On July 31, 2008, our son Thomas died. He was almost eight months old. In those eight months, he spent two days at home. All the rest, at the hospital.
I don’t want to tell you about Thomas’s death, but about his life.
Despite a malformation, the doctors had reassured us that they could deal with the problem, and that our child would have a normal life. We wanted this baby, and we wanted to believe them.
That’s how Thomas arrived in our life – in all of our lives, I should say, because he has brothers and sisters, grandparents, uncles, aunts, friends and more.
That’s how we learned about daily life in the hospital. In that strange world, we turned into Thomas’s parents. We did everything we could to let our child know he was loved, to be with him, and to get him ready for the life we had dreamed of for him, and which we could see fading away.
The crocodile gaze is how we described Thomas’s way – right from the first month – of darting his eyes around, with his eyelids half-way down, in order to see who was in his room: a white hospital coat, he would close his eyes; our blue hospital coats, he would open them. That darting glance was manifest proof of his freedom, one of the ways he expressed his character.

With delicacy and affection, a mother describes her child’s short life – those few months that turned her own life upside down. A clear-eyed view of hospital life.