Authors Note: “Angels” by Emma Nissen plays by default whenever I turn the ignition, a small ritual at the start of each drive. I first heard her perform a few years ago and was drawn to her voice and her engaging, playful artistic style. It has become a reminder that heaven is near, and it also returns me to an impactful season of my life, which I share below.

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In my twenties I wandered into an antique shop in Mississippi and found a picture of an angel watching over two children crossing a bridge. I couldn’t buy it then, but I remembered it. Years later, after our first child was born, I found a copy and hung it in the nursery. It stayed with our family as we welcomed children two, three, and four. Seven and a half years after our “last” baby, I became unexpectedly pregnant at forty. All the checkups were routine. Nothing suggested what was coming. But when our daughter was born, it was immediately clear something was seriously wrong. The nurses brushed her cheek against mine for only a moment before rushing her to the ICU. Soon we learned that she had several serious, life-threatening heart defects. She was life-flighted to Primary Children’s Hospital while I lay in recovery—stunned, scared, and profoundly helpless. That helplessness stayed with me throughout the next month.

My husband rushed to tell our older children, then drove with a friend to the hospital. But when he arrived, officials barred him from entering, as he had recently had the swine flu. He and our friend had gone, intending to give our newborn a blessing, a familiar practice for members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) when someone is gravely ill. When inquiring if our friend could go see her, the head nurse was insistent that this was not allowed as he was not related. Finally, the attending physician stepped in. “We are all tired,” he said firmly. “This baby is very sick. We can make an exception.” He offered to assist in the blessing himself, as he happened to be a member of our denomination. It was a sweet, tender mercy in a moment that was beyond our control.

As a side note, we had wanted to give our baby a middle name, but could not come up with one. Our other children had middle names that had family significance, but nothing felt right for our new baby Abigail. The next day, as we walked through the lobby at Primary Children’s Hospital, we stopped short at a familiar face in a framed portrait—my great-great-aunt, Anna Rosenkilde. We had forgotten her advocacy with President Heber J. Grant helped bring the hospital into being.

Anna Rosenkilde served as the hospital’s first superintendent and primary medical authority, overseeing patient care and training physicians, nurses, and staff for approximately 23 years. The children affectionately called her “Mama Rose,” a name she earned by caring for little ones whose parents could not remain with them. She even took in one boy permanently after his legs were amputated and his family abandoned him. Standing before her portrait, the middle name “Rose” made immediate and perfect sense. I felt a distinct impression that my great-great aunt was near—watching over our baby as she had watched over so many children in her mortal life.

In those days, I prayed desperately for angels to attend our baby in the hours when we could not. Thoughts of angels pressed in with unusual urgency. I began to think more about verses from the Bible and LDS specific ones: 

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Psalms 91:11-12 “For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways. They shall bear thee up in their hands…”

Hebrews 1:14 “Are not all angels ministering spirits sent to serve those who will inherit salvation?”

Moroni 7:37 “Behold I say unto you… angels appear and minister unto men…”

Doctrine and Covenants 84:88 “I will be on your right hand and on your left, and my Spirit shall be in your hearts, and mine angels round about you, to bear you up.”

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After a few long days, surgeons at Primary Children’s told us that Abigail’s condition was beyond their surgical expertise. They had operated on each of her defects in isolation, they explained, but the combination made her situation far more complex. They recommended transferring her to Stanford. 

We are forever grateful for their humility. At Stanford, we saw another baby with heart conditions similar to Abigail’s who had been life-flighted across state lines. Her surgeons’ overconfidence had made her condition even more precarious, and they ultimately abandoned the operation mid-procedure before sending her to the specialists at Lucile Packard. The transfer required an Air Force cargo plane because it was large enough to carry the heart–lung bypass machine. She arrived in extremely serious condition. Her circulation had deteriorated so much—after prolonged instability and time on bypass—that her limbs were turning black and blue.

With the help of these humble physicians, the support of skilled social workers, and dear friends in respiratory therapy and Life Flight, Abigail was flown to Palo Alto, California.

Stanford’s cardiac NICU was stark: a large room lined with infants in plastic bassinets, each one hooked to humming machines. But the nurses, on their own time, made signs to place at the end of each baby’s bed. It was October, so most were decorated with pumpkins and leaves. When they brought Abigail’s, it was covered in angels. They could not have known angels were the very thought I had been clinging to. It was a small, but significant gesture.

While I sat beside Abigail’s bed drifting in and out of exhausted sleep, a hospital chaplain stopped by. She handed me a card. On the front was the exact angel picture I had first seen in Mississippi two decades earlier. For me it was a reminder that God often answers prayers with precision that only the recipient can feel.

At the same time, my sister visited the LDS temple to pray for Abigail. She later told me that she distinctly heard a man’s voice behind her saying “Mark has been with Abby the whole time.” It was so clear that she actually turned around to see who it was. Mark is my brother who had recently and tragically passed away. She texted to tell me and I wrote back, “That is exactly what I have been praying for.”

Back home, loved ones and our church congregation fasted and prayed. Their support was its own kind of ministering—evidence that sometimes angels come with hands and feet. Life rarely follows the script we imagine, but I believe that a God in Heaven cares. Theologically, scripture frames angels not as distant, ethereal beings but as “ministering spirits”—sent “to bear us up” in ways we often recognize only in hindsight.I believe that we can have angels “round about” to bear us up in our greatest challenges and darkest times. In the words of psychologist Carlfred Broderick, “The gospel of Jesus Christ is not insurance against pain. It is resource in event of pain, and when that pain comes (and it will come because we came here on earth to have pain among other things), when it comes, rejoice that you have resource to deal with your pain.”

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