“Let’s bring him to his mama,” the doctor said.

I was there as they lay him on his mother’s chest. There, just moments later, as his pink skin began to turn to dusk and his mouth stopped reaching for air. His arm was gentle across his mother’s face — I clicked the shutter to save this gesture. And then she wailed so deeply that I felt my own bruised grief meet me in the room.

It is a peculiar thing to step into someone’s worst day with a camera in hand. There’s no rule book for how best to navigate it. There was no one to tell me when to stay or when to step out on my first end-of-life shoot, where I hovered in a hospital room as a family said goodbye to their 3-year-old girl dying from a rare metabolic disorder.

Often, I am asked why I choose to photograph the end of a child’s life. When I am in those rooms, I am present with the sole goal of finding the moments within grief that feel the most gentle and human: Watching a mother brush the hair of her dying child, I was able to recognize the love and tenderness that accompanies us even in death. Listening to a child cry over the loss of his sister, and then get back up and start playing again next to her body, reminded me of the resilience we all carry with us, that my family and friends are capable of as well. They will also continue to live on if I die too soon.

Those who have traveled to that pitch-black room of grief, into the depths of it, know well how in our most horrific of moments we are met with small pricks of bright light, piercing and strong. I carry my points of light with me every day — the I.C.U. nurse who helped me take my first shower after surgery, chemo care packages that have shown up at my doorstep for each round of poison, the abundance of groceries ordered for my family in the days after my diagnosis.

Martín Prechtel says in his book “The Smell of Rain on Dust,” “Grief is praise, because it is the natural way love honors what it misses.” In facing the reality of a shortened life, I like to remind myself that grief is centered not in pain but in love.

The families I work with often don’t learn my name. I am the quiet presence in the background, stepping in only to save the image they will want to hold onto later. I have no communication with them once I leave, despite having spent hours at the bedside of their dying child. There is nothing left between me and them but the images, the precious evidence of a bright life lost but loved fiercely.

At night, editing the photos alone on my computer, I often light a candle and turn on music. I click through the set, adjusting the brightness, the cropping, pouring careful attention into each one. I save a folder with each child’s photos and send them off to the organization to be delivered to the families in the form of photo books and gifts. And then, before I shut down the computer and climb into bed, I sit for a moment, alone with the images, feeling the weight of each loss, matched only by the magnitude of each family’s love for their child.

Just as I hope someone would do for me.