Erin lost her niece suddenly. Her sister miscarried. Erin took the experience to heart. She felt like she should have been the one to die.

Tears welled in Erin’s eyes as we stood in the morning light in a still empty Montreal park. The trees and grass were still waking up from winter. The beauty was quiet. Like Erin’s.

Sure, we can all read this and feel like this story that Erin has been telling herself is crazy. That it is an illogical leap to go from thing a to meaning b, but how often do we all do this. I do this. This is Erin’s lived experience. This painful, awful thing happened. Her family lost baby Stella.

But out of this darkness Erin found new handholds in life. What we shared in the park that morning was shared pain. We’d both been living through the hardest time of our adult lives and we were both climbing out.