Linda Dahlstrom Anderson
ASMP Advocate

As I held my first-born son, Phoenix, in my arms hours after he’d been born, I made up a little song for him. “You are my heart, you are my soul, you are everything to me, pretty Phoenix boy,” went one line of it. I sang it to him every day of his life. As he got older, he’d lock eyes with me and smile when I sang it to him and sometimes coo along. On July 17, 2005, held up by my husband’s arms, I sang it to him for the last time standing before a crowd of 300 at his funeral service. He died at the age of 7 months and 4 days from Meningitis B, only 12 hours after his first symptom. It was the first time he’d ever been sick.

When he died, the world cracked into two – a time before and the time after. Everything I knew was shattered. The world didn’t feel like home again for a very long time.

I often think of Phoenix now in two parallel worlds – at that age he was when he died, my brilliant, loving, sparkly baby who was on the verge of crawling, and at the age he’d be if he’d lived. I don’t know exactly what he’d be like now – that future was stolen by death. I imagine that he’d be a college student, but I don’t know what he’d be majoring in, who he’d love, the kind of music he’d like, or what his relationship would be like with his beautiful younger brother, who was born after he died.

But at the center of all of it – past present, known and unknown, is love. I had the honor of getting to be his mother for his whole life. Phoenix will always be my son. Death is no barrier for that kind of love.

We have a vaccine now for the disease that killed Phoenix. When my other son, Gabriel, was vaccinated for Meningitis B, I thought about how the tiny amount of liquid in the syringe could have saved Phoenix’s life – and how many other lives it will save.

I’d been a journalist for a long time after before Phoenix died. After, I focused on health and science reporting, partly as a way to better understand what happened to him. I was the health editor for msnbc.com and global health editor for NBC News Digital for many years. Today, I am the director of storytelling at a Fortune 500 company. Everyone’s story matters – and the work that the American Society for Meningitis Prevention does will help ensure that more children will live long enough to tell their own, each chapter opening to new possibilities.