THE TIME OF TEARS

LIFE WITH KASPER “Storms make oaks take deeper roots.” George Herbert (1593-1633) My contractions were continuous every five minutes. I felt an immediate joy as we would finally see our child, but also a concern as childbirth is not always free from complications. It was a Saturday in May when it all began. Both my husband and I work at a hospital and have seen and heard about everything that can go wrong. Hypochondriac might be the wrong word, but from experience, there are a few deliveries that do not go as they should. Unfortunately, with those thoughts in mind, I went down the second staircase in our house. We live in a three-story townhouse, which is good for exercise, but maybe not on a top ten list for a heavily pregnant woman. The contractions persisted into Sunday. By midnight, I finally called the maternity ward at the main hospital in Gothenburg. A midwife named Linda answered the phone, her voice calm yet firm. I described my contractions, hoping for guidance, and she suggested that if I could manage the pain, it was better to wait. But if it became unbearable, I should come in. I endured the whole night, being a good girl, as one should be. That’s what I had always been taught to do—endure, persevere, stay strong. I regret that now. I can’t help but wonder—if I hadn’t been so obedient to the pain, would Kasper still be here? Since that night, I’ve stopped being so blindly “good.” There’s a strange kind of liberation in letting go of that part of myself. It feels... freeing. By morning, we decided it was time. We packed the last few items into the hospital bag, which had only been ready for a couple of days. I remember with our first child, Iselinn, the bag was ready three weeks before the planned delivery. She came three weeks after the scheduled date by caesarean section. Fredrik , always so careful and thoughtful, had set up the crib properly in our bedroom so that our child would get a comfortable and warm welcome. He’d even put small rocking knobs to the bed’s feet, so that the bed would resemble more of a cradle. We had an appointment on May 14 for weight estimation, as the delivery was actually scheduled for May 21. So we were weighing – should we go to the maternity ward or should we go and do an ultrasound? Since Iselinn had been born via caesarean section due to her estimated weigh of almost five kilograms, we had carefully planned for a vaginal delivery this time. Therefore, we wanted to know how big the baby would be. The thought of meeting our child—maybe today, maybe tomorrow, depending on how long the delivery would take—filled us with joy. We felt elated. Excitement bubbled in my stomach, the kind of nervous anticipation you feel just before riding a big, scary roller coaster for the first time. We were about to board the ultimate roller coaster—the one called life. At the clinic, a midwife in training was assigned to perform the ultrasound. She was learning to estimate fetal weight using the machine, and we thought everything would go smoothly. She had a wild mop of curly hair, wore loose, earthy-colored clothing, and adorned herself with oversized wooden jewelry. But she didn’t see me. Not really. To her, I wasn’t a person. I was just a practice object, a belly to be examined. Even her supervising midwife noticed, gently reminding her, “listen to the patient, she’s trying to tell you something.” But it didn’t seem to matter. The trainee shook the bottle of ultrasound gel above my head like a ketchup bottle over mashed potatoes, then squirted it onto my belly without a word. She placed the probe against my skin, silent and detached. And then time stopped. With a sharp jolt to my stomach, I saw it. My doctor’s eyes, trained from years of experience and medical intuition, picked it up immediately. The heart wasn’t beating. Or... was it? Could I be wrong? My first thought was denial—Maybe I’m seeing it wrong. Maybe it’s just a strange angle, or perhaps it’s another part of the body. But no. The image on the screen was unmistakable. The chambers of the heart—the atria, the ventricles—were utterly still. Everything around me ceased to exist. Time unraveled, leaving me in a vacuum. This isn’t true. This can’t be real. A single thought struck me, a desperate thread of logic: This is one of those moments when something unimaginably terrible happens, and it’s not a drill, not a practice scenario. It’s real life. I flashed back to my time as a young doctor, practicing CPR on plastic mannequins in medical school, and later to the raw terror of emergency disasters during my internship in hilly Norway. But this was different. This wasn’t a training exercise. This was my baby—a living, breathing person just hours ago. Now I was in a quiet vacuum. The midwife was speaking, but I only saw her lips moving. My second thought was, “It has to be an emergency C-section,” which I said to my partner and the midwives with natural certainty. I don’t remember their direct response. What I do remember is the crushing reality they tried to impress upon me: It’s too late. The baby was already gone.