Leaving the Hospital

If you’ve read the introduction of my latest book, The Little Book of Big Dreams, you already know a little bit about Megan and Cam and how they impacted me and the book. (If you haven’t read it yet, you can read the intro of the book for free here.) As part of my creative thesis for my MFA in Creative Nonfiction, I wrote this piece.

After profiling creative artists for so many years, I wanted to take the profiling lens to another kind of creative person: a mother.

Suleika Jaouad Batiste recently said in the trailer for the documentary American Symphony that “we both see survival as a creative act.” I agree. I also see motherhood as a creative act. And this is a story of both.

content warning: child loss

…

On June 16th 2022, Megan Lovell and her husband drove their eight-month-old blue-eyed daughter Cam from their home in Orlando, Florida down to Captiva, Florida for Father’s Day. Megan sat in the backseat with Cam. While they were stopped at a red light, another car slammed into the back of them going full speed. The driver died, and there were no skid marks to indicate he’d even tried to stop.

In the split second between impact and unconsciousness, Megan thought, “Oh my gosh we’re getting into a car accident,” and then everything went black.

The car was thrown across the intersection. The back bench seat where Megan and Cam were sitting was now crushed against the front seat.

When Megan awoke, she noticed people standing outside the car, trying to rescue them. Her head was bleeding, and her first thought was if her husband was alive. The only reason Cam wasn’t her first thought, she says, is because Cam was in the back seat with her. She figured if she was okay, Cam must be, too. The alternative wasn’t a reality capable of entering her consciousness. Cam had to be okay. And her husband was nowhere in sight. She also wasn’t sure where the impact had come from and thought perhaps it had come from the front.

But then she looked at Cam’s car seat and realized that Cam was unconscious. She panicked. She tried to spring from the car but couldn’t move; she was wedged between the front seat, and, while she didn’t know it at the time, her leg was broken.

She doesn’t remember how she got out of the car. Maybe with some kind of motherly strength she lifted herself out to get to her daughter. Maybe one of the onlookers helped pull her out. Maybe the paramedics had arrived by then and pried her out. It’s one of many blank spots in her memory now, where her brain draws blackout curtains in an attempt to protect her from the worst moment of her life. All she remembers is that once she was out of the car, she tried to reach Cam. But she couldn’t walk. And Cam was getting airlifted to a hospital in Tampa.

They wouldn’t let Megan go with Cam in the helicopter and she was “freaking out on them” about that. They said it was a “weight thing” and she was inconsolable.

She and her husband were also injured. They were rushed to the hospital in an ambulance.

Once they arrived to the hospital their injuries were tended to, but they didn’t care about their banged up bodies. They just wanted to be with Cam. But she was in a critical emergency section of the hospital, so they weren’t allowed to see her.

Megan can’t remember how long she waited. It seemed like a lifetime, the lifetime Cam was supposed to have.

“I remember I wanted to curl up in a ball and cry,” she says, “but I couldn't because I was so injured.” It is such an involuntary thing, she says, to deeply desire to curl up into a fetal position. She said it felt like another layer of torture to be physically unable to curl her knees beneath her hospital gown and cave her chest in towards them.

Instead, she had to keep her legs straight forward, shoulders up and against the back of her hospital bed, as if in some kind of stocks.

All she and her husband wanted to do was run to Cam. All they were allowed to do was sit in their own windowless hospital room. While Megan sat there in her hospital gown and bandages, in another part of the building (one she wasn’t made aware of because if she had been she would’ve probably found a way to get there even with a broken leg), there were about 50 doctors and nurses trying to save Cam’s life.

Megan doesn’t think 50 is the right number, but it’s the number she remembers. When she tells it to me, I imagine 50 people desperately trying to keep Cam alive, 50 people trying to save Megan’s life, the life that she gave to Cam, the life that would forever be intertwined, the part of her in that room even though she was across the building.

Whether or not it was really 50 people, 50 feels right. It feels like what Cam deserved, the whole hospital in a frenzy trying to get those beautiful blue eyes to open again.

And the hospital was indeed in a frenzy. At first, they wouldn’t let Megan and her husband be in the same room together. But then, once they realized they were the parents of the baby in the emergency care, their eyes would fog and their faces would drop and they would give Megan and her husband whatever they wanted, whatever they could.

Eventually, two doctors came in alongside two people dressed in religious wear. It was almost like the day Megan gave birth to Cam, September 28, 2021, in a hospital room just like this one. Except that time a doctor handed her a new pink baby with big eyes and soft hair and probably said something like, “Megan, meet your daughter.” Now, eight months later, with Megan laying in another hospital bed, wearing another hospital gown, another doctor told her that Cam wasn’t showing any brain activity.

But they did let her come into the room where they were trying to save Cam, the room where Megan felt like 50 eyes were staring at her when she walked in (it was realistically, she says, probably more like 20). There, a doctor told her that they were trying everything possible, but that they weren’t able to do much more or give Cam any more medication. They asked her what she wanted to do.

“What do you want me to say?” she remembers thinking. “Like, pull the plug?” Instead, she said, “keep trying.” Another doctor added, “She’s a baby though, so, you never know.” All Megan could think was, “Don’t give me false hope.”

