My Saddest Day

Fifteen years ago today I held my first born daughter in my arms for the first and last time.

One evening in early January 2009 I was just over 24 weeks pregnant and something didn’t feel right. I tried to relax but my discomfort turned into pain and in the early hours of the morning, Alex drove to the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. I still remember the fear in the young resident’s voice as he told me I was in labor. The next several hours were a flurry of consultations with the team from the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU).

Sarah Abigail Vindman was born at 10:53 a.m. on January 11, 2009. She had my red hair, her father’s nose, and my crooked pinky fingers.

We arrived in the NICU every morning and spent all day with Sarah leaving only to eat dinner while the nurses did their shift change. When we returned to the hospital I read a selection of books and always ended with my favorite, On the Night You Were Born. When I read the line, “On the night you were born. The moon smiled with such wonder that the stars peeked in to see you and the night wind whispered, ‘Life will never be the same,’ because there had never been anyone like you ever in the world,” I couldn’t get through it without my voice cracking. I still cannot. We had a mostly uneventful week with Sarah in the NICU. The prognosis was largely unknown because she was so tiny but she remained quite steady until the last day of her life when she developed an infection.

One week after we made the choice to resuscitate her after birth, we made the decision to withdraw life support.

While I don’t think I ever wishing I had died with Sarah, I do recall wondering how I was going to live. Where would I find purpose and strength to go on? As grief overwhelmed me, I couldn’t fathom how I would ever have the energy to do anything. Anyone who has been through grief knows there are no shortcuts. There isn’t a skip button or a fast forward option; you have to experience and live every moment of it so your heart can get stronger and the weight of grief no longer crushes it. 

Eventually I came to the realization that the best way to honor Sarah was to live my life in a way that would honor hers. To laugh and love big and go on adventures and even if I did those things while having some sadness in the corner of my heart I was still LIVING. As long as I’m alive, Sarah’s memory is also and even if we’re never able to create something that will bear her name after we’re gone, it’s enough to know I carried her heart in mine all the days of my life.

I will always mourn the child I lost. I miss her presence on the expected days like birthdays and holidays, but I miss her most on the fun days when I wish she were here to be part of the brilliant everyday chaos that is life. But I won’t—and this is really key for me—let her loss prevent me from experiencing joy. Life is meant to be lived, friends, so get out there and LIVE IT and always, always Keep Moving Forward 💚

Please forgive me if this post is disjointed or has typos and grammatical errors. Remembering our week with Sarah always brings a flood of tears and emotion because that’s the price we pay for great love and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.