and ill fitted.

There were so many times in the days and weeks after he died that, sobbing, I would say, almost chanting: “I’m so glad I changed his shirt. I’m so glad I changed his shirt.” It took me months to understand why this was such a point to me. But I understand now.

I am an intuitive person and a ferociously protective mother. I have always known everything I needed to know to protect my children, and any child that was in my care. I have always been guided in this way, and I trusted I always would be. And so it was so confusing, so incredibly shocking, to have my child die on me, in his sleep, his head inches from mine. How could I have missed the signs? I was tired, but I’ve never been too tired to protect my children. I was asleep, but I hear every sound they make and I always wake when I need to. He was sick, but not that sick.

That night I was focused on helping him rest and stay hydrated. I felt clear that he would be feeling better by the next morning, and that the two teeth he was cutting would be out in a day or two. We had a little push to get through, one of many similar little pushes we had gotten through in the past. I had absolutely no inkling that this would be the last night of my child’s life. I desperately wish I had. Was my intuition not working anymore?

And so, when I remembered it, the bit of intuition I had received to change his shirt carried so much grace for me. It was not a soft intuition. It had screamed at me. It was not something I would miss.

And so, this is something I can believe: there was nothing I could’ve done to save him. There were no messages for me to receive. There was a wisdom operating that knew that this was the best way this whole thing could go down. My son was going to die. That was his path. And, in retrospect, I know that he died in one of the most beautiful ways I could’ve hoped for. He was with his beloved family, cuddled between his mother and father. Thanks to the fact that we’d been on vacation, he’d had an incredible amount of quality time with each of us in his last week. He was asleep. It was instantaneous and painless. His family was in a place and with people that were uniquely supportive and would help us enormously in the days to come.

If he had to die, I’m not sure I could’ve planned it better.

 

******

 

And there’s even more. This trail goes back farther.

Years ago, when I first became a mother, in those incredibly tender first months of holding my daughter and being initiated into a world of love and obligation and bondedness that I’d never before understood, I had planned it. Or at least parts of it.

Because once I became a mother, I knew that I would die for my children. That this was an obvious and easy choice I would make to save their lives if I needed to. And I knew, on the flip side of that, that their death would destroy me. I sat for months, for years, with the power of that knowledge, knowing that while my place and time in history granted me a much lower chance of having to endure the death of a child, so much was still beyond my control. I spent endless hours weeping, thinking of the mothers with less control over their children’s lives than I had, whether through war, poverty, racism, or the other endless ways mothers and children suffer. And I imagined what I would do if one of my children died.

I never got very far into that train of thought, but one thing that was clear to me was who I wanted with me: my dear friends, a three generation family who have filled important places in my life as parents, siblings, friends, and god-children since I was a teenager. I knew that they were the people who could hold me in the way I would need to be held in those first days. The big stumbling block in that particular scenario was that I lived in New York, and they lived in California. I knew that I wouldn’t want to get on a plane after my child died, and that the complexity of their lives would keep them all from being able to come to New York. But each time I imagined dealing with my own child dying, I was clear that this family was who I would want to be with. I just couldn’t figure out the logistics.

As it turned out, when my son died, he died in their home.

And they did hold me and my whole family: perfectly, exquisitely, in ways that I will be forever grateful for.

I can’t make any more story about this than I’ve just told. The strangeness of it all, the obviousness, the shock, the blinding gratitude, is exactly how it seems miracles work.

 

And my intuition, it seems, is working just fine.