Crash Landing — A Mother’s Journey Into Grace
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“She May Be Lying Down, But She May Be Very Happy”
Jody Gelb had a wonderful nine-month pregnancy. Then, in the hospital, everything moved fast and went wrong — her water broken early, labor induced, an epidural that couldn't keep pace with the pain, and finally a doctor's calm voice saying the baby wasn't happy where she was. Louisa was delivered with forceps, wasn't breathing, and was rushed to the NICU while Jody and her husband sat alone in a hospital room, not knowing if their daughter was alive.
Days later, a nurse faxed Jody "Welcome to Holland" — a well-known poem by Emily Perl Kingsley that’s often handed to parents of children with special needs. It’s about a metaphorical trip to Italy that lands you somewhere unplanned but ultimately lovely. Jody appreciated it. But it didn't capture what she and her husband were living through. Holland was calm and familiar. This felt more like landing somewhere foreign and at war: a language she didn't speak, no guidebook, and a crash landing instead of a flight in. That image became the opening page of her memoir.
What follows isn't a story about hitting bottom and climbing out all at once — it's a story about incremental hope. Jody and Cody talk through the year after Louisa's diagnosis with infantile spasms and a serious brain injury, when Jody found herself hoping for smaller and smaller things in a way that somehow kept her moving forward instead of crushing her: maybe Louisa will just have a limp, then maybe a wheelchair, then, eventually, something steadier than any of that — that Louisa was happy, connected, and deeply loved, exactly as she was. Jody credits a neurologist's one careful question, "can she still be okay?" with giving her exactly as much truth as she could hold at the time, no more.
From there, the story widens. Jody describes the years that followed as genuinely happy ones — Louisa loved Sesame Street, had a sense of humor, and could answer yes-or-no questions with a turn of her head. She talks about the decision to give Louisa a tracheostomy as her health grew more fragile, and about the community of families with medically complex children that, in Jody's words, helped her heart open instead of harden. And then she tells the story of the night everything ended: Louisa's death.
This is a conversation that holds catastrophe and grace in the same hand without asking one to cancel out the other.
“She may be laying down but she may be very happy”
Jody's memoir is available at jodygelb.com.
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please visit the Iliff Death Care Collective.
>>Theme Music by Michael Shynes, "The Other Side"<<
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