“You’re telling me to leave my baby here?”
“I’m telling you that we should save ourselves from pain that is inevitable.”
I didn’t sleep that night.
Little Jake slept beside me.
I counted every breath he took.
One.
Two.
Three.
And each time, part of me wondered whether Mike was right.
But then another thought nearly suffocated me.
If I left my son there, he might one day leave this world without ever knowing that his mother loved him.
The next morning, the doctor walked into the room carrying paperwork.
Mike was there too.
He placed a pen in front of me.
“One signature and everything will be arranged,” he said. “Then we can go home and try to live our lives.”
I picked up the pen.
My hand was shaking so badly that I could barely hold it.
Then I looked at little Jake.
He opened his eyes.
And at that exact moment, I made my decision.
After what I did next, my husband simply stood up and walked away.
At the door, he stopped, looked back at me, and said one sentence whose true meaning I wouldn’t understand until many years later…
“One day, you’ll wish you had listened to me,” Mike said.
Over the years that followed, those words came back to me hundreds of times.
Especially on the day the school called and told me that several children had surrounded my son and were calling him “the little old man.”
But I still had no idea that an old notebook he kept hidden beneath his bed would one day fall into someone else’s hands…
and after that, the entire world would know Jake’s name.
That morning at the hospital, I didn’t sign the papers.
I put the pen down on the table and said,
“I’m taking him home.”
Mike stared at me for a long time.
There was no anger on his face.
There was something worse.
Disappointment.
“Do you understand what you’re doing?”
“No,” I replied. “But I know what I can’t do. I can’t leave my son here just because I’m afraid of losing him.”
Mike picked up his coat.
At the door, he stopped and looked at our baby one last time.
Then he said,
“I can’t live every day waiting for his last one.”
And then he left.