Megan was then carted off for another X-ray and Cam was taken to another room. Megan’s parents had rushed to the hospital as soon as the accident happened and they were there now; Megan’s mom kept telling her to have faith. Megan’s response at the time was, “She's not gonna freaking make it. There’s no faith.”

By the time Megan’s X-ray’s were done and she could get back to Cam, they were doing chest compressions. They called the time of death shortly after.

Megan left the hospital without her child.

…

Now, a little over a year later, I pull up to Megan’s two-story Florida home. It’s light gray with white trim and dark shutters, with one singular palm tree rising up, front and center. The last time I was here was for her sister Erin’s baby shower. (Erin has been one of my best friends for almost a decade, which is how I know Megan.)

When I first met Megan, I found her warm and friendly. But now, as I pull up to her house on a gloomy late summer day, just before a storm rolls in, and walk up the long manicured gray slate stones to the door, I’m wondering what I’ll find on the other side. While I sent her fresh sunflowers after the accident, I haven’t seen Megan since she lost Cam, a little over a year ago now.

I stand at the door for a few seconds and notice a University of Central Florida flag above, somehow hanging still for a moment despite the impending storm, and knock lightly.

Megan opens the door and offers a big smile, and a hug, her eyes wide, just like Cam’s. Megan exudes a joy I didn’t anticipate. It takes up space, and not just because she’s tall and her high blonde top-bun makes her seem even taller. As I step inside, I realize her palpable happiness likely has something to do with the tiny warm bundle in a pink flowered onesie resting on a pillow on the couch. Her name is Olivia, and she’s two months old. Megan happily walks me over to her as we admire her from above, trying not to wake her. The waves of Olivia’s thin brown hair calm me as if it’s an ocean. The three of us are silent for a moment, in some kind of group meditation. I feel my blood pressure lower, and follow Megan’s lead and give Olivia a gentle stroke on the back.

Megan tells her husband that we’re going upstairs to Olivia’s room for the interview. As we get to the second floor there is a closed door to my left, and an open one straight forward. We go towards the forward one, and at first I’m confused because Megan said we’d be doing the interview in Olivia’s room, but this looks like a guest room.

There is no crib, nothing hanging on the light-grey walls. There is one full bed with a white wooden headboard, a pink-flowered quilt, and six multi-colored pillows at the top, as if the bed has just been made for a guest.

To the left is one small window with white shutters, barely open. To the right is a full-length standing mirror that reflects the storm clouds through the window. To the left is a white fluffy chair.

Megan explains that this is Olivia’s room, or rather, it will be. She opens the closet doors which face the bed to show me rows and rows of fresh new teeny clothes explaining that Olivia is still living in their room for now. There’s another reason why Olivia’s room isn’t put together yet, but I’ll learn that later.

As we prepare for the interview, Megan sits in the chair next to the bed and pulls out a wooden chair for me to sit across from her. Megan wears black leggings, a loose camel-brown t-shirt, and a silver heart necklace on a thin chain. I don’t think she’s wearing any makeup, but honestly it’s hard to tell because she’s so pretty.

Before we start, I remind her what the interview is for and that she doesn’t have to talk about—or answer—anything she doesn’t want to relive. I also tell her a little about my inspiration for wanting to profile my mom friends: how I see motherhood as a creative practice, and how I noticed a lot of beauty in what I learned about motherhood once my close friends started having kid, things I never heard said in public, things that were incredibly unique and individual to the women I knew. “You’re definitely spot on,” she jumps in, “I feel like if anybody has a unique experience, sometimes they're afraid to say it. I talk about that a lot in therapy, about how much pressure there is to be a mom. It’s very intense. I don't necessarily care what people think about me, but I care what they think about me as a mom.”

When Megan says she doesn’t care what people think about her, I can tell she’s one of those people who really means it. Erin always described Megan as logical and that she kept a lot inside. And Megan concurs Erin isn’t wrong about that. Perhaps, I wonder, it’s because of that logic that Megan is one of those rare people who truly doesn’t care what other people think.

However, upon becoming a mom, that changed.

When I ask why, she says she thinks it’s because she had 33 years to establish herself as a person. She was always very confident in who that person was. But being a mom was this brand-new identity, and one born into a pressure cooker of judgement.

“We're our worst critics,” she explains, referring to how she’s dealing, in some ways for the first time, with the onslaught of unsolicited advice and judgement that never phased her before. “We don't need other people telling us we're doing something wrong.” She leans back in the fluffy chair and I realize it’s a rocking chair.

Megan says she knew she wanted to be a mom ever since she was very young. She wanted two kids.

However, as she got older, ever the logical person, she started to notice the realities of being a mom. She wondered if maybe she didn’t want to be one. She loved travel, she loved freedom, maybe she didn’t want kids?

Once she got married, she and her husband traveled often, including to almost every UCF away game. They loved their life, and she had convinced her husband of the joys of remaining child-free. That was their plan.

But eventually, Megan realized that long-ago dream was still there. “I think I was trying to talk myself into the fact that I didn't want to have kids, but deep down I knew.”

