A true angel

It is almost April. Spring makes me think of certain things. It makes me think of a certain little girl, a tiny baby girl. Spring makes me think of London.

At my ten year class reunion I become reacquainted with an old friend. We had been friends since grade school. I can remember us often riding our bicycles to each other's houses. It turned out, that even though we had moved away from our home town, we now both lived in the same town. She was divorced and had a daughter the same age as mine. This was during the rocky point in my marriage, so I often found solace in her company and her apartment, away from my husband, where it was just "us girls".

She was a Deejay for a local radio station. She got free tickets to concerts and public events that we would go to and take the girls. Soon after we got back in touch, she started dating a guy. Immediately I didn’t like him. I didn’t trust him. He was too good to be true. After dating for a month, they decided to move in together. Then she found out she was pregnant.

They got married about a month later and moved to a new city. She hadn’t been there long when she called me crying late one night. They were having trouble and she was moving back. She moved back in to her old apartment. She was about 6 months pregnant by then. I kept her daughter the day she went to the doctor, alone, to find out the sex of the baby. I was the first person she told. She was having another girl.

There are so many details, but yet they are unimportant, needless to say though, she and her husband got back together right before the birth of the baby. The baby was born in April. I remember going to the hospital during my lunch hour to see her. My whole family went back again that night. My daughter was six. She sat still in a chair as we carefully placed the baby in her arms so she could hold her. She sat there holding that baby as proud as could be. She was beaming. I took a picture.

Our daughters played on a softball team together and spring practice had started. It would get cool at night, so we would sit in the car and hold the baby whild watching the girls practice. I loved that baby. I felt as if she was almost mine. I had spent just about as much, if not more time, with the mom during the pregnancy as the father had. It was during a time when I wanted another baby, but my hubby didn’t. I had hoped that this little angel would change his mind.

I still get chills thinking about that night. The phone rang. It was 3:30 in the morning. My husband answered. Suddenly he was sitting straight up in bed saying, “What?!?” I looked at him and he handed me the phone. It was my friend on the other end. She was crying hysterically. Then in a voice I will never forget, she said, “She’s dead. London's dead.” I will never forget that moment and how those words sounded. Apparently they woke up in the night, checked on her and touched her. She was cold. They called 911, but it was too late. She had died of SIDS. She was barely a month old.

They buried her in the outfit they brought her home from the hospital in. There was some family that still had not even seen her alive, yet they were going to see her for the first time dead. I can still see that little baby the night of the visitation. She looked like a porcelain doll laying there all wrapped up. I stood by my friend as she pulled the baby’s hat back and said, “Look, look what they did to my baby.” There were stitches around her head from where they had performed the autopsy.

I did everything I could for my friend. The day the baby died, I took off work and sat with her all day. They didn’t have a church they attended, so I called my preacher and he agreed to do the funeral services for them. I offered to store some of the baby’s belongings at my house. My friend didn’t want all the reminders, but yet she didn’t want to get rid of the things either. My friend never recovered. Honestly, how I know that you can't ever 'recover' from something like that.

I tried to be the best friend to her that I could. They went away that summer to live with his parents. I helped her pack up her apartment and put it all in storage. After they left, she and I emailed and talked on the phone. But then she stopped calling. She wouldn’t return my phone calls. Later I found out they had moved back to town. Soon I got a phone call from her wanting to know if it was ok if her husband came by one day while I was at work to get the baby’s things. I told her yes. I never heard from her again.

Years later I saw her and her daughter at a softball tournament where our daughter’s were playing. Her daughter saw me and my daughter. She ran up to us and hugged us. My friend wouldn’t even look at me or speak to me. Her ex-husband, her oldest daughter's dad, was there. He talked to me. He told me that the baby's dad and her divorced not too long after they came back from his parents. He told me not to take her silence personally, that she had changed.

I could not figure out what I had done to her. I did nothing but be a friend to her. People have often told me that I must have reminded her too much of that time in her life and that it was too painful for her. I still think about her and wonder what she is doing. I hope she is happy.

In my Bible, I have the picture of my daughter holding that sweet little angel that touched our lives.

London ~ 4/12/2000 - 5/16/2000