The girls at the home all used secret names. Ann chose Dare.
It was 1953. Ann was sixteen, pregnant and not married. No girl at the Florence Crittenden Home for Unwed Mothers, next to the big hospital in Charlotte, North Carolina, was younger. Ann adored American history, so she took the name of Virginia Dare, the first English baby born in the New World. To the other girls, she was simply Dare.
The night of the bright planet
One bitter December night, a cold front blew into town. The wind came in hard gusts, and low clouds rushed over the rooftops. Ann went out walking, alone, through the empty streets. She wanted a little while with nobody else there: just her, the sky, and the baby she was about to have.
A thin crescent Moon was going down in the west. In the east, Jupiter was coming up, big and bright. It stayed up all night long, like someone keeping her company.
The baby's father, Richard, had a passion for science and the night sky. Later he told her Jupiter was at its brightest that week. Close to nine years would pass before it shone like that again.
Born at 2:42 in the morning
That night the baby came. The doctor had just finished another birth, and he was worn out. He gave Ann ether to dull the pain, and she drifted in and out. Her son arrived at 2:42 in the morning. He was her first child.
She heard him crying and ached to hold him. Then the long night and the ether won, and she fell into a deep, heavy sleep.
While she slept, the sky kept moving. In the four hours that followed, the planets climbed into the eastern sky one at a time. Mars came up. Saturn followed it, and then Mercury. Last of all came Venus, a bright point low in the dawn. Years later her son would tell it just that way, as if the sky had come out to meet him.
Mars, the first one up, did not rise alone. Spica rose with it, the bright star of the harvest in the hand of the Maiden. For centuries, star-watchers have called it a star of gifts.
Before sunrise, a nurse woke Ann. Someone was here to meet her. Her boy was wrapped in a pale blue blanket, and the nurses said there was no lovelier baby in the place. Ann was so proud of him.
The goodbye
Ann hoped she could keep him. By the end of March 1954, she knew she could not. Ann and her mother made the trip to Greensboro by bus, for the last time.
She held her baby close and looked into his eyes. He was far too little to understand, but she explained it all to him anyway. She told him she loved him, and that she always would, for as long as she lived.
Then she prayed for one thing. She asked God to make sure her son knew he was loved, and loved deeply.
Back then, an adoption was final and secret. The records were sealed. A mother could not follow her child, and the child was never meant to find her.
She wrapped him in his blue blanket and laid him in his crib. She pressed a kiss onto her fingertip and rested it on his forehead. Then she said goodbye, using the name she had given him: Richard Michael.
The answer
The boy grew up in another family, as Eben Alexander. He became a brain surgeon. Ann and Richard went on to have two more children, a girl and a boy.
In October 2007, almost fifty-four years after that cold night, they finally met. He sat down with his birth mother, his birth father, his sister and his brother. Ann told him everything. The secret name. The walk in the wind. The crescent Moon and bright Jupiter. The prayer she said over his crib.
About a year later, a sudden, severe illness put Dr. Alexander into a coma. For seven days, he did not wake up.
By his own account, those seven days took him somewhere else entirely. And there, he says, a message came to him. Its first words were these:
You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever.
More than fifty years before, beside a baby's crib, a sixteen-year-old girl had asked God for exactly that.
She had carried two things away from that winter: a prayer, and the memory of a sky. A crescent Moon going down in the west. Jupiter, shining all night long.
Inspired by the true story in Dr. Eben Alexander's book Proof of Heaven.
Every one of us was born under a sky like that. What was it doing the night you were born? Your birth chart is a picture of that moment, and you can see yours for free, just below.