That old dream was also unearthed when her niece, Erin’s first daughter Ella, was born and Megan fell promptly in love. Megan also noticed how much more fun every family holiday was now with kids around. “I think that’s part of what changed our minds. I wanted to share in the joy of Christmas with kids.”

She told her husband. He was confused because she was the one who convinced him of the child-free travel life. But he agreed. They would wait, though, for about five more years.

But then 2020 happened. Megan figured they weren’t traveling anyway, they were working from home, why not try now?

A few weeks later, her husband asked her what the toilet was last cleaned with because the toilet seat was stained blue.

He started googling and showed the phone to Megan and said, “you’re pregnant?”

According to the internet, there is a rush of hormones in your skin that has a chemical reaction with certain toilet seat coatings and turn it blue.

“It sounds like one of those fake internet things,” Megan laughs, which is what she thought at the time too.

But just to be sure, she took a pregnancy test. It was negative. But it was simply too early. A few weeks later, she found out she was pregnant. “So the toilet seat knew I was pregnant before my pregnancy test knew I was pregnant,” she says, and then we both laugh.

Megan says the reality of being pregnant didn’t really sink in for her. No matter how many ultrasounds she went to, it didn’t feel real.

Pregnancy also didn’t change her life that much. She says she felt better pregnant than she does today. She was one of those people who loved it, and she lived her life as normal.

Except she feared labor. Megan likes to be in control. And labor was the opposite. To help, Megan read books. But not, she explains, books that prep you for the labor process. She read medical books about the labor process. She wanted to know everything. She wanted to be prepared for anything.

She read all the books she could until she realized there really wasn’t much else she could do. This wasn’t going to be a thing she could control. She was nervous about the unknown, but all she could do was wait.

She went into labor on September 27th, 2021. After her water broke at home, she went to the hospital. She lay on a bed while being examined. The nurse said she’d have a long wait. They wouldn’t examine her again for twelve hours.

But her contractions were severe. After a few hours she asked a nurse for help. Now they said she was ready to go to the delivery room.

She wore a hospital gown and the room was quiet. She remembers she specifically didn’t want any music in the delivery room. She was afraid it could ruin beloved songs if the experience was as terrifying as she imagined.

Her fear was palpable, and perhaps because of that, she doesn’t remember any details aside from the basic facts of nurses coming in and pushing and having a baby. She doesn’t remember if the walls were white or gray or if she ate ice cubes or a ham and cheese sub. For her it was a kind of tunnel vision, an intense focus on her end goal, disassociating from everything else.

The only detail she can remember is that while it was mostly quiet, sometimes she could hear other women screaming in the other rooms down the hall.

 Megan asked for an epidural and she was able to sleep for a few hours.

When she woke up, it was time to push. They asked her to do a practice push. When she did, they quickly scrambled and asked her to stop because the baby was coming and they weren’t ready.

After just one half more push, Cameron Rose was born.

Megan’s husband teared up. Megan was just relieved.

When they handed Cam to her, Megan says it felt surreal. “Like, I made a human,” she says. “I don’t think my brain could really process what was going on. I knew this was my child, but it took a while for it to kick in.”

One of the first things she does remember saying in the hospital room was, “Oh, she looks like a little old man.” The doctor was appalled and said no she’s cute, which of course Megan thought too, but the first thing she noticed was her receding hairline.

Her mind, her body, her heart, had all just been changed forever, and that was a little too surreal to focus on right then, so she focused on the hairline and the sweet scrunched pink face and blue eyes.

But mostly, she was just glad the labor part was over and she could jump into the mother part.

When it was time for them to leave the hospital Megan dressed Cam in a white onesie that had “Cameron” embroidered on it and little pink pants. Cam was born in 2021 when there were still many COVID protocols in place, and it breaks Megan’s heart that she doesn’t have any pictures of them together in the hospital where you can see Megan’s face. In their first pictures as mother and daughter, Megan is wearing a mask.

Once Cam was home, Megan says things initially felt pretty overwhelming. Especially because breastfeeding just wasn’t working. Eventually, Megan decided to pump. But she’d originally planned on exclusively breastfeeding, and the change was jarring. She liked to be in control, and now it seemed she couldn’t even control one of the first things she’d planned on doing, something that seemed so basic and natural.

As she turned to the internet for help, she was overwhelmed by all of information about how to take care of a newborn. “I like to know everything,” she says, “and it felt like I could never know everything.” That was really hard for her in the beginning.

She also describes herself as a bit of a control freak and a perfectionist, and she soon realized that trying to make everything “perfect” when it came to taking care of a newborn was impossible. “This is something I've now found out with therapy,” she says, “but everything can't be perfect. You just have to let some things go. In the grand scheme of things, does that little nuanced piece of information really matter? Now I realize it's okay if she cries a little bit. It's okay if she's overfed. It's okay if she doesn't go to sleep at this time and sleep until that time. It's just letting the little things go.”

Megan is rocking back and forth more often now, but slowly, like you might rock a baby to sleep. Her top bun makes a shadow on the wall when she leans back.

Megan says her favorite part about being a new mom was letting Cam sleep on her, which she affectionately calls the “potato phase.” Her eyes get bigger and brighter, crinkling for a moment, when she talks about how much joy it gives her to let that little “potato” baby sleep on her. It also gives her constant and easy access, she explains, for head and hair kissing.

