The mark of tragedy is that there is absolutely no way to know it’s coming. Tragedy finds you in the most normal times. It does not yield to your dinner plans or the fact that you won’t get to pack a bag and say goodbye. You will leave the house one day in 2016 with a spring in your step, not knowing that the next time you walk through your own front door it will actually be 2017, and you’ll be carrying a hospital memory box instead of a baby. It is tragedy, and it is shocking, and it is cruel. I had sensed that things weren’t right for a few days. After repeatedly convincing myself it was fine—as all pregnant moms do—I decided to go in to the clinic “just in case.” When the Urgent Care doctor had completed her exam, she paused for a long moment and asked me if I had come to this appointment by myself. My heart started racing. I knew this line. This was the opening line to the wrong story—not the one where you get to go home filled with relief, as I had hoped. This was the start of the story that you don’t want to happen to you. And, of course, this was the one single appointment I had insisted to my husband, Bjork, I would be fine going to on my own. Bjork picked me up and brought me to the hospital. We waited for the doctor in the triage room, eating graham crackers, drinking apple juice, and watching the Hallmark Christmas movie that the nurse had put on the TV. Everyone was casual—"they probably just got it wrong at Urgent Care," they all said. You are young and healthy. Everything seems normal. And suddenly—wait, wait—she’s four centimeters dilated and her water is about to break and it’s three months too early. Lay the bed flat, lay the bed flat! The nurse rushed to lay the bed flat—inverse, actually, with my head reclined lower than my feet, where I stayed, with Bjork right by my side, for the next four days. And I can think of no more painfully perfect metaphor for our lives in that moment—the tipping of the bed signaling the tipping of our world. Completely and utterly flipped, crashing, inverse, upside down, all wrong. During our time in the hospital, we learned bits and pieces about what was happening: for reasons no one knew, I was in early labor. If our son was born now, even if he survived, his early birth could cause him to be blind, to have significant brain and 20
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lung damage, to be in a wheelchair. He was completely healthy, but this was happening too soon. We needed every possible second of his development. We needed him to stay put. So why, then, do some babies stay put while others come early? Why do some people get healed from cancer while others don’t live to see their next birthday? Why does one person’s car narrowly miss the oncoming truck while another is just an inch too far to the left? I firmly believe that one of the most significant challenges and spiritual callings in my life after losing Afton is to sit with this struggle. To feel it and to wrestle with it. To be at peace with never fully having peace, on behalf of myself and others like me who landed on the wrong side of statistics. And to find God in the love and redemption that can exist in even the worst of circumstances. Within four days of arriving at the hospital, it was determined that we would not be the “lucky” ones. We would not get that extra time. Some babies do—ours did not. Afton needed to be born, right now, via emergency C-section. Our first baby, our sweet son, Afton Bjork Ostrom, was born on December 31, 2016. His delivery was beautiful and terrifying. His entire perfect little self—brain, heart, soul—was packed into a fragile, wriggling 1 lb. 3 oz. body. He was given a 9/10 on the Apgar score and, like any new parents, we were thrilled. Within seconds of being born, he squirmed, he let out a little cry, and he took a few breaths on his own. But because of his extreme prematurity, he was immediately rushed to the NICU where an army of doctors and nurses began major medical interventions to save his life. We knew that the odds were tough. We knew that babies born at 23 weeks have, at best, about a 50/50 chance of survival. Survival is possible, but it’s tough. We knew this in our heads, but you cannot know those percentages in their actual, ugly truth until you get the call at two in the morning that your son—not someone else’s son, but yours—is not okay. You cannot know until you turn the corner of the NICU in the middle of the night and see that army of medical professionals spilling out of the room that belongs to your son. You cannot know until someone in medical scrubs is crouching down in front of your wheelchair explaining that your son, your precious and irreplaceable baby, is not going to live. We went into his room, knowing we would be holding him for the first time and the last time. They laid him on me—my warm, tiny baby—and in that moment I became a new person. I became his mom. I could feel his heart beating so fast against
