First Published, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
November 16, 2003
Life's joy, death's pain braided together
CAROLE E. BARROWMAN
Recently, I found myself wedged in a line of traffic near my daughter's school just as a pack of girls burst from the building and began a spirited march to a nearby custard stand, the sheer joy of being liberated from the confines of a classroom energizing their steps.
I spied my daughter immediately, but since she wasn't expecting to see me, I let my hand fall from the car horn and instead watched her, laughing and jostling with her friends. 
Clare @ 19
When they darted across the street in front of me, I was startled by the sudden realization that my daughter looked much more like the young woman she was becoming than the little girl she had just been. And as so often happens in these moments, grief washed over me, flooding my thoughts with memories of the night my daughter was born and her sister died.
I'm in the maternity ward at St. Joseph's Hospital delivering identical twin girls, and my doctor can find only one heartbeat. In my head, the rest of the night is cruelly disjointed, but frighteningly clear. My labor nurse screams like a banshee that she has a "crash C," and then she leans close to my ear, gently stroking my forehead and softly whispering that she can still hear one of the babies. My husband is paralyzed at the foot of the bed, his face the color of putty, his body folding against itself as the doctor says, "Your wife will be OK." Then silence. He adds nothing about our babies.
A nurse's aide attempts to get my signature on an emergency release form while she jogs next to my gurney as it's propelled at high speed along the sterile hospital hallway.
`Beyond pain'
I'm prepped and prodded and prayed for. I'm beyond pain. I'm in anguish.
As a result of a twin-to-twin transfusion, my first-born is stillborn. Being a statistic is neither comforting nor guilt reducing. That something like one in every 10,000 identical twins shares blood vessels resulting in one twin taking blood from the other doesn't close the bleeding hole in my heart or silence the blaming voices in my head.
For two desperate days, my husband and I watch in alarm when our surviving daughter's eyes are covered with black patches because of developing jaundice. We watch in anxiety when nurses jab the soles of her tiny feet to draw sample after sample of blood. We watch in terror for the transfusion she's been given to raise her dangerously low cell count because, ironically, it's the weaker twin who often survives, the one whose blood has been drained by her sibling.
'Hope for morning'
The remote possibility of infected blood is a distant concern. We just want her to be alive in the morning. When we're finally able to hold her, we share our embrace with heart monitors and respiratory monitors and nurses monitoring our every movement. We celebrate her fighting spirit even as we grieve for her sister's lost one. And that night we learn a fundamental truth about parenting: it is entirely possible to hold two contradictory emotions simultaneously.
Even after the light changed at the intersection and the traffic inched forward, I continued to watch my daughter skip down the sidewalk toward Lucky's Frozen Custard. And my heart filled with the pure pleasure of being able to witness her in such an unguarded moment of sheer joy, while at the same time my heart ached for all the ones I know I'm now going to miss.