When life breaks your window, you can’t live with the shards; you could turn them into stained glass. She sometimes recalls the last three years and wonders how she made it. A pandemic would have been enough for most families. For her, it came on top of heartbreak that started in late 2018, when she and her husband happily told their daughters, Ella and Suzi, that a baby sister was coming. Life felt complete and safe, but she didn’t know how fragile that feeling was. On July 2, 2019, at 32 weeks, she noticed the baby wasn’t moving like usual. She tried snacks, resting, and walking around, then called her doctor. At the hospital, they told her what no parent wants to hear: the baby’s heart had stopped.
Their daughter, Anele, was born the next day, tiny, perfect, and silent. She felt a mother’s love and guilt in those first hours, even though none was her fault. The future she had pictured three sisters tumbling through the house, grandparents with another grandchild, shattered in a moment. Grief changed everything. It wasn’t just sadness but the loss of the life they thought they were building. Still, she and her husband kept going for their girls. From the start, she knew they would try again, not to replace Anele (no one could), but to bring a baby home to the big sisters who had already made space in their hearts.
Seven months later, in February 2020, she became pregnant with a boy, their first son, the first grandson in the family. Hope returned, wrapped up with fear. Then the world closed. With COVID-19 spreading, she was pregnant, grieving, and caring for two children at home, mostly alone, doing schoolwork at the kitchen table and counting down to every scan. Isolation sharpened every worry. On her 31st birthday, August 25, 2020, another blow landed: their baby was diagnosed with a congenital diaphragmatic hernia, a serious condition with survival odds that made her stomach drop. Doctors called his case “mild,” but there was nothing mild about the anxiety of preparing to fight for a child’s life again.
Their son, Mac, arrived on October 26, 2020. The following 24 days were a blur of NICU alarms and milestones. She held him for the first time on Day 4. He had surgery on Day 5. The ventilator came off on Day 7. He took his first breastmilk on Day 8. On Day 24, they finally walked him out of the hospital into the arms of his cheering sisters. Mac felt like a miracle, proof that fear and hope can live in the same room.
Through it all, she chose to give her pain a job. She doesn’t say “everything happens for a reason” because some losses don’t come with easy reasons. Instead, she decided Anele’s life would make a difference. She started a daily practice of gratitude in Anele’s honor. She invited others to do the same with the hashtag #GratefulForAnele. She is thankful for her seven months of life and for every small blessing since. She once imagined her future as a smooth pane of glass: clear plans, bright pictures. Loss smashed that glass. But she’s been picking up the pieces, one by one, and setting them into something new. The broken edges are still there, but now the window is made of blue for sorrow, purple for longing, yellow for joy, red for love, pink for gratitude, green for what’s ahead. It will never be the same as before, and that’s okay. The light that comes through now is different and, in its own way, beautiful.
She still keeps Anele close by, living with intention. She names three small things she’s grateful for each morning: a quiet cup of coffee, a silly joke from Suzi, Mac’s loud belly laugh, and invites friends and family to do the same with #GratefulForAnele. On hard days, she tells the girls that love doesn’t end; it changes shape, like light passing through their “stained-glass” window of memories.
They celebrate birthdays with service projects, write notes to NICU families, and talk openly about feelings so the fear doesn’t grow in the dark. She doesn’t pretend the story is tidy. Some nights still ache. But purpose gives the pain somewhere to go, and gratitude provides the joy with room to stay. In this house, healing isn’t forgetting; it’s remembering on purpose and choosing love, again and again.
