He was our newest volunteer for the infant comfort program.

I need to explain what that is, because on paper it is a simple, beautiful thing, and it is also the reason he was standing in my unit.

Some of our babies have no one. They are born too early and too sick to parents who cannot be found, or cannot cope, or cannot stay.

And a body that new, that raw, does not thrive on medicine alone. It needs to be held.

It needs the weight and warmth and heartbeat of another human being, because that is the language it was built to understand before it was built to understand anything else.

So we have volunteers — vetted, trained, background-checked, cleared — who come and sit and hold the babies no one else can hold.