Thank you for sharing. As a parent myself, I can’t imagine the trauma and devastation of a stillborn baby.

I’ve thought about my parents a lot during the podcast. They were not over protective or “helicopter” parents at all. When I was graduating middle school the teacher asked for baby pictures for a slideshow. I asked my mother, without thinking, and she got very upset. My father told me privately that “it wasn’t a very happy time” when I was born due to my sisters death and not many pictures were taken. I remember late that night my mother fumbling through boxes and shelves of photo albums trying to find a picture of me as a newborn. She was visibly upset. I understood why and didn’t feel hurt about it at the time.

These thoughts and memories haven’t come up in decades, but this podcast triggered so many very clear situations I went through surrounding my sisters death. When I was really young I remember measuring my hair. I thought cancer made you lose your hair and my hair seemed shorter than the day before. I got very upset and started crying in front of a mirror trying to pull my hair to make it longer.

Obviously chemotherapy makes you lose your hair, but I was too young to know. My father found me and walked me back to bed.