The baby arrived on my daughter’s birthday

Dear Delyara, I am a midwife, and tonight I delivered a healthy baby girl at exactly 1:42 a.m., the same time my own daughter was born twenty-three years ago. My daughter died before sunrise. She had a heart defect no one had detected, and for years I avoided working on her birthday by trading shifts and inventing family obligations. This year, the ward was short-staffed, so I came in. The mother labored for eleven hours and kept apologizing whenever she screamed. I told her she never had to apologize for bringing life into the world. When the baby finally cried, the sound entered a room in me that I had kept locked for more than two decades. I placed the child on her mother’s chest, checked her breathing, and counted her fingers while remembering fingers that had once curled around mine for less than four hours. The mother asked why I was crying. I told her I was happy. That was true, but not complete. After my shift, I sat in the hospital chapel and said my daughter’s name aloud. I had always believed another baby’s birth on this date would feel like theft. Tonight, it felt like someone had lit a candle in a room where I thought darkness was the only loyal way to remember her.