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The doctors try to resuscitate her. Her heart stopped. Simply fucking stopped while giving birth. Deprived of my main purpose to live, mine threatens to give up, the beats irregular and messy.

A black fog engulfs my head, poisoning my sanity. Sounds, colors, and everything else vanish. I can’t think straight, refusing to process the dreadful image in front of me. Paralyzed in place, I don’t even blink, afraid that if I do, I won’t ever see my wife again. The breath lodges in my throat, terrified to manifest that thought into reality. That she will slip somewhere out of reach.

Her pregnancy went well. We found out she was expecting three months after we married because her periods stopped. Our baby boy developed perfectly. Calla didn’t even suffer frommorning sickness and glowed throughout her pregnancy.

I look at the clock, the unforgiven time passing while my life stopped at once, then back to the doctor who prepares the defibrillator.

“Save her,” I shout, ready to raze this world if I lose her. I need my wife. My boy needs his mother.

My son hasn’t stopped crying, letting out the most heartbreaking and piercing sound, completely shattering my heart. I don’t know what to do. Calla would know. She knows everything. She makes everything better.

I am in fucking denial, thinking this is a nightmare. I’ll wake up any moment now with her next to me and her round belly growing between us. When we returned from our honeymoon, we traveled with a third, even though we didn’t know at the time.

Her water broke this morning and we were overjoyed to finally meet him, but then everything turned into a fucking nightmare. They had to perform a C-section, and the anesthetic provoked a cardiopulmonary arrest.

A shock arches her body, trying to revive her. I don’t dare breathe or move, praying for the first time in my life.

The heart monitor beeps a crazy beat, bringing back to life not only my wife but myself, and I have an out-of-body experience.

Her eyes pop open, blinking in disorientation while the doctor dabs at his forehead, the relief clear on his face. The breath I refused to expel rings of pure gratitude and sheer ease––unfiltered fulfillment.

Through blurry eyes, I see her mouthing my name. My ears still ring, but my body listens to her plea, and I erase the distance that separates us.

She takes me in and her brows furrow. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize, please… just keep talking to me…. Just…”keep breathing. She died right in front of my eyes and I am a fucking mess, trying to erase that horrible image stuck in my brain. She’s alive. No one took her from me. I repeat it like a mantra.

I am a fucking wreck. Holding my boy in my arms fills me with a love I didn’t even know existed and still recovering from the horror of seeing my wife stop breathing, in cardiac arrest and not being able to help her, splits me apart.

No bullet, no old age, but something I never took into consideration.

“She needs to rest,” the doctor tells me while I offer her our son.

It feels wrong to have held him first after he was nine months in his mommy’s belly, protected and cherished.

I know our family waits outside for the joyful news, and slowly I realize it is.

I am a father, and we’ll leave the hospital as a trio. I doubt I will forget this ordeal when minutes felt like a hellish forever, trapping me in limbo. No nightmare could come even close to what I went through.

My wife looks so pale and weak after she did such a fabulous job of pushing for the last few hours. Then it all went to shit, and they had to cut her open to save at least one of them.

I could have lost both of them and it would have ruined me.

I could have lost my wife, and that would have destroyed me.

Either way, the only acceptable situation for me would have been to bring them both home.

As soon as I place our boy in her arms, he instantly calms down.

She sobs softly, placing her trembling lips on his head and cheeks. “He’s perfect,” she murmurs, completely enraptured by him while I gaze at my little family—my world with so much love in my heart it spills over, flooding my chest. It’s my turn now to keep our son safe. I’ll keep them both safe, no matter what.

Slowly agony switches to determination.

A deep gratitude washes over me. “He is. Thank you,” I say, choking on my words. As the panic dims, sheer bliss erases anything else.

But she understands all the things I am incapable of saying.

A little while later, my wife is out of danger and recovering well from the C-section. A nurse takes our baby from her, and I watch her with hawk eyes while she cleans him up and takes him to the nursery temporarily.