A bird keeps knocking at the window as Amy Fabrikant begins to speak -- and by the time she finishes, you understand why that detail matters. Over fifty years after her birth, she came to realize she had died and been revived in the delivery room, feet-first, umbilical cord wrapped around her neck, a blue baby no one had ever told her the full truth about. The remembering arrived in fragments: a dream at a death retreat, a labyrinth stone pressed in her palm, a grief-soaked drive with her daughters after her mother's passing. Then, exhausted on a Paris street, she walked into what looked like a nondescript church -- and found, painted on the wall, the exact image of the Dark-Skinned Virgin Mary she had been inexplicably drawn to for years. "She had me so wrapped, firmly, in so much love and light, that it did bring me back to life." What unfolded from that recognition wasn't mysticism for its own sake, but something quieter and harder-won: a mother learning to forgive her own mother, a woman with two transgender children learning to blaze a path when no path existed, a healer finally able to say to her smallest self -- thank you for being born. The bird, she tells us at the end, did not crash through the glass. It showed its face, and flew away. Some love, it seems, only needs to be remembered.
