A friend of mine lost her baby yesterday. She was due to deliver him in the next week or so, and yesterday, she noticed that he had stopped moving inside of her. When she went in, the doctors couldn’t find a heartbeat, so they performed an emergency C-section. He was dead when they delivered him, though they tried to resuscitate. They think he had something wrong with his heart. The nurses wrapped him up and let my friend and her husband hold him. My friend and her husband took their new baby’s picture. They named him. They introduced him to his big brother, who is almost exactly Ava’s age. And now they will bury him on Saturday.
All I can think about is my friend lying in her hospital room, recovering from a major surgery with all that emptiness inside of her–and all around her–just waiting to swallow her whole.