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.
But the mood changed fast. Michal Lura Friedman, 44, of Manhattan, New York, passed away five hours after having a Caesarean section. After the catastrophe, her distraught husband Jay Snyder, 41, is forced to raise their twins Jackson and Reverie by himself.
Doctors decided to do a C-section on November 25, 2021 – three days ahead of schedule because Ms Friedman had high blood pressure.
After she gave birth to a 6lb girl at 4:48pm and a 7lb 12oz boy at 4:50pm doctors tried to stop her bleeding.
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.
The New York University Langone Medical Center, where she received treatment, expressed their “deepest sympathy” to the family.
Mr. Snyder, who recently moved the family into a Manhattan apartment, is now raising the kids in the wake of everything that has happened.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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 object of her love—she did so with ease, generosity, constancy, and purity. She was really a kid at heart.”
