The doctor said “SIDS” in the soft, measured voice people use when they know language has already failed.

He said it once.

Then he said it again, slower, as if stretching the words out might somehow make room for meaning inside them.

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

No warning.

No answer he could offer that felt more satisfying than a shrug from the universe.

I remember staring at the bright seam in his lab coat and thinking that his mouth was moving too calmly for the kind of sentence he had just put into my life.

My daughter had gone to sleep in pink footed pajamas with tiny strawberries on them.

A few hours later, she was gone.

Ryan was in Denver for a mandatory training his boss had warned him not to miss.

The night before, we had joked on FaceTime about how Ava kept grabbing at the phone every time he said goodnight.

He had promised he would be home in three sleeps.

I had rolled my eyes and told him she would probably punish him with a full day of clinginess for daring to leave us.

By the time his plane landed, he had three missed calls, two voicemails, and a text from an unknown number labeled LOCAL HOSPITAL.

He called me from baggage claim with panic already in his voice, and I said the words out loud for the first time: “She’s gone.” I heard a strangled sound come out of him that I had never heard before and hope never to hear again.

The hospital moved us into a small chapel that smelled like lilies and furniture polish.

Ava was wrapped in a white blanket.

Her lashes were still perfect.

Her cheeks still looked round and warm.

Every cell in my body expected her chest to rise.

It never did.

The practical world arrived obscenely fast.

A nurse asked if we wanted footprints.

A social worker handed me brochures.

The funeral home had a binder ready before I had fully understood that I was no longer a mother to a living child.

White or pink casket.

Burial or cremation.

Music.

Flowers.

Programs.

Guest list.

The woman at the funeral home was kind, which somehow made it worse.

Cruelness would have been easier to push against.

Instead she was gentle and efficient and apologetic, and I sat there signing forms because apparently there are line items for everything, even for burying your baby.

I chose a cream-colored casket because the bright white one looked too decorative, too polished, too much like something made to be admired from a distance.

I picked a hymn I could barely read through the blur in my eyes.

When the funeral director asked for a photo, I handed him my phone and said, “Please choose one where she looks like herself,” and then I cried because I realized she always looked like herself and I was speaking as if I had to preserve her before time could take more.

Outside in the parking lot, with the cold air needling through my sweater, I called my parents.

My mother answered sounding distracted.

I could hear the clank of metal in the background, the scrape of something heavy being dragged across concrete, and a television announcer shouting over applause.

“Hey, Em,” she said.

“Tyler’s