Writing excerpt:

Chapter 1 

Born Dead 

I was born dead…body bagged and sent to the morgue, as the story goes. My grandma loved to tell me over and over again. 

Herein starts my soul contract. I came into this world with a purpose, like all of us. Perhaps at first, I wanted to break that soul contract and not stay. Yet somehow, in that tiny baby mind, I decided, Let’s get it over with. Let’s just do it. You’re here, honey!

Decades ago, the delivery room was thick with the faint scent of ether. As my mother drifted beyond reach of anesthesia, the nurses noticed something was terribly unusual. Everyone fell into an uncanny stillness when the nurses realized the amniotic sac was still whole, a luminous membrane holding my silent body as if the world had not yet claimed me. 

With a gasp, the nurse exclaimed, “Okay, this is very rare to have happen. Look at this! We only read about it in the textbooks.” 

She pulled out of the birth canal an intact amniotic sac called an en caul birth. Audible gasps rippled throughout the maternity ward. The motionless baby appeared to be born inside a translucent, bubble-like sac filled with fluid. With this particular “en caul,” the umbilical cord wrapped around the baby’s neck was clearly evident. The infant was visible yet very still and discolored. There were no modern-day monitors to accurately assess viability. 

One nurse whispered, “En caul…a veil.” Her voice carried an old mixture of superstition and wonder. Her words trembled in the air as if naming something sacred and ominous at once. 

The obstetrician moved in closer. His glasses caught a sparkle from the overhead light, and he, too, seemed suspended. He was troubled by the stillness yet humbled by the sight of a child arriving as if between worlds—a celestial orb that suspended my motionless being in its own universe. The rustle of gowns joined by the clink of instruments seemed muted, like the room itself understood the threshold this little human hovered on. Then, the doctor’s voice came, steady but softened, guiding the team to open the sac, to invite breath into the body waiting within. The medical team took every precaution ahead of time to ensure the placenta was attached, nourishing the baby before rupturing the membrane. As they worked—swift hands, quiet urgency—the sense lingered that they were not simply intervening in a medical crisis but helping usher a soul across a delicate, shimmering border into life. 

The overhead light buzzed faintly and cast a pale glow over the doctor’s hands. He finally made the delicate incision with reverence usually reserved for holy things. He lifted my still body free, but silence held firm. They tried to revive the baby with swift, desperate motions: cleared my airway, rubbed my chest, waited for a cry that did not come. 

The doctor paused, and his hands fell to his sides. He swallowed hard before giving the slightest shake of his head. He exhaled slowly and with a heavy breath that seemed to dim the light overhead, he said in a solemn voice, “We’ve done all we can.” So, they stepped back as grief settled over them like a shadow, convinced that the child born veiled between two worlds had slipped back into the only one they could not follow. 

Immediately, the intense activity shifted toward my mother, a once-vibrant woman now ghost-pale with her breaths thin and ragged following this failed childbirth. Muffled conversations and worried glances repeated. Due to my mother’s previous history of a stillborn baby and miscarriages, they accepted this baby had gone the same route. Then, all the attention focused on my mother to stop the hemorrhaging, keep her hydrated, and have her rest. They put her under gas anesthesia and didn’t tell her the news right away. 

My parents had been married ten years before my mother had a live birth. I had always thought it was because my father travelled around during World War II. They spent little time together. Later in life, I learned that my mother had several miscarriages before my older sister was born. Then, there was allegedly a stillborn boy in the five years before I came along. “Nervous uterus,” the doctors termed it. I was told since I came out encased with the cord tightly wrapped around my neck and generalized blue skin tone, the doctors chalked it up to another casualty for my parents. 

The nurse’s chunky heels struck hard on the marble floor as she hurriedly marched to the morgue, carrying what was commonly referred to as “products of conception.” On the way down that dismal death hallway, she felt a distinct kick. She halted in her tracks, unzipped the bag to open it. The first words out of her mouth were, “Look at you, all bright-eyed and bushy tailed.” These words became an imprint on my life. My resilience is my brilliance! 

        ( … ) 

Repeatedly, the same theme would replay in my life. Go to death’s doorstep, almost as a dare, then run back into the 3D world instead. At birth, I couldn’t have begun to comprehend the depths and hardships of repeated near-death experiences my future held for me. As the decades have unspooled, I accepted this personal life theme with a somewhat invincible mindset. But one specific dark event would become a tragedy of magnitude beyond others, defining and challenging my lifelong soul journey.