What surprised her the most about the early phase was how long it took her to feel that connection. “There was this warming up period,” she says. “It took a little while and I was surprised about that. I thought it would be instant. And it was not.”

She also thinks it was because it took her some time to get through the stress of coming to terms with not breastfeeding. But when she did come to terms with how she was going to do things, she says, things started to flow, including the deep and powerful connection to and love for Cam.

The first time Megan cries in the interview is when she tries to explain the intensity of the love she felt for Cam as a tiny baby. “Before you have a kid,” she starts in her normal voice, “you don’t know how much you’re gonna love a baby.” And that’s when it happens. The words stop. She leans back. Arms clasp above her stomach, as if her body is trying to help her not fall apart. She’s quiet for a while, and then says, “I’m surprised it took me this long to cry.” And by this long, she means 14 minutes.

Her voice cracks over and over as she tries to explain this love as she wipes the tears that don’t stop. But it seems she can’t find the words to explain her love for Cam, as if no words exist big enough to hold it. But I see it in the way Megan’s face collapses into itself as she recalls that love, as if her every neuron is grappling with what to do with all that feeling when its object is no longer alive.

Megan went back to work as a contracts manager once her maternity leave ended. She worked from home, but for her it felt good to get back to an element of her life as it was before, to check things off a different kind of to do list. She also loved that she could work while still being close to Cam.

The next eight months were pure joy for Megan. I know this not just because she tells me, but because every few weeks when I caught up with Erin and asked about Megan, Erin would tell me how blissfully happy she was, how much she adored being a mom.

Megan and her husband took Cam to UCF games, to a local farm known for its sunflowers, and on trips to Georgia. And then, of course, there were the holidays. Christmas and Thanksgiving and Valentine’s Day and Easter. Megan loved them all and dressed Cam up for them all. She says that the holidays were indeed more magical as she’d hoped, and she couldn’t wait to continue the memories each year and watch Cam grow up.

What Megan didn’t expect was all the magic in the smaller daily moments. Her eyes water as she tells me about how every day after work she would open the glass double doors to their backyard, walk across the grey-stone patio and place Cam in her floatation device so they could play in the turquoise pool together beneath four palm trees all matching in height and string lights hanging just above the water. “She was a really happy baby,” Megan says as she recalls those days. She then tries to recall other stories or big memories but says that really all the joy was in those little daily things, like a warm bath or that time they went to the Steak it Easy food truck and Megan gave Cam some of her steak fries and Cam sat up in her stroller and proudly held a giant golden fry in each hand.

People often asked Megan if she was going to have more kids, but after having Cam she was sure she only wanted one. People kept asking and she was firm. She only wanted one kid. Cam was perfect, they were happy, and she didn’t need anything else.

Megan recalls the first day she met Cam, the first day she became a mother, how she lay in a hospital wearing a hospital gown and thought now she would be a mom forever, that she would care for Cam forever. She had no idea that just eight-and-a-half months later she’d be in another hospital room, in another hospital gown, as doctors told her Cam was gone.

She couldn’t speak at first. When she could, only five words came, words she said over, and over, and over again: “This is so f*cked up.”

The next few weeks were shock and survival.

On the night Cam died, Megan begged her mom to get all of the baby stuff out of the living room. Megan couldn’t bear seeing it when she walked in.

In hindsight, she says she wishes she would have left that stuff in the living room, but at the time it was as if her body and mind were frantically finding anything they could do to protect her from falling apart even more.

Then Megan left the hospital without Cam.

They stayed in a hotel room in Tampa that first night, and all she could think was, “Why am I in a hotel in Tampa?” It was surreal and jarring, and she can’t remember anything more.

They came home, but only long enough to grab a few things. Her husband’s family rented an Airbnb nearby for a few weeks to stay close, and they decided to live there for a few weeks to avoid being home. The house was on a few acres of land and there was a horse. During that time, other than cry, wail, sob, and grieve, the only other thing Megan remembers being able to do is stumble outside once in a while to look at the brown horse.

Staying away from her own home for a while was good, she says. Things not feeling normal felt right. Because things weren’t normal. They never would be again.

Megan and her husband took many months off of work, the first few for disability because of their severe injuries, and the last few for mental health as supported by paperwork from their therapist.

It was a brutal time, but they took the time. To grieve. To heal. To move slowly and completely through one of the worst things that can happen to a person. “We wanted to make sure that we were grieving and processing properly,” she says, “because if you don't then there's long-term effects of not processing.”

They started therapy almost right away, something her husband was very adamant about. Megan says she prefers to internalize everything, to try to handle it all herself, but deep down she knew it was the right thing for them to do. It helped a lot.

So did having the time and space to heal from trauma. Both of their jobs offered paid leave during this time.

But although the time was healing and helpful, it wasn’t good.

Megan shares what it feels like to come home without a baby: “F*cking awful.”

They spent most days, months even, in bed. “Then once we got past the like, okay, we're not gonna lay in bed anymore,” she says, “it's like, so, what? Are we gonna go out and have fun? What does that even look like? You think that once you have a baby that it’s forever, you know? And now we had all this unwanted freedom. We didn't want to be able to go out to dinner or do whatever we wanted. We wanted to be tending to Cam.”

