Pregnancy loss is about grief, obviously. You are shocked and depressed and angry, but not always in that order. Sometimes it’s a roaring rush of all these emotions at once, a cacophony that paradoxically blends into a dull white noise. The persistent emptiness of what-might-have-been. Meanwhile, you’re also navigating a body that was visibly pregnant moments before, with all the attendant hormones.
In my case, it was a triplet pregnancy, naturally conceived; twins ran in my family, but no one had ever imagined three. The story of the pregnancy is long and complicated, but you should know I bled throughout and was under perinatal care, and at the same time, we were assured that there were many cases of triplet pregnancies resulting in three healthy babies. When my water broke early at 19 weeks, my husband Ben and I rushed to the hospital. Somewhere in between miscarriage and stillbirth is what we experienced. They were never alive. And also we held them. We met and said goodbye in the same hour.