"Our baby died yesterday. Please help us..."

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"Our baby died yesterday. Please help us..."

We are strangers to one another. You arrived to me through a website in a series of zeroes and ones. But we are space travellers connected forever by shared astrophysics. I was once pulled apart into a drifting cloud of atoms and molecules. Like oil in a dish, my specks magnetically drew to one another over what felt like millennia until there were enough atoms and molecules for an arm, a kidney, an ear, until I was myself again.

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I know it's sad, but...

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I know it's sad, but...

"This isn't just sad," I said. "These are the best stories. The ones that take someone's suffering and shape it, form it, use it. As writers, we take this character—you, me, Chanie, even baby Liam—who might be feeling lost, and scared, and brave, and determined all at once—and we give them love by paying attention. We will almost always find understanding. Even a bit of magic. Even if it's fifty years too late, it counts. It matters to try, and this is art."

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Memory

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Memory

This is where my memory begins to fade. Wanting, what I now believe was the protection of my sanity, my mind started uprooting entire events and details of Raahi's hospital stay, as I could not bear to remember the nuances, grief sweeping through me like a forceful mudslide. My memory wanted to forget death, and with it, it had to forget life too.

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Enough

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Enough

My gut instinct was to turn away from Agnes—along with everyone else—and I didn’t know why. However, at five months along, with the decision to continue the pregnancy, there was little to no room for rational thought, much less self-exploration. I didn’t have the slightest idea how to share her with the world, nor did I want to. It is hard to describe what it’s like to carry a baby you’re afraid to meet.

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