When I was very young my family visited my relatives for Christmas in Alabama. My aunt was about to deliver any day. The day came a couple days after Christmas. My parents and brother and I had gone for a drive that day around Mobile Bay. When we got back to my aunt's house that evening we were shocked to learn that she had died in childbirth that day.
It had come down to this: The doctors could save her, but at the cost of her baby's life. But she told them no, put the baby's life first.
It was such a sad time--but I was only 8 and it never hit me so hard until I became a parent myself.
It's all so impersonal now, on sterile, plastic clad beds, masked strangers milling about like old time stagecoach bandits each waiting to snatch your precious baggage as though to claim it for their own; no children allowed, only giddy in-laws whose smug smiles will soon turn to scowls when MIL#1 doesn't get the latest E-Pic before MIL#2.
But, when push comes to shove, the real you or me or whoever comes out.
This dear woman's family will have a community of friends, that's the way most people still are; they just don't want to admit it.