My parents chose my brother’s barbecue over my baby’s funeral and told me, “It’s just a baby. You’ll have another.” I buried my daughter by myself, and what I did afterward changed everything.
My mother said, “It’s just a baby. You’ll have another,” less than an hour before I laid my daughter to rest.
Even now, writing that sentence feels unreal—like something too cruel to belong to ordinary life. But it happened exactly there, in ordinary life: on a bright Saturday morning in Columbus, Ohio, as I stood in a black dress outside a small funeral home holding a folded blanket that still carried the faint scent of baby soap.
My daughter’s name was Lily.
She lived for twenty-three days.
Twenty-three days of hospital monitors, whispered prayers, nurses adjusting tubes, and me learning how to love someone with a fear so constant it never let me sleep. She was born with a severe heart defect no one had detected early enough. By the time the doctors fully explained the surgeries she would need, their words already sounded like grief disguised as hope. I stayed with her every moment I was allowed. I memorized the shape of her hands, the curve of her eyelashes, the small sound she made when she settled against my chest. Then one Tuesday night at 2:14 a.m., as rain tapped softly against the NICU windows, she was gone.
The funeral was four days later.
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