To be a mother is to know fear. Yes — it’s to know love, and joy, and pride and all those life-affirming emotions that make it a worthwhile experience — but on the flip side is the knowledge that our very joy rests on the frightening fragility of human existence. Though a deep-seated superstition (that I intellectually scoff at) makes this hard to type, I can’t imagine anything more devastating than losing my child. I think just about any mom will name that as her worst fear — unimaginable, terrifying, and the dark thing that makes us hold our children close, and sneak into their rooms to check their sweet breath as they sleep even though they have long outgrown the danger of SIDS. But — a close second on that list of fears is the loss of our very selves — the thought of leaving our children motherless.

That is just what happened to a 33-year-old new mother named Jennifer last month in Orlando. She died in her sleep, unexpectedly, leaving her six-week-old daughter Sara without a mama, and her husband Ivan alone in the world with a brand new baby.

This is the kind of thing that I try to avoid reading — there are so many sad stories in the world, and I don’t really need fuel to add to the cold fire of my fear that will surely burn as long as I live. But several moms that I follow on Twitter tweeted the same link Thursday, saying: “Moms team up to pump breast milk for newborn whose mom died. Amazing!” so I clicked. And found this story, on the Orlando Sentinel’s “Moms at Work” blog . There aren’t any details about why Jennifer died – in fact there aren’t even any last names – but the story, about a little baby who was breastfed, lost her mother, and is still living on breast milk, was incredible to me.