Children's Hospital, San Francisco, the evening of March 5, 1981. I held my first child, stillborn, so briefly. Smoothed his little brow. Too drained by too many hours of drug-induced labor, still groggy from the gas they gave me after I tried to punch someone who was pushing painfully hard on my belly, trying to turn the baby. I wasn't thinking clearly, didn't grasp that this would be my only moment with him. I knew he was dead days before, but my heart never gave up on him, and the finality of this scene escaped me. The medical team was just glad that I survived; the baby was already a non-entity to them. I just wanted to sleep, he was whisked out of my arms, and I was taken back to bed. When I awoke, the full horror hit me; my chance to know my son had come and gone. I have spent my life trying to re-live those few seconds that I held him and saw him, trying not to let them recede into foggy memory, and wishing that I had held him for an hour, not a minute.