The Baby I Never Held, and the Grief That Grips Your Heart

Trigger Warning: This article discusses recent pregnancy loss and is the first in an ongoing series about parenthood, grief and hope

The first time I saw that faint line, I knew. My body knew. My heart knew. There was life inside me—a second child, a winter baby, a new beginning.

I remember that serene thrill that pulsed through me—calculating the due date, imagining the bump beneath soft sweaters while snowstorms painted the world white outside my window, envisioning how I’d move through each season with more grace, ease, and confidence than the first time. With Raven, my first-time pregnancy nerves had never settled. This time was different. This time, I would embrace every moment of the undulating journey. This baby was so loved. This baby was so wanted by us all.

Then, one day, a shadow slipped into my gleeful thoughts. It was so subtle I almost dismissed it. I had never even heard the term “missed miscarriage” before, yet suddenly, I was scouring Reddit threads and medical forums late into the night, hunting for reassurance. I found women like me, hoping, clinging, fearing.

Still, the symptoms reassured me—sore breasts, heartburn, light nausea. With my toddler Raven, I had none of that. Not even a few seconds of nausea. And she came out as perfect as perfect could be. Six weeks in, I traveled to Taiwan for work and felt my body doing what it should. But my mind—my mind betrayed me—every lull in symptoms brought panic. My dreams were filled with dread. I would wake in the night and whisper to myself: “You’re still pregnant. Everything is fine.” Until it wasn’t.

I did not want to schedule an independent early scan. I don’t know why. So, I waited in a state of anxiety before I finally concluded I could not hold my breath any longer. I had no excitement walking into that eerily quiet OBGYN room—only raw, debilitating fear. I told the sonographer I was scared. She smiled kindly, dismissively. “That’s just the mama bear in you.”

Deep down, I knew.

The moment she began the scan and asked if I’d had any bleeding, panic clawed my throat.

My legs shook uncontrollably. I stared into her expressionless face, searching—desperate—for the slightest flicker of recognition. Of hope. Of life. She pressed the button for the heartbeat, and a whoosh of dead air spluttered back, but the machine kept looking. Barren air, no galloping rhythm, just the betrayal of silence. The sonographer wouldn’t say the words—protocol, she said. I knew that, too. I’d had a healthy baby before. I knew what this was supposed to look like. I knew what the stillness meant.

She shut the machine down and went to hurry out—no photos, no smile, nothing that I so desperately needed at that moment.

I pushed and pushed until she finally confirmed what my soul had already screamed:

“There’s no heartbeat.”

A tired Raven cried and screamed in a way I had never heard before. My fiancé Ryan tried to soothe me with logic.

“It’s okay; this happens to everyone. We made one baby. We’ll make another.”

But I didn’t want another baby. I wanted this baby. The one already created, already inside me.

Based on the measurements, I thought back to the day I lost the little one. It was three days earlier—Father’s Day. We had just returned from my in-laws home in upstate New York after picking up Raven, and I found myself that evening at a baby shower in D.C. A beautiful home and one of the activities was releasing butterflies into the sky from the rooftop patio. I felt a little uneasy with the exercise—my love for all living things made the thought of these fragile creatures, folded and stilled inside paper envelopes, almost unbearable.

When I opened my envelope, my butterfly was dead. I remember freezing, trying to shake off the bad omen, grasping for another live one, needing a sign that not everything was lost. That something could still fly from my hand.

Later that night, while watching Georgian dancers, I felt strange twinges on one side of my lower back that I had never felt before. Harmless, I thought. Yet that, I now believe, was the moment—the last heartbeat—the final flutter. My butterfly never left the envelope.

One of my earliest memories as a very small child is catching a butterfly at our home in the Queensland outback. I believed the delicate, blue-winged creature would be my new pet. I didn’t yet understand that such beautiful blessings live brief lives. When it died just a few hours later, I was devastated. It was the first time—at just two or three years old—that I felt the sharp sting of grief and guilt, convinced the butterfly had died because I touched its delicate wings. I never forgot that summery Sunday afternoon.

I thought back to the last night the baby was still with me. I snuck away for a quick meditation in our room in the Catskills Mountains, Ryan’s lovely childhood home, comforted by the demure breeze, cocooned by the forested slopes rolling in soft greens and blues. I asked if my baby was okay.

