My parents skipped my baby’s funeral for my brother’s BBQ and said, it’s just a baby, you’ll have another. I buried my daughter alone, and they had no idea what I would do next.

My mother said it so casually that for a moment I thought I had misheard her.

“It’s just a baby. You’ll have another.”

Less than an hour later, I stood beside a tiny white casket and buried my daughter alone.

Even now, that sentence doesn’t feel like something that belongs to real life. It sounds like a line written for cruelty, not something a mother says to her child on the worst day of her life. But it happened exactly like that—on a bright Saturday morning, in a quiet corner of Columbus, with sunlight touching everything that had already gone dark for me.

My daughter’s name was Lily.

She lived for twenty-three days.

Twenty-three days of machines and whispers, of learning how to love someone while bracing for the moment you might lose them. She was born with a heart defect no one had caught in time. The doctors spoke in careful language—possibilities, procedures, outcomes—but I heard what they couldn’t say. I stayed beside her through everything. I memorized her face the way people memorize something they know they won’t get to keep.

Then one night, just after two in the morning, she was gone.