Photo by Helen Montoya Henrichs.

It’s been more than three years, but there are still flashes that remind me of that day—a song or a word or the way the light falls in a room just so.

Tonight it’s words that send me back to a bright-white room where a baby, my baby, died.

“You give and take away,” these are words that hold sorrow in their hands.

I know what it’s like to be given a treasure. I know what it’s like to have that treasure taken away.

I know what it’s like to stand at the end and wish it was The End.

I know what it’s like to die in the places no one can see.

And it doesn’t matter if she was 12 weeks in a womb or 12 years breathing the air of the world, losing a child all hurts the same.

///

It was a Friday. It was a routine doctor’s appointment on a sunny summer day. It was the “we made it safely” day according to all the pregnancy books.

There was no blood. There were no cramps. There were no signs that a baby had died wrapped tight in my warm.

There was only a blank screen where a heartbeat had been, where it was supposed to be now, today, because this was the safe day.

They sent me home and my husband drove me back so they could clean her from the parts of me that had not let her go in the three weeks she’d been dead, and then he wheeled me out of the same place I’d carried out three babies in my arms. Except this time someone else carried her out in a lab jar and those hallways turned ugly and the smooth ride hurt and the whole world went dark.

My husband held me all night, and I woke with a pillow soaked with tears I don’t even remember crying, because I thought I was sleeping, and all her brothers were knocking on the door because life doesn’t care about a whole world ending. It just goes on.

It was a Saturday when he called the pastor of the church where we were serving as worship leaders and told him what had happened, that he’d need a Sunday or two off so our family could process through this loss.

But there was no bereavement leave for a death like this one, because it was just a miscarriage.

It was just a miscarriage, and he should be able to stand on stage two days after her death and sing to a God who gives and takes away, like this God hadn’t just given a daughter and then taken her right back away.

So my husband went. I could not climb from my bed, so I stayed, wrapped up to my chin in a blanket that smelled like him. I cried. I bled. I died a little more in that dark room without him.

Without her.

///

They say we should get over it. They say it’s only a miscarriage. They say it should be easier, because at least we didn’t carry her for nine months and then watch her die, and at least we didn’t raise her for nine years and then watch her take that last shudder of a breath, and at least we never even had to meet her and look in a face that would be stuck in our memories forever.

Except we do meet her. In dreams. In unguarded moments when we see her squished on the couch between her brothers, reading. In the family picture taken just after twins, who would have been her little brothers, were born.

She is there, with her fiery brown hair and her summer evening eyes.

They, the ones who have never held this pain in the corner of their heart, don’t understand how a year later we’ll be saying her name and we’ll get all choked up, still. How two years later we’ll listen to someone else’s miscarriage story and feel that wound open a little. How three years later we’ll hear a song that reminds us of the words we raged from the cold concrete floor when we actually had strength enough to lift our head and shout, how the hearing-again knocks our legs unsteady.

How all these babies, the ones who came before and the ones who have come after, are precious and beautiful and wanted, of course they are, but we still wish we hadn’t lost the one.

Losing a baby in the beginning still feels like the end, because it would have been party of six or it would have been three boys and a girl or it would have been a family that looks much different if she were here.

They don’t understand that we can’t be rushed through this kind of grief, because it is hard and it is still awful and it is still ugly, ugly, ugly, no matter how many children we have or how much time has passed or how strong we seem to a world that expects only strong.

This is a piece of jagged glass we will carry all our days, and we never know when it will pierce us in our tender places again.

We don’t need someone to grieve with us. We don’t need someone to hurry us. We don’t need someone to tell us God will never give us more than we can handle or that all things work together for our good or that He promises us a hope and a future.

We just need someone to understand this sorrow, the way it turns a world inside out and pulls out all the seams and unravels everything we’ve known.

It is a sorrow like any other.

///

There were some who understood.

Four days after that losing one, my husband and I drove out of town for a youth camp. We’d had the worship-leading job booked for a year, and we knew it was too late to find a replacement, and so we sent our boys with family and we drove all that way in silence, because I could not find the words to speak.

He led worship alone that first night, and I hid in the shadows, watching the moon and letting those words sit on my shoulders, because I could not be alone in the dark with all the blood that shouldn’t be there, and standing outside, a football field away from students and the man I loved worshiping a God I could not feel in this losing-place, made me feel less alone.