“Trust your body,” was the vivid message that came back to me.

I realized if I had gone for that early scan, it would have been fine, and weeks would have transpired before I learned the growth had stopped, as my body showed no signs of letting go. I waited more than a week for my body to pass the pregnancy naturally. When it showed no signs of budging and my HCG pregnancy hormones were still rising, I chose a D&C.

A D&C, or dilation and curettage, is a medical procedure used to remove tissue from the uterus. In the context of miscarriage, it’s performed when a pregnancy has ended, but the body hasn’t naturally expelled the fetal tissue. During the procedure, doctors dilate the cervix and use a thin instrument to clear the uterine lining.

I couldn’t wade through the agony any longer. I couldn’t stretch the loss across days and weeks. I needed closure. I needed healing. I needed to not be pregnant anymore with a baby who wasn’t alive.

The night before the procedure, my 21-month-old daughter curled into me as I sobbed. She placed her head on my belly, looked up and said, “Mama sad, baby is happy.” We’d never spoken to her about the pregnancy and never called her a big sister. Somehow, Raven knew. At that moment, she gave me an infusion of light I hadn’t realized I needed. I didn’t think it was possible to feel any closer to my daughter—but the bond between us surged like a sudden storm. As I gazed into her milky blue eyes, it felt as though we had already lived a hundred lifetimes together.

My thoughts drifted back to the tiny baby motionless inside me—the one I never held, kissed, or named. I had wanted that little soul so badly and the little love had taken a long time to come to us. That’s what people don’t always understand. Miscarriage is not the loss of an embryo or a fetus. It’s the loss of a dream. A name. A child. A future. It’s a love story for a lifetime abruptly cut short.

In the days that followed, I felt every trauma I’d ever witnessed in war zones seep into my pores. It was a private war now. One between my body and my mind that no little blue passport could allow me to exit. I questioned everything—my travel, stress, diet, and decisions. I wondered if the eggs I had for breakfast in Taiwan were too runny, or a blood clot had formed over the placenta on my long-haul Asia flight, or if I had taken too much of the pregnancy supplement methylfolate or did too many hill runs in those early weeks. I dissected every movement and wept so hard I could not breathe.

I also felt tremendously guilty for my grief, knowing how much worse so many women have it than I do, knowing that everyday people struggle to have one child and that mothers lose babies much further along in their pregnancies and well into infancy and childhood.

Yet, I could do nothing but acknowledge the ache that rattled my bones as I spoke about this child in the past tense. I could not believe I was talking about a child of mine in the past tense. Technology morphed into an enemy. Every scroll brought me baby ads, pregnancy tips, and postpartum care reminders—algorithmic cruelty in the face of my despair.

I worried about the well-meaning friends who would not know and would ask if we would have more kids or if we wanted more children. Would I freeze? Would I run away and break into a million pieces? Heck, would I even be able to give birth to another baby?

I resented things I never had before. My career. My travel. My ambition. All the years spent running into other people’s tragedies while quietly putting mine on hold. I love what I do and believe fleeing to far-flung places was a calling so deep I could not have worked against it. I also once dreamed of a big family. Now, in the twilight of my 30’s, I wonder if I waited too long.

I had read stories about pregnancy loss in the past, and they shook me to the core. I could not comprehend how women endured such bodily trauma. I naively felt the universe would shield me from such a thing, the way it had protected me from any real harm in war zone after war zone, yet here I was. Somehow, surviving the thing I never thought I possibly could. Second by second.

I lay in bed curled up with Raven, reading books on that last night with the little one, who would never know anything but love and warmth. Tears rolled down my cheeks as I wondered if I needed to say goodbye. My baby came to me in my dreams. I possessed an inner knowing before I even conceived it would be a boy. I got to hold that tiny soul for a moment against my chest, and I did not want that moment to end. When I woke up, I missed my child terribly. It pained me that something so loved and so wanted was taken away, yet I felt I did not need to say a formal goodbye. My angel was still around me and would return to me when it was ready.

A stoic United States Marine, pulled together, and always calm in my wild storm, Ryan waited outside with Raven in the doctor’s waiting area. I decided I needed to do this alone in the room, without sedation. I needed to be present in what felt like one of the most challenging moments I had encountered. This was the journey of my body, a mother’s wisdom, and only I could find peace to float through to the other side of it all.

