We can heal those long-ago losses that still break too many hearts.

My sister Máire Bríd was stillborn. My mother says that, two days before her due date, her little baby stopped moving and that she almost ran to the hospital, knowing something was terribly wrong.

At the hospital they couldn’t find a heartbeat. Two days later she was born: perfect and beautiful, but without life. There was no sound, no cry, no hope she might have even a brief time with her heartbroken parents.

The nurses wanted to take her away. “Give her to me,” my mother said through her tears, and she held her baby to her as if she could will the life-force back into her. But she was gone, born sleeping as we say now, one of God’s angels.

My mother said she would have given anything, anything at all, to have had her baby live even for one short moment after birth, to have touched her warm face and stroke her tiny hand, to pour a lifetime of love into that fleeting minute. But it wasn’t to be. The loss of that time haunted her. It broke her heart.

Parents weren’t encouraged back then to hold their babies, or to make memories of their too-short lives. That denial just made everything harder.

But then we went to a Remembrance Day organized by a group called Every Life Counts.

My mother sat with Fiona, who lost her little boy, Andrew, to anencephaly, and they talked about their babies who they had loved so much for that brief time, and for ever after. And then they took each other’s sorrow and released it a little from the deepest fissures of their hearts.

So I was reminded that, with great love, we can help each other through the very worst of times, and we can heal those long-ago losses that still break too many hearts.