Michal Lura Friedman wanted more than anything to be a mom.
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| Jay and the twins |
With her husband at her side in the OR, Friedman delivered a healthy 6-pound girl at 4:48 p.m. on Nov. 25 and a 7-pound, 12-ounce boy two minutes later.
After seven years of trying, the 44-year-old singer-songwriter became pregnant with twins. The next nine months were the happiest of the Manhattan couple’s lives.
Four and a half hours later, she was dead.
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| Michal Friedman |
“One of the many things that is despicable about this is that she didn’t really even get a chance to hold her kids,” a tearful Snyder told the Daily News. “They held up the babies to her, she saw them and smiled at me, but she was kind of out of it from the drugs. She wanted to be a mother more than anything else in the world.”
Friedman, who described her tiny, 100-pound frame as “5 foot nothing,” had just the usual morning sickness — with no hint that anything terrible could happen as her due date approached.
Because one of the children was a breech baby, a C-section was scheduled for Nov 28. The children were full-term — 38 weeks.
Friedman, who described her tiny, 100-pound frame as “5 foot nothing,” had just the usual morning sickness — with no hint that anything terrible could happen as her due date approached.
Because one of the children was a breech baby, a C-section was scheduled for Nov 28. The children were full-term — 38 weeks.
The day after Thanksgiving, an elated Friedman went to NYU Langone Medical Center for her preop appointment. Her blood pressure was elevated, Snyder said, so doctors made the decision to admit her and do the C-section that day.
A grieving Snyder, and dozens of relatives and friends who loved the spirited and spiritual woman known as “Michal the Girl,” now struggle to understand what happened.
It is an unspeakable tragedy that Snyder, 41, is trying to absorb, replaying in his head her final hours as he watched doctors try to stem her postoperative bleeding, and then saw her slip away on an ICU table.
As doctors worked frantically to save her, he rooted her on.
“Please, please, please stay with me, Michal, you have to be here,” Snyder repeated to himself, just 90 minutes after hearing his newborns wail healthily in the delivery room.
A grieving Snyder, and dozens of relatives and friends who loved the spirited and spiritual woman known as “Michal the Girl,” now struggle to understand what happened.
It is an unspeakable tragedy that Snyder, 41, is trying to absorb, replaying in his head her final hours as he watched doctors try to stem her postoperative bleeding, and then saw her slip away on an ICU table.
As doctors worked frantically to save her, he rooted her on.
“Please, please, please stay with me, Michal, you have to be here,” Snyder repeated to himself, just 90 minutes after hearing his newborns wail healthily in the delivery room.
Breaking down in sobs, Snyder described how the team was able to bring Friedman back after her heart stopped. But as the situation spiraled downward, he was asked him to leave the room.
He was given a private room, where sleeping newborns Jackson and Reverie were brought to him to hold. He whispered over and over in their ears a father’s desperate prayer:
“Please reach out to Mommy to help keep her here.”
About 9:30 p.m., Snyder was given the news.
It was over.
NYU Langone officials declined on Wednesday to comment on Friedman’s death.
“Our deepest sympathies go out to the family at this difficult time,” said a spokesman in a written statement to The News. “Pursuant to HIPAA [confidentiality laws], we are precluded from commenting further.”
The family is waiting for the medical examiner’s report for a conclusive cause of death. The state Health Department is also investigating.
Snyder, an actor who does voice-overs and animation, finds himself in a surreal state, a swirl of emotions and numbness. Nothing is as it was supposed to be. Friedman’s memorial service last week was part wake, part celebration of the babies.
The Inwood apartment the couple just moved to from Brooklyn is eerily quiet, broken only by the sounds of the babies crying. Snyder and his devastated mother-in-law take turns changing diapers and doing the feedings.
Although they need time to mourn and process what has happened, there is no time for that now.
‘It feels like such a ripoff’
The babies’ cries and coos are a call back to the living — that no matter how hard, how painful, how permanent a mother’s death, there is life she created that must be lived.
There are two beautiful babies to be fed, to be sung to, to be held close and
He was given a private room, where sleeping newborns Jackson and Reverie were brought to him to hold. He whispered over and over in their ears a father’s desperate prayer:
“Please reach out to Mommy to help keep her here.”
About 9:30 p.m., Snyder was given the news.
It was over.
NYU Langone officials declined on Wednesday to comment on Friedman’s death.
“Our deepest sympathies go out to the family at this difficult time,” said a spokesman in a written statement to The News. “Pursuant to HIPAA [confidentiality laws], we are precluded from commenting further.”
The family is waiting for the medical examiner’s report for a conclusive cause of death. The state Health Department is also investigating.
Snyder, an actor who does voice-overs and animation, finds himself in a surreal state, a swirl of emotions and numbness. Nothing is as it was supposed to be. Friedman’s memorial service last week was part wake, part celebration of the babies.
The Inwood apartment the couple just moved to from Brooklyn is eerily quiet, broken only by the sounds of the babies crying. Snyder and his devastated mother-in-law take turns changing diapers and doing the feedings.
Although they need time to mourn and process what has happened, there is no time for that now.
‘It feels like such a ripoff’
The babies’ cries and coos are a call back to the living — that no matter how hard, how painful, how permanent a mother’s death, there is life she created that must be lived.
There are two beautiful babies to be fed, to be sung to, to be held close and
kissed. Explanations will come in the years ahead.
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For now Snyder wants their children to know how wonderful their mother was, how he was smitten with her beauty and honesty when they first met in Greenwich Village, how they married atop their Williamsburg apartment building, and how all they talked about was the day they would have kids together.
As he diapered and fed little Rev on Wednesday, Snyder said he has been overcome with thoughts of how happy Friedman would be “doting on the kids, how happy she would be to be holding them and breast-feeding them.
“She did such an amazing job of getting there, and she doesn’t get the payoff to be the mom she was supposed to be. It feels like such a ripoff.”
And while he is grateful for the outpouring of support of friends and family, Snyder is deeply saddened.
“Those kids are going to miss out on her very special kind of love, the love that Michal couldn’t wait to give them,” he said, choking up. “When Michal loved someone, and I was the recipient of that, it was effortless and generous and incessant and pure. She was really a kid at heart.”
According to the Washington-heights-inwood paper: Laura was a practicing Buddhist r"l.
"A memorial for Friedman, a practicing Buddhist, was held Wednesday in Chelsea at the New York Shambhala Center on West 22nd Street."
Read more: http://www.dnainfo.com/20111203/washington-heights-inwood/singer-michal-girl-dies-after-giving-birth-twins#ixzz1fzGvPXyr
“Those kids are going to miss out on her very special kind of love, the love that Michal couldn’t wait to give them,” he said, choking up. “When Michal loved someone, and I was the recipient of that, it was effortless and generous and incessant and pure. She was really a kid at heart.”
According to the Washington-heights-inwood paper: Laura was a practicing Buddhist r"l.
"A memorial for Friedman, a practicing Buddhist, was held Wednesday in Chelsea at the New York Shambhala Center on West 22nd Street."
Read more: http://www.dnainfo.com/20111203/washington-heights-inwood/singer-michal-girl-dies-after-giving-birth-twins#ixzz1fzGvPXyr
