The Apparition in the Delivery Room

I have worked in labor and delivery for eighteen years. I have seen complications, emergencies, and miracles in roughly equal measure. I have watched babies take their first breaths and mothers hold their children for the first time more times than I can count. It is the most joyful place in the hospital, most days, and I am grateful to work there.

But I have also seen things in the delivery room that I cannot explain. And the most vivid of these occurred on a Tuesday night during a difficult delivery.

The patient was a thirty-one-year-old woman I'll call Jenna. She was in active labor with her first child — a girl — and everything had been progressing normally until the baby's heart rate began to show late decelerations, a sign of fetal distress. The obstetrician was called. The NICU team was placed on standby. The room filled with the controlled urgency that accompanies a potentially complicated delivery.

Jenna was exhausted and frightened. She had been in labor for eighteen hours. She was on oxygen. The nurses were repositioning her, adjusting the monitors, talking to her in calm voices, trying to keep her from panicking. And then, in the midst of the chaos, Jenna looked past me at the foot of her bed and said, "Mom?"

I turned. The obstetrician turned. Jenna's husband, standing at the head of the bed, turned. And all three of us saw her — a woman standing at the foot of the bed, perhaps sixty years old, with gray hair and a kind face, wearing what looked like a floral blouse. She was looking at Jenna with an expression of profound love and reassurance. She was not translucent. She was not a shadow or a trick of the light. She was there, fully present, as real as anyone else in the room.

Then she was gone. The entire experience lasted perhaps three seconds. But the effect was immediate and remarkable. Jenna's heart rate — which had been elevated from pain and anxiety — dropped into the normal range. Her breathing slowed. She looked at me and said, quietly, "That was my mother. She died two years ago. She always wanted a granddaughter. She's here."

The baby was delivered fifteen minutes later — healthy, crying, perfect. Jenna named her Margaret, after her mother. And when I charted the delivery that night, I did not mention the woman at the foot of the bed. I didn't know how to describe it in clinical language. But I knew what I had seen. And so did two other people in that room.