We name her Adeline

As we were driving to the funeral home, Sean looked at me and said "Do you think we should give the baby a name?" I burst into tears.  But I had been thinking about this too.

"Yes, I said.  I think we should name her Adeline."

Adeline is the most beautiful name I could think of.  It seems fitting for her, such a tiny and beautiful thing.  Selfishly, it's also a pretty rare name, so I don't think I'll have the shock I would feel of hearing it mentioned all the time, in the same way we would feel if we named her Emma, Madison, or some other trendy name.

When we got to the funeral home, a very polite man with a diamond encrusted wedding ring escorted us to a room with leather chairs.  He filled out the paperwork and Sean answered his questions while I quietly sobbed.

"Did she have a name?" the man asked.

"Yes," answered Sean, "Adeline."

I cried even harder.

The man really was very kind. He told us they would cremate our daughter for $153.00. Which seemed  shockingly low.  We were too numb to process the cost, or anything else really.

I watched the man with the diamond ring write our daughter's name for the first time.  He was filling out the cremation orders.  He asked us if we wanted to send out an obituary to the papers, but we said no.  How could we write an obituary for someone we didn't know?

It was a really hard day, but I think giving her a name was a step in the right direction, for us at least.  It has given us a chance to think of her in a different way--it's been a way to try and give her some of the respect and dignity she deserved, and to think of her as an entity apart from the painful memory of her birth and death.