On August 15th Loren gave me an envelope that changed our lives. A member of our church needed to have an observer to spend time with his children, so for the better part of a long week I had been at their house. I was tired, had been trying to hide my discomfort with the situation, and did not have the social energy to go home and entertain another friend who was staying at our house while between jobs. At that moment however, I was happy to have a little time alone with Loren and a quick but quiet picnic at our church’s garden on the way home. We ate and chatted and Loren gave me the surprise. It contained a pregnancy test (positive) and the most beautiful letter that I have ever received. With that, the world, our relationship, and our very identities as human beings changed in the simplest of moments. Today, I cannot even remember how I manifested the happiness I gushed. The emotions of that day seem so far away, so clouded with pain.

Exactly one month later, ten weeks into our unborn child’s development, Loren started bleeding heavily as her body began the process of miscarriage.

It is now December and so many things have changed. I am afraid of all the details that my memory has already lost. Maybe I am more afraid to try and remember them, to face the holes in the story and the guilt I feel for not allowing them to be permanent images burned into my brain. Writing this is not an attempt to recover those many moments, nor an attempt to encapsulate and protect the moments I have yet to let go of; it is only an attempt to process what I am still feeling now. This is my release valve, my conversation to the void, because I don’t know how to have the conversation with anyone else.

The child that Loren and I lost is a confusing relationship to process. At ten weeks its heart had formed and should have started beating. It did not start beating. It had a heart, a head, and an identifiable body of sorts, if alien-like. It had fingers and fingernails. But it never had its own heartbeat. It never had a name, one of the things I have the most difficultly with. This child had not yet even developed a sex, and as I mourn, I do not know if I am mourning the death of a son or a daughter.

The human develops stupid and clumsy mechanisms to survive tragedy. One of the first things they tell you at the hospital is that having a miscarriage does not mean you are unable to have more children, and as soon as you are able to speak through the tears you tell yourself and your spouse that you will. Later, you tell other people the same thing: “At least we know now that we are ready to have kids.” You say that you are not trying to forgo the mourning process and you know that having another baby cannot replace the one you just lost (which is true, you cannot replace the child taken from you through miscarriage by having another baby; you will always be a man or woman carrying deep and unhealable wounds.) But you really want to try anyway. You want more than anything else to fill the hole and be a daddy. You want to have a baby boy or girl to prepare for, to buy cribs and clothes for, to one day read Judith Vorst, Shell Silverstein, and Maurice Steinbeck to. You want to be that person you began to transform into the day four weeks earlier, in the garden of the church, with a little white pregnancy test marked by two pink dashes and a beautiful, now sadly naïve, letter in your hands. You want to be who you would have been if destiny and design had not given you a cruel lot. And you think you can do so now, right now, and turn dreams and plans sunken and lost into dreams and plans merely stalled. But the womb and the heart take too long to heal and you become something else. In my purgatory, I have become secretly jealous and bitter, but outwardly ok and moving on.

Another stupid thing you tell yourself is that you are already a father. But a miscarriage robs you of that. It robs you of a body to hold, a forehead to kiss, or a blanket to smell. A miscarriage robs you of your baby’s sex. It robs you of a name to call him or her by. It robs you of any image to identify and properly mourn, and instead it leaves you with tragically inept words, blood, and a tiny lifeless fetal mass in the toilet of a friend’s house when you cannot make it home in time to have some privacy and dignity. A miscarriage leaves you always in danger of doubt: am I a father? did that really happen? what lesson was I supposed to learn from such a horrendous experience?

My biggest fear is of becoming pregnant again. Of course, this is my biggest hope, too, but I am absolutely terrified of the emotions that will accompany a second positive pregnancy test. A father-to-be should feel overwhelmed by joy and anticipation. He should feel nervous about being a sufficient provider, teacher, example of a man; fears of the baby’s development should be in the back of his mind, not front and center, dominating every conscious thought, day in and out for (hopefully) nine months. I worry that Loren becoming pregnant again will immediately launch me into a paralysis of panic. I worry that I will cry with fear and ineptitude when I tell my parents such news for the second time. I worry that I will be plagued by the conditional, never thinking in terms of ‘when we have the baby,’ but always ‘if.’ I worry that if we should actually carry a child to term I will forever look back on the gestation with a sense of having just barely dodged a bullet, with nail biting dread, instead of celebrating each moment and preparing ourselves with every parenting self-improvement scheme possible.

The most likely reason I have chosen this time to write/publish these thoughts and fears is the jealousy laden inspiration derived from reading a tragically wonderful memoir by Elizabeth McCracken. Reading An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, the memoir of McCracken’s still born first child and subsequent second pregnancy and birth, I found myself jealous of her articulation. Writing her memoirs gave her permission to name all her emotions, complex, beautiful, and base alike. She told the story of her self-critical fears, isolation from society, and tentative reintroduction with candid honesty that gave me the sense of permission to feel the same irrationality, and permission to own it publicly.

For me, An Exact Replica also helped to manifest simmering understandings of the tragedy. (I say "understandings" because 'lessons' is a word I refuse to use. I refuse to believe that God did this to get me to need Him more, or something equally disproportionate.) For example, one of the things McCracken promises never to do, then does anyway, is to assume to know what other people have gone through. “You can never guess at the complicated history of strangers.” You never know what people hide behind the veneer of their dopey, everyday happiness. You never know if the mother of the iconic, bright-eyed and playful children in the park has experienced horrific suffering in earlier years. You never know if the father, who looks even younger than you and has named his child Abigail, Gabriel, or any other name you listed as a possibility for your child, has earned his peace after tremendous heartache. It is easy to assume other people don’t deserve happiness when happiness is senselessly snatched from your grasp. But not everybody wears their heart on their sleeve, and the jealousy I feel for strangers with families is really only for the momentary snapshot in a grocery store, not the messy lives I can’t even guess at. Everyone’s story is complex.

One final concern that has motivated me to write this is that a small wedge can form between Loren and me. No one can endure the loss of a baby and be unchanged as a person. It dosen’t leave you intact. And the quiet mourning each of use goes through only drives us more deeply inward. I think that is the real reason I am writing this. I think I want to make this inward gulf of inadequacy open so that I will not feel lost in the fierce loneliness of it. Even if it is never read, never understood, or never cared about, if I can lay it out there maybe I will know that I was honest and accessible. This is my best act of courage.