What do you do with grief?

Many of us keep it so close we choke on it, which serves no one, not even ourselves.

Rather, we like the example set by Sarah Quartiers. Her baby boy, Cameron, was born on Feb. 16, 2009, five weeks before his due date. “But we never gave up,” say words in a video made by Quartiers’s daughter. The family brought Cameron home after 213 days in the intensive care unit only to have him readmitted to the hospital. He died on Oct. 20, 2009.

In his memory, Sarah Quartiers founded “Project: Cameron’s Story,” in which books are donated to neonatal intensive care units so that parents may read to their tiny premature babies, babies who are often too fragile to be held.

One of those books was given to Jamie Mullins at a time when she most needed it. Mullins is a reading teacher at Farnsworth Middle School in Guilderland so she knows the value of a good book, but this was one she did not expect.

Mullins also knows how to tell a riveting tale. She shares every detail of her story, without hesitation. She says she and her husband, John, took a journey to become parents; she likens that journey to a rollercoaster ride.

“My husband and I had been trying for a long time to have a baby,” Mullins said. They succeeded through in vitro fertilization, where an egg is fertilized outside the body.

Their much-wanted baby arrived on Good Friday, April 18, 2014, after just 34 weeks and five days in his mother’s womb. “I didn’t realize my water broke. I thought I peed my pants,” said Mullins.

A 2:30 p.m. doctor’s appointment on April 18 sent her straight to Albany Medical Center. “We were freaking out. We weren’t prepared. The nursery wasn’t together. We hadn’t decided on a name,” recalled Mullins.

A dozen people, experts in various ways, crowded into the special delivery room. “I was having almost a panic attack,” recalled Mullins. She had long pictured holding her baby after he was born and feeding him, and now she was told this was not to be.

Her baby was delivered at 7 p.m. He weighed 4 pounds, 2 ounces and measured just 16.9 inches. Larger concerns loomed. “Would his lungs be developed enough that he could breathe?” Mullins wondered. He was whisked away by staff.

“I just wanted to see him and hold him,” said Mullins. “We got to have that moment.” But then she couldn’t hold him for another 48 hours.

She and her husband got to see their baby through the clear walls of an isolette. She described the $75,000 isolette as “the most expensive bed he’ll ever sleep in.” She went on, “It looked almost like a space machine,” and could be lowered to her height or raised to her husband’s lofty reach at 6 feet, 4 inches.

As their baby’s tiny body learned to regulate its functions, he ate first through a feeding tube. Carter, as he was named, was in the NICU for 16 days. On the day after he was born, the Mullinses found a book on the couch in the NICU, Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel.

“That’s for you,” said the nurse.

Since John owns a crane company, it seemed like a book that was, indeed, meant for them. “He had to stay in the isolette so all we could do was look at him,” recalled Mullins. “Staring gets overwhelming. You just want to hold him. The only way to bond was to read,” she said.

And read they did. “It gave us some sense of normalcy,” said Mullins. It also gave the family hope.

“You’re thinking, ‘What will things be like 24 hours from now? In a week?’ I thought, ‘I can tell him about this book and tell him, ‘When you were in the hospital, we read this to you.’ In such a scary, unpredictable time, it gives you comfort,” said Mullins.

Carter turned nine months this past weekend and, not surprisingly, he loves to be read to. He’s a healthy child and catching up in growth, now in the 18th percentile for height.

“I wanted to be part of giving back,” said Mullins this week.

She has arranged a book drive at the Guilderland schools. Books collected at Farnsworth Middle School, Altamont Elementary School, and Westmere Elementary School will be donated, through Project: Cameron’s Story, to a dozen hospitals. The books have to be new because they are used in a sterile environment, and should avoid religious themes since families of varied beliefs will be using them. Big books with lots of pictures are best.

Books may be ordered online through Scholastic, which is linked through the school district’s website, guilderlandschools.org. “Books start at just a dollar,” said Mullins. The drive runs through Feb. 13.

The book the Mullinses were given was donated by “Hoosick Falls 1st Grade.”

The Facebook page for Project: Cameron’s Story features a video Mullins said was made by Quartiers’s daughter. It shows pictures of tiny babies — so small and fragile they hardly seem real, anchored by tubes, keeping them alive. Then it shows these same babies, now grown to be healthy, smiling children, surrounded by their families.

Each family holds a sign that says, “Our book gave us...” The words that complete that sentence vary with the family: comfort, strength, confidence, solace, bond, precious moments, hope.

Mullins cries as she talks about Sarah Quartiers.  “She took a tragedy and turned it into a positive thing,” Mullins said. “I can’t imagine losing a child and turning it into something good....I don’t know if she grasps what she does for families.”

We grasp it. Sarah Quartiers gives families something tangible to hold onto, what Mullins, who knows that fear of the future, called normalcy. 

We like the lesson of the particular book that came into the Mullinses’ hands when they needed it. Virginia Lee Burton wrote in the depths of the Great Depression, a time when many were in need, of Mike Mulligan and his steam shovel, Mary Anne. They had outlived their usefulness until Mary Anne heroically dug a cellar for a new town hall.

But the steam shovel was literally in a corner, with no way out. So Mary Anne stayed and became a furnace to heat the community’s meeting place while the steam shovel operator, Mike Mulligan, became its caretaker.

In short, out of hardship, they adapted and found a new purpose, a way to be useful. That’s a good lesson for all of us.

— Melissa Hale-Spencer