“He asked her, ‘Do you see Alley?’” Renee said. “She kind of sat up and nodded. That was the first and last time she woke up, but she got to see her baby, and that was good.”

Time passed, days blurred together. At one point, Heather seemed to take a turn for the better, but it was a short-lived hope and at 2:14 the morning of Jan. 2, the hospital staff came to the baby’s room and told Jason that Heather’s heart had given out.

By 4 a.m., her lungs had collapsed, and at 8 a.m. Jason was told to bring in the family members who weren’t already present.

At 9:52 a.m., Heather died holding Jason’s hand.

She was buried in Natchez Jan. 6, the same day Jason took the baby home.

In the house, he found the nursery prepared.

“When I walked into that room, I just looked up at the sky and said, ‘Baby, thank you, because I would be lost if I had to do this,’” he said.

Even as he mourned his wife, Jason was a new father and adopted a routine. A seven-year veteran of the oil field, he was still used to keeping night shifts, and every four hours, he would wake up, change the baby, feed her and try to catch some sleep himself.

Members of his church — Cliff Temple Baptist Church — kept Jason stocked with meals, and family members helped when they could. He found a daycare that could take a pre-mature baby so he could return to work. Slowly, life found a rhythm.

Then, there was last Sunday.

Jason was in church, holding the baby when he felt her suddenly go limp. He looked down, and his gut bubbled with fear at the sight of the tiny, purple infant in his hands.

But amongst the fear, a moment of grace. A churchgoer — Donnie McIlwayne — knew infant CPR, and after using a CD case to see if the baby was breathing, was able to revive her.

Jason lives around the corner from the church, and took the baby home while his mother wiped her down with cold wipes to keep her screaming — screaming, after all, is breathing. An ambulance took Alley to the hospital.

“I will forever owe my life to Donnie,” Jason said. “At the hospital they told us we caught her in the second stage of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, which hardly anybody ever does.”

The scare was caused, Jason said, by an apnea related to Alley’s early birth that doctors have said she will outgrow. Other tests have shown her heart is fine.

Alley is scheduled to be released from the hospital Monday, and Jason said he will drive to Flowood to pick up a breathing monitor “on a hope and a prayer.” The monitor is the only way he’ll be able to find a moment of rest.

“If I don’t get that monitor, I will be up all night, watching that baby, making sure she keeps breathing,” he said.

“The other day I was talking to her, telling her, ‘Don’t you scare me like that. Don’t you ever turn that color again.”

Heather’s death lingers with Jason, and it’s difficult to believe young people can — in this day — die from the flu. Feelings of guilt are a stage of mourning, and the conflicting medical advice he heard during the ordeal still echo through his head.

Some said nothing could be done because of the pregnancy. Others said options were available, and Heather would have lived if she had received treatment in time.

“I feel like I failed her, like I let her down,” Jason said. “Maybe I didn’t fight the doctors enough, that we didn’t go back and rebel against those hospitals more.”

But he also has a few moments he will never take back. Taking Heather’s daughters — they’re living with their father in the Buffalo  community — to see her before she was flown to Jackson is one of those.

“I am glad that those girls got their moment to say goodbye to their mother, and to hear her say, ‘I love you back,’” he said.

He also sees direction and purpose in the course things have taken, even the scary moments.

“I believe the Lord had a lot to do with (Alley), and it was the Lord who had me in church that Sunday, where Donnie McIlwayne knew how to do CPR on a baby,” he said.

“We’re going to be in church every chance we get.”

Jason has worn a hairband Heather handed him just before she was airlifted on his wrist since that day, never taking it off.

There have been moments he has felt a phantom tap on his shoulder, the way Heather used to swat at him flirtatiously — and sometimes furiously — to get his attention.

“I feel it, and I can almost hear her saying my name — Jason — like she used to, to get my attention,” he said. “Never more than a second later, I’ll hear the baby cry. It’s like she’s telling me to go take care of the baby.”

It’s moments like those, and the more concrete reminders — the nursery, the baby’s hair, the stream of family and friends who still stop by — that help him know life will move forward. The memories they had planned to make won’t be there, but in some indelible way, Heather remains.

“I don’t feel like we are alone in this world,” Jason said. “Just because mama is gone doesn’t mean we are alone.”