They went on trips, which she says was more of a distraction than anything resembling fun. “We went on a cruise over Christmas so that we could avoid Christmas. I wanted nothing to do with Christmas. I wanted nothing to do with the holidays. We skipped everything.”

She didn’t enjoy any of those trips. They were more like medicine. A way to help her get through another day. A reason to stand.

She liked Switzerland, a place she always wanted to go. But even those small moments of joy would be quickly pulled to the depths by her grief—that feeling that Cam should be there, that Cam should see this, that Cam would have loved that park and that pizza place.

The grief followed wherever they went, but they still went.

I ask Megan what people did that helped during this time, as well as what she found not helpful or even hurtful.

What wasn’t helpful was when people kept bringing up their tragedy during moments where they explicitly didn’t want to talk about it. They were at a football game one afternoon with some friends and told them beforehand that they really needed a mental break and didn’t want to talk about or process the accident or losing Cam today, but some of the friends kept bringing it up and it was painful. While it was important to process, living in a constant state of that kind of processing is exhausting. They needed time to live too.

Megan says it was always nice when people reached out, versus staying silent or staying away. Though sometimes the question “How are you?” was an exhausting one to answer. But she loved when people, like a friend from work, would DM her to say how something in their day reminded them of Cam. Knowing people were thinking about Cam always meant a lot, and still does, to Megan. She also loved getting flowers.

In the first few months, Megan brought flowers to Cam’s grave almost every other week. She’s buried about 25 minutes from their home, a decision they made so as not to have to stumble upon it when they weren’t ready, but to be close enough where they could go as often as they wanted. Megan has a favorite wholesale florist now, Orlando Flower Market, where she visits from time to time to put together her own arrangements for Cam.

A few weeks after this interview, the day before Cam’s 2nd birthday, I accompany Megan on one of these flower shop trips so she can pick flowers for the arrangement she’ll make and bring to Cam’s grave the following day.

We pull up to a non-descript warehouse building, walk up a few steps and through a clear glass door. I expect there to be some sort of magical shop inside that belies the industrial look outside, but I quickly realize this essentially is a shipping warehouse to send flowers out to weddings and parties and funerals. But they also have a room that could best be described as a giant walk-in industrial refrigerator that is open to the public to buy wholesale bouquets. I would have never found this room on my own. But Megan knows exactly where to go, since she comes here all the time. Her long sheer white shirt billows behind her as she walks through a few offices, past 8ft orange ladders and gleaming silver shelves brimming with red, white, and pink roses and purple and white orchids, all collected in bundles, ready to be delivered. We then pass shelves of half opened boxes, and a little bin of raffia hearts to place in bouquets.

Then, just past a tiny register and two giant green trash cans, we make a sharp right and push through multiple clear plastic “curtains” that serve as the door to the flower room, as if we are cars moving through a car wash.

The temperature change is instant and oddly the icy air feels like a hug, especially compared to the sticky September Florida heat.

The room is about the size of a one-bedroom apartment if you knocked out all the walls. The four walls that are there are hidden with shelves of yellow tulips and purple velvet roses and eucalyptus and red daises and flowers whose names I’ll never know.

They’re all individually wrapped but are bundled together in industrial black or white plastic bins. There are also bins placed in every available floor space. There is only one narrow walking path that we follow as Megan looks at every single flower and chooses what moves her.

She’s not sad when she does this, but light and thoughtful. It reminds me of a mom who posted an Instagram story last week of her shopping at Old Navy for clothes for her two toddler daughters. It’s as if Megan has found a way to still shop for Cam, to still find her what she needs. It’s almost as if that instinct she had when Cam was born, that she’d be her mother forever, was right all along. She is still her mother, even though Cam is no longer here.

After about 14 minutes of walking the narrow pathways back and forth and crinkling cellophane to lift and then put back but sometimes keep a bundle, Megan has what she needs. In her arms are white flowers called stocks, light pink rose-looking blooms called ranuclus, gerberas and dysbuds in various shades of pink and purple, and some soft green eucalyptus, which Megan says she likes to use to round everything out. It’s clear this is also a creative outlet for her, and I can almost feel her blood pressure lower in this giant flower fridge.

Inspired, I too grab a bundle of chamomile, some bullet allium’s that look like purple pinecones and, the most beautiful, the first flower I chose and cradled, the fringed tulips. Light pink and white, I gasped when I saw them because the fringe at the top looked like a light snow.

Ready to check out, Megan faces the room and walks backward towards the long plastic strips that separate the room from the warehouse. I follow suit, not exactly knowing why, but when we come out the guy at the register laughs and compliments her, saying how many people struggle to figure out how to push through the surprisingly heavy plastic without it ruining their flowers.

We place our bundles on the table and he asks in a friendly manner, “What are the flowers for?” and I feel my breath catch in my throat. I feel like I want to throw up. I will never know what it feels like to be Megan, to lose Cam, but in this moment, I experience at least 1% of what she means when she says how death can sometimes turn friendly questions into landmines, and how stressful it can be to try to live the rest of your life avoiding them.

