There's a particular quiet in the weeks before you tell anyone you’re pregnant. I remember it from my twenties: I was in college, bunking in a wonderful log house on a small horse farm in Connecticut, working off my horse’s board by mucking stalls and tending other horses. It started as just a feeling, but one wintry morning while riding, my horse spooked and I fell, twisting instinctively, somehow knowing to protect my stomach. I landed awkwardly in the dirt, not hurt but not feeling quite right either, so yeah, I took my butt to the hospital and just knew to tell the nurse who wanted to X-ray me that “no, you better give me a pregnancy test first.” And yup, I was pregnant, went home giddy and scared at the same time, one hand resting low on my stomach, as if I could hold a secret in place by touching it. Years later, I would learn that carrying grief feels much the same: a hand pressed to something no one else can see.
I was pregnant with Matthew, who arrived in 1993, healthy and loud and very much here. I want to say that first, because today is October 15, Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day, and I know many people reading this did not get that ending. I’m writing though because those months taught me something I have carried ever since: how much love a pregnancy holds before anyone else can see it.
Now I’m not a big crocheter, but I bought this soft white yarn, determined to crochet my first baby blanket. I remember my hand often found its way to my belly, protective, wondrous, waiting for that first kick, and when it arrives, man, it’s something. I remember feeling little pushes out against me as though this growing person were stretching within. I remember being scared to walk down stairs, afraid I’d trip and tumble down. I drove slower, ate right, stopped drinking wine and caffeine. I made lists. I read everything. I bargained with a universe I wasn't sure was listening. Somewhere in all that preparing, I understood love was already complete. It arrived the moment I let myself imagine a face, long before anyone else could see the shape of it.
That is why remembrance days matter. A pregnancy that ends, at any point, leaves behind a love that was real and fully formed, and the world often gives it nowhere to go. People bring casseroles to funerals. For this kind of loss, they often say nothing at all, or they say the wrong thing quickly and change the subject. So love goes underground. It becomes something a woman carries quietly for years, oftentimes for the rest of her life.
I know something about carrying grief quietly. Matthew was seven months old when I found myself pregnant again, and everything about it was frightening and unclear. I chose to end that pregnancy. I was having nightmares and felt so alone. And so I made a choice. It’s a choice I still feel today. The peace I find is knowing I made the right decision for me. An unhappy mom leads to an unhappy child. I believed that then. I believe it still. And I couldn’t put that on this little man who I was now responsible for. Matthew was happy and healthy. It doesn’t mean there isn’t regret. I picture a little face, a little girl, who’s still with me.
In 2022, I lost my mother, and then in 2024, my faithful four-legged companion of 14 years, Bella.
My mom was a quiet presence. My brother and I called her square with rounded corners 'cause she was stern, but there also was a bend to her, a softness. She was a huge reader, and I snuck many of her books when I was little, escaping into these far-off lands of barbarians and their five-banded women. I thought she knew nothing about my pilfering until, one day, the books started showing up on my bed after she’d finished one. Love of reading was something we shared.
Losing her woke every older grief at once. Suddenly I was mourning her and every earlier loss I had never finished mourning, all together, like opening a closet and having everything come down off the shelves. Things I wanted to say, ask about, but didn’t. I thought I had time.
I didn't plan to write about any of this. I set out to write a quiet story about a woman who spends a week in Tuscany. Stories have a way of finding the room you've kept closed, though. The more I wrote, the more I recognized what I was doing: going back. Back to my twenties, to the young woman who was so certain that if she prepared carefully enough, the world would be kind. Back to my mother, the loss of her is real, much like the loss Lucinda feels. Yet my mom lives on in one of my characters; this is how I see her and keep her alive. One detail of her found its way into the book: her quiet, comforting presence.
Writing became my own act of remembrance. Every evening at my desk, I was giving grief somewhere to go.
So when you read about Benna, the older woman who keeps a guesthouse in the hills, know that you are feeling a touch of my mom. And I’ve given her words I feel she would have said, words I know to be true: “When you lose someone to death, you grieve who they were. But when you lose someone to life, you grieve who you might have been.” I wrote that line for her, and I think I needed to hear it myself. There are losses with funerals and losses without them. Both are real. Both deserve to be named.
Tonight at 7 p.m., people around the world will light candles for the Wave of Light and let them burn for an hour, so that a ring of light moves across every time zone. I’ll light one for every pregnancy that left a love behind, for my mother, for Bella, for the little girl I still picture, and for the young woman I was, who held so much in silence and didn’t know she was allowed to set any of it down.