‘The biggest thing for us was that they couldn’t promise she would ever leave the hospital. We said, ‘how is that fair to a child who deserves the best, if she could never come home and have that with us?’

Ronkonkoma

“We found out I was pregnant in March of 2017. Everything was going pretty good. There were no indications anything was wrong. When I went for my anatomy scan, they had seen some things that were kind of concerning. We met with the doctor after the ultrasounds and they had seen a growth on her neck. They knew it was growing and with that came complications. If it was the better case of scenarios, it would be a high-risk pregnancy, but she would come home and live a fairly normal life.

“It ended up not being the better case. It ended up being a cervical lymphangioma. It was growing into the lymph nodes and muscles and tissues around her neck.

“My husband and I looked at each other in that meeting and knew what we were going to do, even though we didn’t say the words yet. The biggest thing for us was that they couldn’t promise she would ever leave the hospital. We said, how is that fair to a child who deserves the best, if she could never come home and have that with us?

I decided every year around her due date, I would offer sessions to other parents who lost a child.

“Being a newborn photographer, that wasn’t something I wanted to go back to right away. When I went back, we had to share what happened with everyone, it wasn’t something we could hide. In the long run, it helped me heal. It’s helped me become an advocate for child loss and infant loss. I decided every year around her due date, I would offer sessions to other parents who lost a child. It allows me to talk about my daughter and them to talk about their children. I know how much it means to them.

“I found out I was having my daughter Morgan on Nov. 27, when Amelia would have been born Nov. 28. Morgan came Aug. 13, about three weeks after Amelia had her first birthday. I suffered greatly from postpartum depression for about four months. I think losing Amelia and getting pregnant so quickly, there was guilt, grief and it was hard to bond. I didn’t feel what everyone said I would feel. There was a lot of going through the motions and coming to terms with those feelings. It’s not that I didn’t love her, it was just hard to get out of that fog. But I’ll never forget when Morgan turned four weeks old and she smiled for the first time. It was like nothing else mattered.”