He knelt there at first. Soon he was on all fours, in a moment where pride and standing upright didn’t matter – barely able to make words of whimpers. His back convulsed as he struggled to breathe so he could speak, perhaps a prayer. She came over to him, wrapped her arms around him, and overtook his cries with her own.
“We’re gonna make it. We’re gonna make it,” she cried. She collapsed back into the arms of the one who had born her, “Mom I can’t do this,” she sobbed.
The last time I saw my cousin Rob cry was at his father’s funeral about a decade ago. He was a teenager standing in a suit near the casket. The second time was the loss of a father, too. But this time he was the father, a man, in a brown sweater, with his wife.
Months ago he and his wife Jess found out she was pregnant with twins. Soon after, they found out one wouldn’t make it, and the other could live less than a day, in a terrible best-case scenario. The baby Jess chose to carry never took its first breath, and on the day of her induced labor, the child’s life was over just before it had begun.
So on this Sunday morning, family had flown in from as far as Texas and Hawaii to this San Diego plot, among hundreds of plots closer together than I’ve seen before, to honor the lives that were almost lived with rose petals.
“More,” said a baby, the daughter of another cousin whose wife was far along in her second healthy pregnancy. She wanted more singing after the gathered finished “Jesus Loves the Little Children.”
“Take care of my boys, God. Give them a kiss for me,” Jess said.
