A mother, it turns out, can keep breathing long past the point where a person would stop, because a mother is not only breathing for herself.

I did not save my son that night through any heroism.

I simply could not, at the deepest level of my body, let him go — and that inability, that beautiful stubborn refusal built into me below the level of thought, is the only reason either of us is alive to tell this.

Chapter 5 — The Light

And then, when I had stopped believing in anything but the next breath, a beam of white light swept across the falling snow.

I thought I was hallucinating.