Nobody saw this coming when you arrived here, 18 critical weeks short of your due date.  At the very least, it was a distant, faint hope rather than a “discharge plan”. 

And yet. 

This moment illustrates why, sometimes, hospital “discharge” gets renamed “release.”

Because here we all are, almost seven months later, celebrating: crowds cheering, sparkly pompoms waving, happy tears streaking faces.  You make a stately exit, serenely ensconced in your car seat as you survey the festivities over the oxygen tubing resting on your chubby cheeks. Your parents’ T-shirts proclaim you a “FIGHTER”.

We’re collectively pushing you out into the world, in a second birth, from the pseudo-womb of our NICU. 

So many have labored here together: analyzing blood gases and adjusting ventilator settings; changing, weighing, and tracking the contents of infinitesimal diapers; performing the intricately painstaking surgeries that, in their cutting, kept you intact; measuring nutritional intake, stoma output, vital signs, growth, and developmental milestones; listening to, weeping for, and rejoicing with your parents.  We’ve debated treatment decisions, puzzled over setbacks, celebrated milestones—together.  Always together. 

This is a community occasion. 

Because together we often doubted whether we were doing the right thing by your tiny self.  We would peer into your incubator, in those early days, and systematically, methodically, repeatedly review and rehearse your challenges with knotted-up-inside wonder and dread.  And together we marveled at your resilience as you gradually grew up through all these long days, and nights, and weeks, and months.  

As you leave, you take a piece of each of us; and yet you are not, in the end, ours at all.

Go in peace, little one. And thrive.