As soon as the checkout guy asks this question, Megan walks away, towards the raffia hearts we saw in a bin near the entrance. The guy says across the room, “Please take as many of those as you want, they’re free, we’re trying to get rid of them. They’re from Valentine’s Day.”

Megan carefully chooses a few hearts and I tell the guy that my flowers are just for my home. I don’t tell him what Megan’s are for, and she never does either.

Back in the car, Megan texts her husband to see if he can pick up the number “2” balloon they’ll bring to Cam’s grave tomorrow. They are having scheduling issues and I tell her not to change her plans on my behalf, that I’m in no rush. But she assures me no, it’s not me. She needs her husband to go because she only mentally prepared herself for the flowers today. She isn’t mentally prepared for the clerk at the balloon counter to joyfully ask about what theme she’s doing for her two-year-old’s birthday party.

Tonight, Megan will take the flowers she’s picked and arrange them artfully. Tomorrow, they’ll bring those and the “2” balloon to her grave.

On Cam’s first birthday, the cemetery was closed because of a hurricane. But Megan didn’t care. She and her husband went anyway. Their umbrellas broke immediately in the hurricane rain and winds, but they kept walking in the torrential downpour towards Cam’s grave. They stood there, shoes caked in mud, drenched, in the middle of a hurricane (one that demolished Captiva), and wished their daughter a happy birthday.

They visit Cam’s grave as often as they can, and when they do, they stay for hours, bringing chairs and water and even food. So far, they’ve visited her every single holiday.

The night they lost Cam, Megan declared, in the hospital, that she would have two more kids. She can’t remember who she said this to or why or when, but she remembers knowing for sure that she wanted more kids, and that she wanted to start right away.

Megan found out she was pregnant a few months later. She was relieved, but that feeling didn’t last long. “I thought that getting pregnant was gonna like solve all my problems,” she says. “It did not. It did not solve all my problems. I thought it was magically gonna feel better when I was pregnant. Not even a little bit. It was more anxiety.” It was also more landmines, as she calls them. More things she wasn’t at all ready to do again. “I didn't want to buy baby clothes. I didn’t want to put a room together. I didn’t want to do of that stuff.”

So, she didn’t.

I look around again at the sparse gray guest room.

She didn’t tell anyone on social media either. They only told close family. They didn’t have a baby shower. They didn’t decorate a room. They did what they needed to do to survive it.

They constantly worried something bad would happen. Megan says she knows that just because something terrible happened once doesn’t mean it’s more statistically likely to happen again. However, she explains, when something tragic and unexpected happens, it makes you realize that nothing is guaranteed. It’s not that hope is gone forever. But it’s more as if a kind of trust is broken, as if her heart hired an army whose orders are to not let in anything in that looks like hope without solid physical proof. “I'm not gonna get my hopes up until this baby is here in the flesh,” Megan says of her mentality then. A complete absence of hope would have been not trying for another baby at all. But most of the hope in her life now is in action alone, not feeling.

I ask Megan what she’d done with all of the stuff she had for Cam, and that’s when I learn about the closed door I saw when I first climbed the stairs.

“99% of Cam’s stuff is in her room,” Megan says. “I still have everything. The bag that I packed for her for that trip is still just sitting there.”

Megan goes in there once in a while. To remember what it used to be like.

This home was supposed to be a temporary place, somewhere they lived for just a few years, but now she says she can’t imagine leaving it. She doesn’t know what she’s going to do as their family grows, but she says that’s future Megan’s problem.

Megan had her second daughter, Olivia Kate, on June 9th, 2023. She came three weeks early, and seven days before the anniversary of the car accident.

When the doctor handed the baby to Megan, she felt the connection instantly. She says partly it’s because this time she already knew what that love and connection felt like, and she was so grateful to have it again, to hold a baby again, after a year without.

Erin texted me the happy news, sending pictures of her daughters holding Olivia. She said Megan seemed so, so happy.

Megan confirms this was, and is, true. “The way that I felt after having her was kind of how I thought it was gonna be when I got pregnant, like all my problems would be gone or whatever. After losing Cam, my happiness level was like a two out of ten, and having Olivia catapulted up to an eight, which I think is about as good as it's gonna get. It just drastically changed everything.”

It’s not that there aren’t still dark days, and not that Megan’s life is now problem-free. She of course still misses and grieves Cam every day. But now, she is able to also feel happiness again too, which feels like a miracle.

Megan also says the experience of bringing Olivia home was a lot easier this time. “I already knew the things that worked for us, so I could really just focus on being with her.”

She shared the news on social media. People were elated for her, cried for her. Some were deeply apologetic that they had somehow missed the news she was pregnant, and she consoled them that no, they hadn’t missed it, she just hadn’t shared.

Instead of a baby shower, she had been planning on doing a “sip and see” party, a party where, she explains, people “sip” drinks and “see” a new baby. But by the time she had Olivia, she didn’t have energy for a party. So instead, when people asked what they could do, she requested books. For Cam’s baby shower, everyone gave books that they wrote notes in, and she wanted Olivia to have a similar collection. So people sent books. And they sent “a million clothes,” Megan laughs, which are hanging in rows in the closet behind me.

