We tried.
The AED in our hands,
the child slipping into stillness.

Gone before the current
could return.

We stood in silence,
hearts heavy as stone.

Then came the women.
The grandmother, strong and sure,
wrapped the child in soft cloth.

The family climbed onto motorbikes,
bearing grief through dusty roads.

The female community gathered.
They sang How Great Thou Art,
fierce, raw, unbroken.

The funeral procession rose and fell
with the pulse of steel drums,
carrying her spirit forward
into the next horizon.

The clinic doors opened again.
The living kept arriving.
The songs did not end.

Six months passed.
I sat by our pond
watching my children play—
sand on their legs, water in their laughter—
when I felt her presence
as soft as butterfly wings.

She came with no weight of sorrow,
only the stillness of knowing.
She whispered that her life
had been just as it was meant to be—
a perfect unfolding
for the soul lessons she came to learn.

She loved her parents deeply,
and the land of Haiti,
its songs, its soil,
its arms that cradled her body
on the journey home.

Then she was gone again—
a shimmer of grace
in the air above the pond.