'Kind and loving' young mother, 23, dies from heart condition a week after giving birth to twins

The young mother died of a heart condition days after Christmas and just over a week after giving birth to twins. Morgan Aubrey Hughes, 23, died on 28 December at Utah Valley Hospital in Provo after welcoming son Hudson Samuel Hughes and daughter Georgia Elise Hughes 19 December with her husband Samuel Craig Hughes, also 23.

The couple married in 2023. “It just doesn’t feel real,” Samuel told KSL-TV 5 in a joint interview with his late wife’s siblings.

He said: “Morgan was amazing. She was the best wife, the best daughter and nobody loved more than she did. She loved her Saviour, Jesus Christ and we will do our best to honour her through our faith in Christ. The only choice is to believe in an afterlife, otherwise there is no hope.”

In a separate interview with NBC News published Friday (3 January), Morgan’s father, Brian Hodson, explained that his daughter’s delivery went “extremely smooth” before she began to feel sick days later. After vomiting and fainting, she went back to the hospital where she was diagnosed with postpartum cardiomyopathy, also known as peripartum cardiomyopathy.

John Hopkins Medicine defines the rare condition as one that “begins sometime during the final month of pregnancy through about five months after delivery, without any other known cause.” According to the American Heart Association, postpartum cardiomyopathy can be hard to detect because it “can mimic those of pregnancy, such as shortness of breath and swelling in the feet and legs.”

A GoFundMe page has been set up by Lone Peak Fire Association where her father is a captain. On the page Morgan was remembered as “a kind and loving soul whose greatest joy was becoming a mother.”