Ella, Erin’s first born and Megan’s five-year-old niece, drew a picture when Olivia was born that Erin texted to me. Megan has it now and pulls it out. It’s framed, ready to hang in Olivia’s room once they are ready to decorate it. On the left is a blond-haired, blue-eyed girl and on the right is a brown-haired girl. Between them is a teddy bear whose hands they are both holding. There is a name beneath the brown-haired girl, “Olivia.” The name beneath the blonde, written in purple crayon, is “Cam.” On the top right corner in purple marker is says, “Sisters.”

June 16th, 2023, the anniversary of the accident and losing Cam, came just a week after Olivia was born. And while it was hard, Megan says having Olivia made it easier. It was a tough day, she says, but not tougher than any other.

She’s still unsure how to approach the holidays, but she hopes therapy will help as each one approaches. For now, it’s still a mix of excitement and dread. “Everything comes as happy, sad, joy, grief. I'm excited for Olivia, but then I'm sad for Cam, and then I'm sad for myself,” she explains. “I follow a lot of moms that have lost children to help myself and see how they're doing things.”

Megan says certain Instagram accounts and friends she’s made through Instagram have been the biggest help on this journey so far. “Even my therapist as great as therapy is, she's never lost a child. She doesn't actually know what it's like. So having somebody that knows exactly what it's like is very helpful.”

She started by searching for general child loss accounts, and then looked through the comments to find others.

Once on one of those accounts she saw a quote she recognized as one of the only things so far that ever brought her any peace. It was a quote from the TV show Yellowstone, something one character said to another after the loss of a son: “That boy lived a perfect life…We're the only ones who know it was brief. All he knew was you. And that you loved him.”

 A few days after our interview, Megan shares on Instagram that a lady stopped her on her way out of dinner (a dinner where, Megan wants us to know, Olivia pooped all over her), to tell her that she teared up watching Olivia and Megan look at each other during dinner. “That woman will never know the weight of her comment and how deeply it affects me,” Megan wrote, “It is something I’ll never forget…even though I seriously had poop on my dress. But I wouldn’t trade it for the world.”

When Megan is usually out with Olivia in public, the most common question people ask is, “Is this your first?” People are just trying to make conversation, and from what many of my friends have told me it seems this is a common question, something people ask pregnant women to gauge what to say next, possibly to try to assess how much they know when it comes to what they’re in for. Megan doesn’t think people mean her any harm, but this question has become a nightmare.

She’ll often answer truthfully but simply with a “no,” but then the follow up question is always, “How old is your first?” And that’s when she has to tell them.

She has a narrative she can get through without breaking, but having to go through it at random times and to complete strangers is exhausting. And she says she feels bad having to drop something so heavy that she knows they aren’t expecting.

Her therapist has encouraged her to just say she doesn’t want to talk about it, but Megan says she just can’t do that.

When it comes to the future, Megan hopes to have another baby sooner rather than later, and hopes to provide a good life for them and navigate telling them about their sister without it becoming a burden for them. “I was watching a reality television show,” she says, “and this chef was saying that she comes from a family where her parents have lost a child and that there was a lot of pressure on her to be successful and not to disappoint them. And I was like, oof. That’s definitely something I have to think about and make sure that I'm not putting any sort of pressure on them because of our situation. I just want the best for my kids, you know?”

When it comes to Cam, Megan still visits often. Her coworkers also put together a memorial bench in their local park that says, “In loving memory of Cam.” Megan lights up a little when she tells me, “She has a bench.”

We finish up the interview and get up and stretch our legs. I ask Megan to give me a little tour of anything in the house she’d care to share about Cam or Olivia. She starts with a photo album as big as a three-ring binder and filled with beautiful multicolored scrapbook paper backgrounds and photos of Cam.

“I started making it after the accident,” Megan explains, “I printed off 600 photos.”

The first page she shows me is from the day Cam was born. The background paper is white with pink flowers and there are pictures of Megan holding Cam in her hospital bed and smiling at the camera. The caption at the top says, “Hello little angel.”

She then turns to a random page in the middle and it’s an explosion of red and green plaid and presents. We’ve come to the Christmas section, where Megan happily holds Cam in her red onesie and white bow headband, and one where she’s meeting Santa. Cam is sleeping in most of the Christmas photos, but Megan is beaming.

However, Cam is wide awake as the Christmas photo pages progress (there are many). In one, she’s smiling at the camera in a red long-sleeved shirt that says, “I believe in Santa and unicorns.” Cam’s hair is short brown, her eyes big and blue, and her face the shape of a heart.

Right after the accident, Megan looked at photos a lot. But then it became too much and she stopped for a while. “When did you start again?” I ask. “Tuesday,” she says, referring to just a few days before our interview.

After we gush over the album about how cute Cam is (she’s really, really cute), Megan shows me Olivia’s closet which almost looks like Cher’s in Clueless. I also see the books, like Llama Llama Red Pajama and one whose title I’d never heard of and say out loud, The Little Girl Who Lost Her Name. “Oh,” I continue, “that’s kind of sad.” I’m not sure why this breaks my heart so much, but it does. Later I’ll realize it’s because a name is so personal. My mom is so proud of the name she gave me, Isa, after my grandmother Isabel, and she talks about it all the time. To lose your name feels profound to me, and it will later occur to me that one of the reasons it brings Megan comfort to hear people say Cam’s name and DM her about how they were thinking of Cam is that a name, and those who remember it, is one of the few things that isn’t lost, one of the few things that can’t be taken if we don’t want it to be.

