We have reached a point now in our society where birth feels a lot less scary than it once was. Sure we can all cite horrific, scary stories, but for the most part, we expect to live and see our children grow and thrive. It's a heartbreaking truth, though, that child birth, while vastly safer than it once was, can still have devastating consequences.
One such story happened just this month in England where a 34-year-old woman gave birth to triplets and collapsed eight days later. She later died.
It's hard to even imagine that poor father and what he is going through left alone with three babies, but the scary truth is, it could happen to anyone.
Though doctors are not yet sure what killed Isabel Mason, they suspect hemopericardium, a condition in which blood leaks into the sac surrounding the heart from a cut in an artery. It's random. It's scary. And it's devastating.
It's not that birth is always dangerous. As a mom who had two complication and drug-free deliveries, I am the first to say we are probably over-medicating births these days.
But this kind of story is a sobering reminder that there are no guarantees and that every childbirth that goes smoothly and every healthy child and mother are a miracle. It may all feel normal and expected, but there are no guarantees in life.
My heart breaks for Mason and those three babies as well as her poor husband. This is never how a person expects to start as a parent. There is no rule book and now those babies will never know their mother and how much she tried to have them and how much she would have loved them.
Any time a mother is separated from her babies permanently, it's a tragedy with lifelong effects. But when it happens so soon after birth, it just makes it all the more heartbreaking.
They only had eight days of a mother's love. But maybe, somewhere, on some level, it was significant to their development. I know, as a mom of babies, I used to worry if something happened to me, they wouldn't remember me. But those baby memories DO happen. They just don't happen in the same way.
A baby might not "remember" mommy wrapping him tight to keep out the chill. But he will "remember" (on some level) feeling warm and that someone cared enough to keep him warm. That's how we have to think of it when a mom of babies dies. On some level, her babies have been made better because she had her little time with them.
As a mom, my heart goes out to this story and I hope these babies have someone in their lives who can help them "know" the mother who loved them and who only had eight days to show them.
Does this story break you heart?
Image via rumpleteaser/Flickr