When I was three, I had a nightmare. I was shopping with my mom in a department store, as we often did when I was little. We were walking toward the perfume counter when she stepped onto a grate that was built into the floor. I was terrified of those drainage grates—they looked like trap doors leading to scary places. In my dream, it gave way exactly as I’d feared, and my mom fell into its dark recess. Store clerks and shoppers ran to help as I stood by—helpless—watching in horror. When I woke, crying, my mom rushed in to comfort me. She sat on the edge of my bed and rubbed my back until I fell back to sleep. 

At twelve, my dad was working late one night. It wasn’t normal for him to miss supper and my little brother’s bedtime—he was a school principal, and his hours were predictable. When my mom told me it was time to go to bed, I went to my room and stood by my bedroom window, waiting. I thought of all the ways my dad could die between work and home. I thought about car accidents and heart attacks, wondering what terror we were about to endure. When the headlights from his car finally swept across the walls of my bedroom, I sighed with relief, and went to bed.

I am now nearing thirty-seven, and I am sitting in the hallway of the emergency department. It’s busier than normal and someone has placed extra chairs in the hall to accommodate the dozens of patients who need to be seen. There aren’t any rooms left, so histories and assessments are being done in the waiting room. I have learned that the man sitting beside me has a surgical incision that refuses to heal and that the elderly woman across from me is here for a possible UTI. Her daughter speaks to the doctor for her, and I wonder what the older woman is thinking as they speak about her as if she is not there. We make eye contact for a moment, and I look away. 

I am in this too-full emergency department because I am days into a pregnancy, and I am bleeding. I’m here also because I am afraid. Pregnancy is the thing I am most afraid of as a woman nearing middle age. It has become my boogeyman, the metal grates built into department store floors, the idea of a car accident late at night. As I wait for the doctor to make his way to me, my legs bounce, and I am unable to focus on the book I brought for distraction. Even my phone, with its dopamine hits and funny videos, isn’t enough to calm me down. 

A doctor stands in front of me with a clipboard in his hands. He asks for my name and then he asks what number pregnancy this is. When I respond, his eyes narrow, and he leans down as if trying to hear me better.

“Did you say second?” he asks. 

“Seventh,” I repeat, and I hold up my hands the way my son does whenever he tells anyone his age. When he turned six, we used to comment on how he now needed to use two hands since he was getting so big. He beamed with pride when we said that. I don’t feel proud, though, holding up my two hands. My cheeks redden knowing everyone around me can hear what I’m saying. I lower my hands and wait for what will come next. 

The doctor looks around the crowded space for an empty chair. Finding one a few feet away, he grabs it and pulls it to where I am. The metal legs screech across the floor. He sits in front of me, blocking the path for anyone who may want to pass by, and our knees nearly touch. 

“May I ask,” he says, lowering his voice and his face mask. “Do you have any children?” 

“One,” I say. “He’s six,” I add, as if my son being well into childhood makes my odds any better. As if I am playing show and tell with my baby who made it. 

See, I want to say to this doctor with the concern written on his face, this isn’t entirely hopeless.

The doctor asks me to describe what happened the times before. Miscarriages, I explain. All of them. He scribbles notes as I describe each one, including the premature arrival of my son. I wonder what he’s written, what information is valuable, and what is not. I wonder if he can help me. If there is anything he has to offer that hasn’t been tried before. 

The baby’s heartbeat is swift and steady that day, strong for a thing so small. But after leaving the emergency room, I continue to bleed. I bleed for months, and yet, with every ultrasound, our baby is still alive. When my body finally begins to show signs of stress—when I can no longer walk up a flight of stairs and when my skin turns ghost-white and waxen—I am admitted to the hospital with dangerously low hemoglobin. As I sit in my hospital bed, trying to breathe, the nurses hang blood that snakes its way into my veins, and they try everything to stop the bleeding. But it doesn’t work. The bleeding cannot be stopped. My body is not one that can sustain this life. 

In a darkened room, we are told that our baby has died. They could not survive having me as their mother, and I may not have survived had my pregnancy continued. 

The night before my surgery, when they will remove my baby and try to staunch the bleeding in my broken womb, I lie in my hospital bed, cradling my stomach. I know this is the last time I will be pregnant. I know that I cannot go through this again. That I can’t hold up any more fingers while sitting in an emergency room. As I say goodbye to the last baby I will ever carry, I am overwhelmed with the desire to get home to my son. To be the mom he deserves, the one I wish to be. I have spent the last ten years trying to keep a baby alive long enough to be born. And I’ve spent the last several weeks in bed, trying to hold onto this last baby of ours that couldn’t survive. But I need to get home to my son—the child I have—and to let go of my desire for more. I need to find a way to accept my life for what it is. 

In the grief-stricken days that follow, I struggle to find peace with who I have become. At night, I slip out of bed, trying not to disturb my husband, and retreat to our living room to sob in the dark. During those panic-filled nights, I think about who I once was. The little girl in the footed pyjamas who woke from a bad dream and the preteen with bitten fingernails standing at her bedroom window. How even as a child, I knew death would come for the people I love. I wonder if this laid the blueprint for who I would become in my late thirties—a mother trying to become a mother again. A mother who fears her son’s death may only be a heartbeat away. A mother who has carried death inside of her again and again. 

I wonder if the way that I am should be considered a disorder, or if it’s simply a natural reaction to the things I have endured. Maybe when someone loses a baby, it is certain that they will suffer from some form of prolonged grief or anxiety. Maybe it was inevitable that I would become a mom who worries that her six-year-old could die from SIDS. 

My therapist reminds me that I am a vigilant person. How I am someone who springs into action when needed. She tells me, though, that I should think about how I am holding my body when I am anxious. Are my legs crossed? Am I biting my nails? Are my eyes darting side to side? 

I practice this when watching my son learn to swim at the pool by our house. I wonder how to be vigilant, while also trying to appear aloof, nonchalant. If I relax my body enough, maybe my thoughts will follow. If I sit back in the deck chair, trying to release the tension in my neck, maybe I won’t picture my son drowning in the deep end. Instead of relief though, it feels like I am arranging my body like a mannequin in a store. 

As I focus on relaxing my muscles and easing the tension in my jaw, my mind wanders to my grandmother who recently died. Girls are born with all of the eggs they will carry in their lifetime. This means that we are born first in the wombs of our maternal grandmothers, and our mothers second. After my son was born—too soon and too small—my mom came to visit us in NICU. She cooed and spoke to her first grandchild through the plexiglass of his incubator. As she spoke, he lifted his head that was smaller than the palm of my hand, and he turned with effort to face her. His eyes brightened as he listened to the cadence of her voice. He recognized her as someone he’d always known. 

I think about my own life, how my grandmother carried me, too. My grandma, who taught me the joy of writing, of creating, of caring for others, was perhaps the first voice that I heard decades before I was born. That her laughter, her joy, is still alive within me, even though she is not. I hope that if there is an afterlife, that my grandmother is caring for the babies I didn’t get to hold. That she is teaching them how to make fried cod fish and blueberry muffins the same way she taught me. I can picture her mending their clothes and wrapping them in warm blankets each night, telling them stories of her childhood, of my mother’s, and of my own. 

My body softens with these thoughts as I watch my son jump into the pool, and for a moment I am not afraid. I am not counting the seconds until he resurfaces and takes a breath. I look down at my hands that remind me of my grandmother’s, and I wonder if the answer to fear is love. That maybe love is the answer to everything that hurts and how that’s something I can accept. 

—J. Gallant