A tragic thing occurred yesterday. Producer and singer John Legend and his wife, model and TV personality Chrissy Teigen, lost their baby, Jack. The young tiny baby was still inside his mother’s womb and the pregnancy was only halfway through. Little Jack would’ve been the couple’s third child and Teigen took to social media to share the ordeal that first began a couple of weeks ago when she was put on bedrest. 

On Sunday, Teigen was hospitalized at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center due to excessive bleeding. Tuesday, she wrote on Twitter that she had just experienced a “really scary morning.” Teigen explained: “Huge clot, almost save-worthy. The scramble to hear the heartbeat seemed like hours. I never thought I’d relief sigh so much in my liiiife.” 

With the loss of fluid, bags and bags of blood transfusions were needed. Sadly, despite the profuse amount of fluids given to the tiny child inside, Teigen shared on social media that their baby did not survive. “We are shocked and in the kind of deep pain you only hear about, the kind of pain we’ve never felt before.”

“On this darkest of days, we will grieve, we will cry our eyes out,” she added, “but we will hug and love each other harder and get through it.”

The emotional post and brutal honesty of the celebrity couple’s pain led to an outpour of love, prayers, and support for the couple whom most of us, let’s face it, don’t really know. But as countless women and families have grieved the loss of a child through miscarriage, the pain brought about a moment of unity on social media as couples and women shared their own experiences, grieving once again for a lost little boy or girl.

Media reports say Teigen was about 20-25 weeks pregnant, old enough for some babies born that soon to survive. Some may remember micro-preemies, Baby Saybie, or just earlier this year, Baby Gloria, all leaving the hospital after months in the NICU, defeating the odds against them.

But tragically, many babies don’t survive, piercing the hearts of many women and men, scarring siblings who waited patiently to be big sister or brother. So we cried for Baby Jack. A little young one with a name and a mommy and daddy that love him, anxiously waiting to bring him home. In this unified moment, the world seems to recognize the reality of life, of a child formed inside the mother's womb, waiting to take its first breath. 

As Catholics, we recognize the sanctity of life from conception to natural death. And for brief moments, we think the rest of the world does too. We, as Catholics, even bury our lost children because, as we know, made in the image and likeness of God, each one will never be forgotten. And we wait in the joyful hope of meeting those dear little ones when we depart from this temporal world.