LA HAIRCUT MOBILE

When I was a baby, my mother and her friend Isabel, who'd been told her own child would die, decided to share me. Years later, Isabel and were bound by something else — we each learned what it means for a mother to lose a child.

Readers’ photos of moms and their little look-alikes.

There's a grim, rarely talked-about twist to all that medical know-how doctors learn to save lives: It makes them especially good at ending their own.