The tour of Olivia’s room ends quickly, because other than the closet, there is really nothing of hers in there. So we slowly, almost imperceptibly, walk past the closed door of Cam’s room. I don’t ask to go in, and Megan doesn’t offer. I glance at the door for a moment, and when I do, I feel a surprising burst of emotion in my stomach, a sense of the life that should still be in there, and pain thinking of the backpack for Captiva Island Megan said is still in there, filled with clothes she selected for her daughter, still clean when they should be sandy.

Once downstairs, Megan shows me a shelf in the kitchen with all the stuffed animals they’ve brought to Cam’s grave over the last year, like a little brown bear wearing a birthday hat and holding a cupcake, a pink bear with a pink heart for a nose, one with a Santa hat and a scarf, and a chipmunk from Switzerland. They leave them with her for a while and then bring them home. Above the lined up stuffed animals is a big framed picture of Cam with her longer lighter hair pulled to the side with a blue bow, sitting up and smiling delightedly at whoever is behind the camera.

Once Megan realizes Olivia is awake we return to the couch. Megan kisses her and softly says, “Did you miss me?” She picks her up and holds her facing outwards towards me. Olivia is wide awake and has a smile in her eyes that matches the one in Megan’s. While Megan holds her and looks down you would never know all that she’s been through; she looks like one of the happiest women in the world.

Though she’s not the same woman she was before losing Cam. If becoming a mother, bringing a new person into the world, changes a person, so does losing a person. We cannot control the fact of it changing us, or our lives, but we can control how it changes us. We have a choice. Sometimes, to avoid that change, people freeze up, turn inward, harden, as if to try to preserve how things once were, when instead it only seems to make them die too.

 Letting it change you in a way that allows you to live again, even hope again, is also painful, though.

“I'm definitely a different person,” Megan confirms. It’s harder for her to hope, at least with words. It’s harder for her to not dread the holidays she once welcomed. It’s harder for her to go out in public. And it’s harder for her not to imagine everything disappearing in an instant.

But she’s not a different mom. She treats Olivia the same way she treated Cam. And losing Cam didn’t change how much she appreciates Olivia. Because she appreciated and loved Cam as much as any human can love another. She didn’t need to lose her to know that. She already did.

But the biggest change, she says, is that when she decided to have Cam it was more of a logical decision. But with Olivia, she said, it was an emotional decision, because now she knew what it felt like to have a child, and she wanted to feel that again, even though she knew it was and always would be a risk, because of all that can go wrong in any human life.

 When I return to Megan’s house a few weeks after the interview to go to the flower shop, she brings me back upstairs to show me a little progress in Olivia’s room.

 Over the white fluffy chair Megan sat in for the interview, which is now moved to a new corner, is now a peach blanket with “Olivia Kate” hand crocheted in cursive in white. In the far left corner to the right of the window where the sun gleans in today is a white wooden bin with “Olivia” hand painted in pink with pink painted flowers surrounding it. In it are a complete collection of books from a series with titles like Olivia and the Fairy Princesses and Olivia Goes to Venice and Olivia Helps with Christmas.

 In the corner is now a giant open box with white foam squares and wooden pieces that will eventually be a crib. Progress.

Stacked on the bed are blue overalls with a silver symbol on the front pocket; Megan explains Olivia will be a Minion for Halloween. Beneath that is a black and white checkered frilly onesie with the “UCF” logo on the front, to wear to games. Beneath that is a red stocking with a gray fox on the front and white snowflakes with the name “Olivia” at the top in red thread. Megan explains Cam has one too, and there will be four stockings hanging on their mantle this Christmas.

We hug goodbye and I get another look at Olivia peacefully sleeping in her swing, the one thing they brought back into the living room of Cam’s. She smiles a little.

Later that day, I get a text from Megan with pictures of her final arrangements, pink flowers the color of a sunrise blooming towards the sky.

She posts a picture of all the arrangements the next day (she made three and they’re all giant and gorgeous and all shades of pink). They look as if they were done by a professional, and behind them in the picture are three shiny pink balloons, a “C”, an “A”, and an “M.”

I arrange my flowers into two vases as well, my purple bullet alliums and chamomile in one, and my snowy fringed tulips in another. I text pictures to Megan and wish Cam a happy birthday.

My purple bullet alliums live longer than any cut flower I’ve ever purchased, but of all the flowers I bought, the one that caught my eye first, that inspired me to get some of my own in the first place, the fringed tulips, were the first (and fastest), to die. It started with each bud wrinkling inward and then collapsing into itself. The thick stems slowly succumbed to gravity and dipped below the outside of the glass. The leaves drooped into the water where they turned loose and slimy. However, the stem that dropped the lowest below the vase was also the one that made a kind of soft backwards “J” shape, as if it’s bud refused to look at the ground. Instead, until the day I threw them out, no matter how low the stem fell, the bud remained facing outwards, towards the stove where I make tea every morning, as if to greet me, as if it knew it were still beautiful.