Birthing my son in the same room where I delivered my stillborn daughter was the closure I didn't know I needed

• I conceived my son after two miscarriages. He was a twin, but I lost the other baby early.
• He was born in the same room where I delivered my stillborn daughter. It was that or the hallway.

This essay contains descriptions of a stillbirth.

When the French midwife finally wheeled me through the maternity-ward halls, leaving the room where I'd been laboring for hours, I was exhausted but also excited and hopeful.

Then she turned a corner, and I recognized the door.

"No. Not this room," I protested, begging her for another room - any other room.

As I was struck with memory and terror, my partner explained to her how, just under a year prior, I had delivered our stillborn daughter in that same room.

A fluke late-term miscarriage of a child who had been un bébé parfait on Monday at her 22-week checkup but had no heartbeat by the following Sunday. A baby who was supposed to have healed our little family from another late-term miscarriage just two years before.

The midwife frowned but insisted that it was the only available delivery room: "It's here or the hallway."

My heart had shut down from so many consecutive losses

The baby I was about to deliver used to be a twin. I had lost his fraternal wombmate just before the end of the first trimester. The loss of that twin made my heart shut down, certain that the other baby, whose elbows and feet I could now see moving across my swollen belly, would also pass away before I could meet him.

For most of my pregnancy, I refused to look down - afraid that acknowledging the fetus would somehow jinx it.

Throughout the final trimester, a midwife visited me at home biweekly to check my blood pressure and the baby's heartbeat, but it wasn't until the last two weeks that I allowed myself to relax and be hopeful. The baby was viable. If something were to happen, he would most likely still survive.

But when I saw that door, I remembered how I begged the midwife on call to induce me so that my dead daughter wouldn't be born on my already living daughter's birthday. I remembered how I felt her being born while I was still standing, caught in my hospital-issue undergarment, and how the midwife sternly commanded me to lie down in case I might crush my daughter's fragile but - we all knew - already deceased body.

I remembered the look on my partner's pale face as the midwife removed the garment and my daughter fell onto the floor of that room with a splash, still entirely in the caul, and that I said a little prayer of gratitude that I wouldn't have that image burned into my memory as he did. I remembered holding her, seeing flashes of my living children in her features: sandpaper bumps on her tiny tongue, downy white hair.

But less than a year later, it was either that room or the hallway.

The labor was my hardest, the first epidural I'd ever needed, but a fat little boy - un bébé parfait - came screaming out only a few hours later.

The midwife respected every point of my birth plan, at which she'd frowned earlier: She didn't wipe the cheesy, white vernix off his skin; nor cut the umbilical cord until the placenta stopped pulsing; nor put drops in his eyes; nor poke his perfect foot for a blood test until the following day. And she allowed him to nurse immediately.

What could have been a terrible experience was instead a full-circle moment of salve for my heart that turned the delivery room from a chamber of horrors into a room of light, celebration, and redemption.