Something of Your Very Own

It's been a long, slow death, but I'll be damned if it's going to kill me.

I am descended from two types of women. One is a Dutch housewife of a farmer, who wakes up in the freezing cold, milks 27 cows, raises 13 biological children, votes despite her Presbyterian husband’s strong opposition, and bird-watches in her “free time.”  Her identity was never recovered.  The other speaks only French, despite knowing English as her first language, divorces seven times, marries eight, has no children due to potential depredations on her figure, drinks copiously during Prohibition, and finally dies in a house fire, due to a decades-long predilection for smoking in bed.  Her bed was never recovered.

It will never pass into nothingness

"[She] lifted her heart to the Being, who, extending through all place and all eternity, looks on the events of this little world as on the shadows of a moment, and beholds equally, and in the same instant, the soul that has passed the gates of death, and that, which still lingers in the body. 'In the sight of God,' said Emily, 'my dear father now exists, as truly as he yesterday existed to me; it is to me only that he is dead; to God and to himself he yet lives!'"
-Radcliffe

Quiet Breathing

The living warmth, velvet breath, and porcelain skin of a sleeping child.