He smelled of mountains and lakes, petrichor and pine resin, forests, and wild ice. His hair smelled like freshly baked bread. But his body, so cold, so unrelentingly unmoving, was beginning to belong back to earth. A block of perfect marble into which even now I try to press my own life. Exhaling. Exhaling. Exhaling.

It's fruitless. You know it's fruitless, but you do it anyway. Entreating your dead son to return to this perfectly usable thing, this beautiful still body, so unblemished, so strong, so mid-stride. You can give your child anything. You can give him his life even. But not yours. And you can't give him his life back once lost.

Also, his death made Fi no longer mine, no longer ours. For the first time since being born, Fi belonged now to the hands of others entirely: to the medics, the authorities, the professionals. There was nothing more for me to do for his body. His beautiful body with its own rhythms and tides, its breath and heart and spinal fluid in and out, stilled.

—Alexandra Fuller: Fi

Holly Margl is the award-winning author of Witnessing Grief; Inviting Trauma and Loss to Our Coaching Conversations, An Enneagram Perspective, coach, coach mentor, and trainer specializing in grief, trauma, and the Enneagram.