Kairos

It is four years, eight months, and 18 days since Grace died. It is good to remind myself of this sometimes, to try to understand how time passes, how it moves neither forward nor back but it just moves. I want to be moved, I want to be reminded of Grace, I want to remember her small face, her even smaller hands.
Terry took a short but meaningful video of us shortly after she was born, and I had fallen asleep without knowing that I had fallen asleep. Grace is lying on top of me and I am holding her and you can see the rise and fall of my chest as I breath and in the video, it looks as if she is breathing too, moving up and down on me and I love that. I love that I can pretend for a moment that she is moving, she is breathing, she is there alive and well.
And sometimes, I look at the pictures I have of her but there are so few, so few poses, so few of these pictures and she never changes, never grows, never moves forward in time. Time is frozen into one moment, one place and one time. It neither moves forward nor backwards, nor does it move at all. And if I close my eyes, I can go to that moment, to that space with Grace, with her in my arms, and when I revisit that place now, it is not so much filled with pain, but a moment of peace, of joy to have her in my arms, to be sleeping again and breathing with her. And if I could, I would have her here: Carver, Sophia, Grace, and Sawyer--all of them together here and now. But that can't happen and won't happen and knowing this pulls at something deep within me and the longing remains and the longing aches but there is love there too. And for now I must live in the time of the angels, in a space where time exists neither as a movement toward the future nor away from the past but just simply living in the moment, in the here and now. With Grace and without.