They could not stop their children’s deaths, so they found ways to love their children’s brief lives. The ecology of our human family entrusts to us the care of the vulnerable: our unborn children long before we see their faces, the dependent infant, the ill, the injured, the aged — each in whom we see our own weakness and for whom we feel the pull to help and comfort, to carry them in their coming and becoming —and to grieve their leaving. It is the beginning of a life full of many good things for the child and for those who give life, as our poor straws of parenting are, with time and love, spun to gold.