Laura endured profound and permanent brain damage during her birth 51 years ago.

Although cognitively impaired and having little volitional motor control, her joie de vivre was infectious.

Seeing the signs of awareness and happiness shining in her eyes and smile lit up the hearts of caregivers.

She managed to reach out to those caring for her and to build reciprocal love from which she too thrived.

Some people report experiencing an ineffable dimension after years of practicing meditation. Others do so following ingestion of psychedelics, others following a near-death experience. Laura seemed to experience bursts of transcendent joy of a similar kind, though she couldn’t tell us what made her eyes shine and her face light up in such ecstasy. Her smiles could fill a room, and special caregivers felt the glow of her spirit and experienced a lift in mood and a sense of meaning from their interactions with her.

She was born in the maternity ward of a suburban hospital that had up-to-date equipment and well-trained doctors. Her mother went into labor close to midnight, having spent months practicing breathing techniques and hoping for a natural delivery. Per standard procedure, her fetal heart rate was monitored, and a resident entered the room occasionally. But neither her obstetrician nor any of their colleagues made an appearance. Shortly before dawn, signs of fetal distress became severe enough that a doctor was summoned and a decision was made to perform a C-section.

During the hours that followed, she experienced numerous seizures, and within a day, the hospital neonatal specialist told her parents that she was unlikely to develop beyond the cognitive level of an infant, and that we should consider instructing the hospital to abstain from special efforts to keep her alive. However, the consulting neurologist stabilized her seizures with orally administered medications, and she was released to home care. As the neonatologist had predicted, she failed to achieve standard developmental milestones. From age two onwards, she would have round-the-clock care in specialized nursing facilities.

Before she was moved to a new pediatric facility at age nine, due to a need for greater medical attention, there seemed little by which to assess her response to particular people or stimuli. Her new facility’s recommendation that she transition to tube feeding seemed to be a turning point. She had long struggled to swallow her pureed meals. With better nourishment and less stress from near-choking episodes, she began to thrive in her special way. She still could not walk, stand herself up, crawl, roll over in bed, or raise herself to sit, but we began to see smiles on her face when she heard the voice and felt the gentle touch of trusted caregivers.

Each morning, a nursing assistant would take her for a bath or sponge-bathe her in bed, dress her, position her on a special sling, and hoist her into her wheelchair to be brought through the facility’s hallways to her school or adult day program room. Her eyes could not discriminate shapes, though she responded to the switching on or off of ceiling lights. She experienced her world primarily through sound.

Around age ten, an aide who had taken a special interest in her found a small bell to dangle from the handle of her wheelchair, bringing her sensory pleasure when the chair swerved or passed over a threshold. The bell and a windchime that later replaced it created a signature by which all would know Laura was coming. Although her mental age remained below that of a toddler, she seemed to grow in spirit, showing increasing delight in the relationships special caregivers formed with her, and responding remarkably to music.

Most in my family are musical, and I love to play my favorite tunes on a keyboard, and at times to sing along. With Laura living within driving distance of my home, I would bring a small electronic keyboard on my visits, and she appeared to enjoy that music, as well as various tapes and old records we would play for her. When the facility obtained a larger and better keyboard with dozens of settings, she seemed to enjoy our music sessions even more.

I’ll never forget the days on which I would wheel her over to a position beside the keyboard while she seemed to be turned inward, unattentive even to my voice. On some magical days, after 10 or 15 minutes of music, something inside her would seem to awaken, and soon she would be beaming, eyes shining and fully alive, remaining engaged for the following hour or more. Many times, I was amazed by how excited she would become during a song’s best melodic hooks, as if she had an intuitive appreciation not only for the rhythms but for the melody and chord progressions. When I finally returned her to her room for her scheduled bed rest, the person who had appeared to be “zoned out” an hour before was beaming so brightly that the staff members we passed would all light up from her glow.

A few weeks before her unexpected passing, her day program teacher hosted a 50th birthday party for her in their classroom, with Laura sitting behind the cakes and smiling as teachers and staff took refreshments and came up to congratulate her. All of her facility’s residents were similarly disabled and fragile, with unpredictable life expectancies, few reaching 50, and often, a fresh memorial to a departed resident would be there, reminding us of this fragility as we passed through its lobby at the beginning of our visits. On that birthday, a little over a year ago, it was beautiful to see how many people felt a connection with her.

As it would happen, many of the same people gathered more somberly for a “celebration of life” event marking her departure from our lives seven weeks later. Even a night nurse whom I had never met made the effort to be there, and she and a dozen other staff and volunteers told me personally as the gathering broke up about how much they had loved Laura and how special a connection they felt each time she bestowed her special smile on them in response to their hello, their touch, or their playing of a musical toy or recording.

In the present state of science, we cannot know what Laura’s inner world was like, so we can’t dismiss the neonatologist’s judgment that it might not be worthwhile to have made efforts to keep her alive after her traumatic birth. It appears, though, that a beautiful fighter of a person survived that initial trauma and slowly blossomed, learning how to connect, to draw others’ love towards her, to beam back her own joy and love so effusively, and to thrive, in her way, from the love that came to surround her.

As her beloved nurse, Michelle Smith, wrote in remembrance: “God has a job for everyone to do. Laura was a quiet teacher. She showed me what pure innocence was, and also pure love and joy… if you earned her trust, she showed you all the more.” And as her favorite teacher, Haydee Adams, wrote: “Discovering how to open the door to extraordinary and beautiful worlds like yours has forever changed me. Next to you, I learned to close my eyes and enjoy the endlessly beautiful sound of your musical instruments. I am humbly grateful for being chosen to be a part of your life, just as you are a part of mine. You will forever be missed and very loved.”

May her memory continue to be a blessing for years to come.

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