“Twins! Nice. Two-for-one!”

Buddy, you have no idea. 

Today’s email is a departure from standard Parental Advisory material. These will be infrequent, I promise. 

This post includes content about child loss. But it’s not a post about child loss. It’s about… Perspective? Life? What it means to be human? 

I write this newsletter for myself. To help me remember the things that happen and the way they make me feel. Fortunately, it’s a lot of hilarious things. Sometimes it’s not! 

So without further ado… the story of our second child, Luke. 

These are not the words you want to hear from a doctor on your child’s due date. But they were the ones we heard after my wife’s water broke at 3am, after she expressed concern about not feeling him move, after our midwife came over and struggled to find a heartbeat, after we rushed to the hospital, and after staring at an impossibly dark, motionless sonogram. 

If this is a dream, I’d like to wake up now.

I looked at my wife, who had tears in her eyes and wore an expression that said, “I’ve been preparing for this. I am not surprised. I am just profoundly sad.”

It quickly dawned on me that the hardest part was still ahead of us. 

We got to our room, which was oddly large but comprised only a bed and an astonishingly uncomfortable chair. Phone calls to parents were made. 

Our shock and disbelief transitioned into “Okay, this is really happening,” which then, by the grace of some force unknown, became, “We have a beautiful daughter at home. We have each other. We have so much… We’ll get through this.”

My wife was induced with Pitocin, labor got underway, and when things really got moving, she stationed herself at her preferred birthing location (reverse on the toilet) and rocked the birth. It was just the two of us in that dark bathroom. I caught the baby. He was a perfect, beautiful little angel and we named him Luke. 

We spent the next two and a half hours holding him, looking at him. And we cried a lot.

It is a very strange thing to hold a lifeless baby. There’s nothing right about it, except the love you feel.

At some point you have to decide that it’s time to say goodbye. You can’t hold them forever, even though you want to. Even when some part of you is still hoping that maybe, just maybe, he’ll open his eyes.

The time we spent at the hospital felt like a dream, completely disconnected from reality—strange feelings, strange places, strange events. We got home, showered, got into bed, stared at each other.

Did that actually happen?

But it sets in pretty quickly.

In the weeks that followed, we dealt with the pain of the loss, the pain of talking about the loss, the emotional pain of suppressing my wife’s milk supply while every hormone in her body was asking “where is the baby?”, and the pain of having to continue living and providing while carrying the weight of something so tragic. It was a hard time. But not without several welcome punctuations of humor and clarity.

Our daughter, who had just turned two, got a new doll with a bunch of new-doll accessories for her birthday. One afternoon, in our playroom area, she was upset about misplacing the doll. 

“I have all the baby’s stuff, but no baby.”

To which my wife replied, “Same.”

We both laughed at what was, without question, the darkest joke of all time.

Another moment I’ll never forget was a text exchange with a good friend.

“Live your life to honor him.” I’d rate that as some of the best advice I’ve ever gotten.

We talked a lot. We made a huge effort to be grateful for everything we have. And we were relieved to learn that it was a random cord accident—nothing genetic, just horrible luck. About six months later, my wife was pregnant again. 

Our tech at the 20-week ultrasound (we skipped the 14-week because we were confident in the dating) was, I’ll be generous and just say, lacking in bedside manner.

“Is this your… first ultrasound… for this pregnancy?” he asked.

“Yes.” My wife and I looked at each other, both thinking, where is this going?

“Well…”

What the fuck, what is it now?

“I guess I have to be the person to break some…”

Why is he pausing for so long??

“…news to you.”

Spit it out!!!!

“I see two viable babies in there.”

I remember looking at my wife, stunned, feeling like I had just received a gift from God.

It quickly dawned on me that the hardest part was still ahead of us. 

We welcomed two healthy babies into the world in August 2025. I’ll spare you the details of the birth and just say that it was uncomplicated, unmedicated, and epic beyond belief.

I’ll go so far as to call it transcendent (but you had to be there).  

At the very least, you know a bit more about me; this isn’t exactly a topic to lead with when you meet someone new. 

Writing it brought many of the emotions of that day, and the months that followed, right back to the surface. The truth is, I hadn’t reflected on Luke’s birth in a while. Life has been so non-stop with the twins and our daughter and work that he just hasn’t been on my mind.

I’m grateful to feel them again.

They remind me that perspective is a well you must actively draw from. In drawing from it today, my appreciation for everything that kids are—even when they’re acting like straight-up mean little fuckers—is totally renewed. 

I’ll leave you with some words from Leonard Cohen: 

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in

Have a great day. Hug your kids. See you next time.

-Will

If you enjoyed this newsletter, please consider forwarding it to your parent friends. If this email was forwarded to you, consider subscribing to Parental Advisory here. Outside of this newsletter, I run a financial planning firm that pretty much exclusively serves millennial families with 1) variable incomes from sales or sales-adjacent jobs and/or 2) concentrated wealth (usually from a lot of employer stock).