The sheer strength and courage of our fellow mums around the world never fails to impress and amaze us, and the story of what Sarah Rieke did for her best friend Lauren Casper will surely touch your heart today.
The friends, both from the US, have had a taste of viral stardom this month after sharing the incredible story of how they bonded through a bittersweet time of joy and tragedy.
Lauren and Sarah were delighted when, back in 2012, they were both preparing to welcome children into their lives – Sarah was pregnant with a daughter, while Lauren was in the process of adopting a baby girl of her own.
Matters took a turn for the tragic, however, when Sarah learned during her 20-week scan that her baby would not survive for long outside of the womb. Indeed, Baby Evie passed away just four hours after entering the world.
In the midst of her grief, and with Lauren after welcoming daughter Arsema into her new home, Sarah did something astonishing: she offered to breastfeed Arsema with the milk her body was still producing for Evie.
Writing about this beautiful gesture from Sarah, Lauren told Today.com: “Sarah was longing to do something meaningful and, in a way, her feeding my daughter helped heal a tiny piece of her broken heart.”
On her own website, Sarah wrote about the experience in detail, in a post entitled ‘On Feeding My Friend’s Daughter When I Couldn’t Feed Mine’.
In the piece, Sarah is incredibly modest, as she writes: “Pumping milk for Arsema after Evie passed away was a blessing for me. It was good for me to sit and be still and take the time to think and reflect on Evie’s life and pray for Arsema’s future…Even though readers are commenting on what an amazing woman I am for making that decision, it really felt so normal. Logical, really. A blessing, certainly, on both sides. But maybe not as saintly as others seem to think.”
One thing is for sure: these women and their families are beyond lucky to have each other.