A Facebook story: A mother's joy and a family's sorrow

Shana Greatman, a consultant at the Corporate Executive Board, and Jeff Swers, a scientific researcher for a biotech company, met in 2006 through the dating Web site JDate.com for Jewish singles. Their first date was at the National Gallery; eight months later, they got engaged -- she said yes before he even opened the ring box. Billups, 49, a journalism professor in Michigan and a former Washington Times reporter, knew Shana through Billups's former husband. Billups was hoping the baby would be born on Sept. 17 because that is Billups's birthday.

Talbert, 38, academic director of an Alexandria educational nonprofit group, was Shana's resident adviser at George Washington University in the early 1990s; later, the two lived in the same apartment complex in Arlington County. "Shana always wanted to be a mom and wife. She was so successful in college and law school," Talbert said. "She had all these internships in the Senate, but she always said, 'If money were no object, I wish I could stay at home to be a wife and mother.'"

Shana had a close relationship with her mother, Dana Greatman, 65, of Lancaster, Calif., especially after Shana's father, Lawrence Greatman, a secondary-school teacher, passed away in 2008 from lung cancer. "When I landed at the airport that day, there she and Jeff were waiting for me. Her smile was as big as sunshine, and she was as full as could be," Greatman recalled in an interview. "The only sadness was that Larry wasn't going to be there for it."

Carstensen, 35, a Kansas pediatrician, met Shana on their first day of college, and they quickly became good friends. When Carstensen, who is now pregnant herself, had two miscarriages, Shana was one of the first people she told. Shana also confided in her: "After she and Jeff got married, I knew they were trying to get pregnant," Carstensen said. "And she was worried she wasn't going to be able to have kids. She was so excited about Isaac because adoption was so scary to her."

In true Shana style, even her son's bris was an intricately planned party. Guests nibbled on blue and white M&Ms with the words "Isaac Lawrence" on them, Carstensen said. "It was controlled chaos," she said. "Shana is a fantastic party thrower. But she was getting winded walking up and down the stairs -- and could not carry her own baby up them."

As Shana's ordeal worsened and became more mysterious, Jeff said a doctor jolted him with hard-to-accept news: They could no longer have children. "We had wanted two, maybe three children," Jeff said."Shana was born to be a mom."

Billups, who was communicating with Shana on Facebook from her home office in Haslett, Mich., said she and Shana always teased each other for being "princessy" because they liked the color pink. "I had no sense that her condition was going downhill so fast," she said.

Billups was now getting very worried. "It wasn't until she was being transferred to Hopkins that I wrote Jean and said, 'What is going on?'" she said.

Talbert had just gotten to her Silver Spring home from Johns Hopkins that night and felt depressed. Shana's heart was not pumping enough blood and was failing, symptoms of her peripartum cardiomyopathy, a rare disorder. "Doctors weren't holding out much hope and said that overnight would tell the tale," she said. "It felt normal to talk with Shana through Facebook because she always carried her iPhone. I never got the sense that there was any real divide in her world between her friends and family and what she would do privately."

Currell, an executive director at the Corporate Executive Board, who works out of his home in Minnesota, calls his home office "The Annex" and his children "The Annex Staff." Shana got to know the Currell family when she visited their home during work trips. "She met my kids, my wife, and she was a 'connector,' to use the Malcolm Gladwell term," Currell said. "At the funeral, we learned that, and everyone was describing her the same way, and she was the person everyone knew."

During the service, Jeff sat in the front row, stretching out his arm and holding onto the corner of Shana's casket. Isaac was propped up in his stroller, crying. At the cemetery, after Shana had been lowered into the earth, relatives and friends participated in an important Jewish burial custom honoring the dead: They passed around a shovel, taking turns to pour dirt on her coffin.