I can still feel the chill of that plastic chair, the way the floor seemed to tilt as doctors spoke in phrases that didn’t sound like English. I held my baby and a stack of consent forms, and the room felt both too full and brutally empty. The nurse never offered platitudes or tidy answers. She simply stayed—beside the incubator, beside my grief, beside the versions of me that kept falling apart.
Her care arrived in ordinary disguises: warmed blankets, a whispered explanation before every new procedure, her hand steadying mine as I signed what no parent should sign. When the monitors erupted, she anchored me with a single sentence: “You don’t have to be strong; you just have to be here.” Years later, seeing her as a foster mother, I finally understood. Her real miracle was not rescuing us from loss, but proving that life after it could still be chosen, one fragile tomorrow at a time.
