‘I was watching my beautiful wife sleep peacefully on the couch.’ Picture: Royce Young/Facebook

It was a typical ultrasound image, showing her teeny tiny baby. Along with the image, she wrote this:

“This is our daughter’s perfect heart. She has perfect feet and perfect hands. She has perfect kidneys, perfect lungs and a perfect liver. Sadly, she doesn’t have a perfect brain. We found out recently she has anencephaly and is terminal,” she wrote.

“Faced with terrible options we have decided to continue the pregnancy to full term so Eva, which literally means life, can grow strong and give life to multiple people through organ donation. This was not an easy decision. For the next 20 weeks I will feel her kick, have the hiccups and we’ll be able to hear her perfect heart beating all while knowing we’ll only get a few short hours with her when she’s born.”

Though public, the message, soft and sad and brave, was shared and commented on by close friends and family. For Keri and her husband, Royce, sharing this image on their Instagram and Facebook pages respectively, was their way of marking the beginning of a heartbreaking journey.

LOVE WHAT MATTERS

About two months later, Royce, a sports writer for ESPN, wrote the following tribute to his brave wife. Picked up by Facebook page Love What Matters, the family’s story has now been shared almost 15,000 times.

“The other night, before I left for New Orleans, I was watching my beautiful wife sleep peacefully on the couch,” Royce begins. “I looked at her laying there, her belly big with our daughter kicking away, a daughter that won’t live more than a few days, and it just overwhelmed me of how incredible this woman is.”

As a writer who travels a lot for work, Royce was inspired to pen his thoughts after meeting “this awesome kid named Jarrius” who was in need of a liver transplant.

Seeing the sick boy hit him hard. It reminded him of the incredible thing his wife was in the process of doing.

He wrote: “I thought back to the moment where we found out Eva wasn’t perfect, and how literally 30 seconds after our doctor told us our baby doesn’t have a brain, somehow through full body ugly crying, Keri looked up and asked, ‘If I carry her full term, can we donate her organs?’ I remember our doctor putting her hand on Keri’s shoulder and saying, ‘Oh honey, that’s so brave of you to say’. Like, how nice of you, but come on. Keri meant it.”

The picture shared by Keri about her baby’s beautiful heart. Picture: InstagramSource:Instagram

Keri’s question to their doctor took Royce by surprise, and in his tribute he describes the feeling as a kind of out-of-body experience.

“There I was, crestfallen and heartbroken, but I momentarily got lifted out of the moment and just stood in awe of her. I was a spectator to my own life, watching a superhero find her superpowers,” he remembers.

“I’ve had a lot of moments stop me in my tracks where I thought, ‘holy crap, this woman I’m married to, lucky me’. But this one was different. It hit me that not only am I married to my very best friend, but to a truly remarkable, special human being.”

The post is an example of compassion and ‘oneness’ with his wife, a woman who, with every kick, hiccup and roll, is reminded that the baby she’s carrying will die.

In it he describes how “the light at the end of her nine-month tunnel will turn into a darkness she’s never felt before” after she give birth the their baby, Eva. For while her body will still have to deal with the difficult post-birth recovery, it is one that will happen “with no snugly, soft, beautiful newborn to look at to remind you that it was all worth it.”

LIFE IS SHORT, BUT MEANINGFUL

Though baby Eva’s life will be incredibly short, Royce points out that her time within the womb still counts and she deserves to meet her parents.

“Donating was on Keri’s mind from darn near the second we found out and while the experience of holding and kissing our daughter will be something we cherish forever, the gift(s) she’s got inside that little body of hers is what really matters,” he wrote.

“There’s another family out there hurting and hoping for a miracle for their baby, knowing full well someone else’s baby will need to die first. Eva can be that miracle.”

But Eva isn’t the only miracle. For this loving and devoted husband, it’s Keri, his wife that blows his mind every day.

“I’m looking at Keri right now and I don’t even have to ask,” he finished his post. “She’s TOUGH. She’s BRAVE. She’s incredible. She’s remarkable. She’s cut from a different cloth … And somehow, she’s my wife. Not that I needed some awful situation like this to actually see all of that, but what it did was make me want to tell everyone else about it.”

Wow. Just, Wow.

This story was published on Kidspot and is republished with permission.