Two women found me huddled beneath a tree. One of them had been through more than just my one loss, and she gripped my hands and prayed over me, there under the boughs of an oak tree that keeps all the secrets of the world.

She ended the prayer and then she wrapped me in her arms and she whispered some words, and she didn’t care that my cheeks were black with the tears that took my makeup all the way down to my chin, and she did not care that my nose was wet with sadness, and she did not care that I was angry and unsteady and weak on my feet.

She understood that it would never really go away, that pain. But I would learn to carry on.

///

The minute I took that pregnancy test, I called my husband.

Because we had decided now was as good a time as any to expand our child count from three to four, and I knew he’d be just as excited as I was about what the pregnancy test had to tell us.

And he was.

After the first appointment, where her heartbeat showed strong on a screen, we let ourselves settle into the reality of four little ones instead of just three.

We talked about where she would sit in our car and where she would sleep and what kind of room she would have. I picked out the colors I would use to crochet her blanket. I marked the material I’d use for her bibs and dresses and bows.

She was a person, already living in our home.

This is how it happens. We imagine who they will be and how they will fit into our families and whose nose and eyes and hair they will wear.

Before we even meet them, we have already planned their details and we have already seen their faces and we have already embraced them, alive.

And then they are gone, and they will never sit in our car or sleep in that bed or look at the walls of that room we decorated with them in mind.

There is a hole where they used to be, and even though our uterus will shrink again and the blood will taper off and our body will forget it ever carried new life within, we will never forget.

We fly right off the edge in the losing, and it takes time to climb back up.

///

We stood in line to check out, one twin seat balanced in front of the basket, the other inside it, and the woman behind me said, “Such beautiful boys. No girls for you?”

It’s an innocent question that has come before when people see the five boys following me through a store. I turned to answer with my usual, “No. Boys sure are great, though,” but my oldest, 5 years old at the time, beat me to it.

“We have a sister,” he said. “She’s in heaven with Jesus.”

The woman was taken aback by his candor, as we often are with children, and said nothing else, just checked the lines around us to see if there was another shorter than ours. To her credit, she stayed. And my boy told her how his sister’s name is Amarise, which means given by God, and how she died in Mama’s belly and how we never got to meet her but we will someday.

Sometimes it’s just easier to answer that girl question with a simple no, but I wonder if we are missing a piece of healing here. Her brothers know the truth, that she was and is and will always be their baby sister.

She was real. She is real. She is my daughter who died.

Her living was real. Her dying was real. Her memory is real.

I hope we never forget.

///

We don’t talk about it much, we who have been through the horror of losing a baby we never met, but there are many of us out here, spinning to the floor or trying to lift our heads or finally walking out the other side of that crack in a world.

We don’t talk about it because it hurts. We don’t talk about it because we’re afraid that maybe we did something wrong. We don’t talk about it because we should be okay by now, shouldn’t we?

I want to tell you that it’s OK to feel sad and crushed and sick, sick, sick that your baby is the one who slipped away when there are all those others who aren’t wanted or needed or loved.

It’s OK to grieve.

I want to tell you that you can take as long as you need to get over this loss, even when “they’re” telling you you’re taking too long and it was only a miscarriage and at least it didn’t happen later when it would have been harder to say goodbye.

There is no harder goodbye. There is only hard goodbye.

So grieve. Rage. Cry until your stomach hurts and your eyes feel like they’re burning away and you can’t even make another sound.

Keep that sonogram picture, the one that proves she had a heartbeat once upon a time, the one that says she lived. You’ll be glad you did.

It’s hard to see from these days and weeks and months after losing that there is another side to this dark, that one day you will mend this crack in your world and you will run your fingers over that scar and feel stronger and more alive because of it.

You will.

But for now, let the world crack right open. Let the light go out. Fumble around in the darkness until your eyes adjust and you see the flicker of a candle glowing in a corner, waiting for another day.

And then, only when you feel ready, crawl toward that day, because it is still waiting. Let love walk you right back out.

Stay down as long as you need, as long as it takes. And then lift that weary head, so much stronger than you knew, and overcome.

The tiny ones we’ve lost are remembered here, too, in the overcoming.