More than fifty years passed before Amy Fabrikant understood what had happened to her on the day she was born. As she describes it, she arrived feet-first, with the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck — a blue baby who died and was revived in the delivery room. No one had ever told her the full truth of that day.
The knowledge did not arrive all at once. It surfaced in pieces over time: a dream during a death retreat, a stone from a labyrinth pressed into her hand, and a long, grief-heavy car ride with her daughters following her mother's death. Then, worn out on a street in Paris, she stepped into what appeared to be an ordinary church. Inside, painted on the wall, she found the very image of the Dark-Skinned Virgin Mary that had drawn her, without explanation, for years.
"She had me so wrapped, firmly, in so much love and light, that it did bring me back to life," Fabrikant told DailyGood.
What grew out of that recognition was not mysticism for its own sake, according to her account, but something more modest and more difficult: a daughter coming to forgive her own mother, a parent of two transgender children forging a way forward where none existed before, and a healer at last able to thank her youngest self simply for having been born.
A bird knocked at the window as Fabrikant began to speak, a detail that takes on meaning by the time she finishes. As she tells it, the bird never broke through the glass. It appeared, showed its face, and then flew off. Some love, her story suggests, asks only to be remembered.