Photo by Anne Lambeck on Unsplash

Before the D&C, I asked for one final ultrasound. I needed to see. I needed to be certain. There it was; my magical baby—tiny, curled, still—looked perfect. Just... still. Blood swished around my uterus, but not into that tiny being. No life. Just my little one, forever frozen in time. The doctor gave me the images, a kind gesture that I was not offered last time. That mattered more than I can explain. I needed healing. I needed proof. I needed to believe that something so loved, even for a short passage of time, had truly existed.

Afterward, the ultrasound showed my empty uterus. Just like that. I fretted that I’d forgotten to ask what would happen to their tiny remains. Raven reached for my arms, and I understood I must walk through that door and not look back.

Later that afternoon, as I blew bubbles with Raven in the fading light, I breathed a name into the soft evening air: Solstice. It felt right—gentle, luminous, eternal. The weekend that held my grief between the loss and the procedure also held the Summer Solstice, my favorite day of the year. It marks the official start of summer, the sun at its peak, the longest stretch of light in the entire year. More than that, it means “when the sun stands still.”

That’s exactly what it felt like—time, breath, my own beating heart—suspended. Spiritually, the solstice is seen as a portal, a moment of radiant energy and profound transformation. It is a threshold, a pause between light and shadow. And so, I named my baby after the sun standing still, the light that never fully leaves, the turning point that reminds us that even in loss, there is the possibility of return.

The universe pauses to remember.

Solstice is the baby who will never grow up but will always be with me.

Pregnancy, for me, has never been just biological. It has always felt like a spiritual tether—two souls moving as one, however briefly. Even in an early loss, that thread doesn’t break. It just becomes invisible. It morphs into a unique kind of grief, one filled with love and honor yet with no place to land.

I didn’t know the bleak weeks that followed would be filled with bleeding and cramps, steep medical bills, lingering positive pregnancy tests, and symptoms that refused to fade—as if my body hadn’t yet understood the baby was gone. But the worst ache was the distended emptiness: I looked six months pregnant, carrying only a memory. A sad, swollen echo of what might have been.

The cruel price we pay for the possibility of the privilege of motherhood.

I write this for every woman who has lived this nightmare quietly. There are many of us. If it had not been for the raw openness and honesty of others, I could not have gotten through. I write this for every mother who loved a baby she never got to hold or dreamed of a child that did not come to her. For every parent who asked “Why me?” and received only silence in return. We carry the unseen grief, the ghost kicks, the what-ifs. Still—we hope.

Because I do still hope. For peace. For expanded love. And for the strength, one day, to stand still long enough to begin again.

Throughout this time of grief and fear, I’ve found myself yearning for maternal threads—reaching for the women who came before me, especially my maternal grandmother, whom I never got to meet but who was my first home when my mum, an only child, was in utero. My mother’s mother died of uterine cancer—cancer of the womb—just days after my parents were married. She was only 47.

The night before my follow-up OBGYN appointment, I hummed a gentle request: “Grandma, send me a butterfly. Just so I know you’re with me.”

The next morning, as a thunderstorm lashes the windows and I dress Raven in the dim light, she turns to me suddenly and says, “Butterfly. Butterfly.”

“What?” I ask.

She repeats it, calm and confident: “Butterfly.”

This is not a word she says often. There are no butterfly toys nearby. No pictures. Nothing in sight she could have seen. I press a kiss on her forehead.

Later, in the sterile calm of the doctor’s office, the physician reviews my tissue results. Her voice is gentle.

“It wasn’t anything you did; this was a rare spontaneous error at conception,” she assures me. “The baby had three copies of the same chromosome. If the pregnancy had continued to term, it wouldn’t have survived more than a few hours.”

She pauses, then adds, “The results also show the gender if you’d like to know.”

I nod.

“It was a boy,” she responds softly.

Raven and I hop into the Uber to head home. I cannot stop the tears streaming down my cheeks as I call Ryan and feel as though the cycle of grief is beginning all over again. I recognize the melody of the song playing, only I want to be sure.

“The artist Bjork,” Shazam glares back. “The song is Solstice.”

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