October is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month, and October 15th is Remembrance Day. My daughter was born still almost 17 years ago, and my memoir, From the Lake House, explores my experience navigating the loss. Did you know that about 70 babies are stillborn each day?

My heart is united with all mothers who’ve lost a pregnancy at any stage, and with those who have lost an infant.

17 years later, here’s my remembrance:

I Remember

I remember the drive to the hospital. The sun was low, the air was frigid, and my mind spun wildly. When had I last felt her move? My right hand lay on my belly, bursting to the brim with my awaited baby. My other hand lay on the stick shift, cupped underneath my partner’s fingers as he navigated traffic and tension. We were told to get to the hospital, not because of broken water, not because of contractions, and not because my labor was scheduled. We were told to get to the hospital because it had been too long since I’d felt the stirring of limbs in my womb.

I remember the ultrasound machine. I lay on the table in a triage room with my eyes closed and my round tummy covered with cold gel. While the technician slid the wand back and forth, searching, I listened to every sound the machine sputtered but never heard the woosh-woosh of a heartbeat I’d grown to love. I remember the curly hair of the technician, but not his face or his voice. His words, however, pierced a hole right through my gut and are seared into my memory forever. Your baby died. I rolled my head away from him, this grim reaper of a man. I rolled onto my side and asked him to leave.

I remember checking into a hospital room where my midwife administered drugs to induce labor. Hours and hours passed without a single cramp. Friends, family, doctors, and nurses came and went all day with plaintive eyes and tender hugs. Briefly, I played cards with my brother. I’m playing Rummy in a hospital gown with my forever-sleeping baby inside me. Surely this is a dream. The longer my partner and I awaited labor to start, the more my fervent hope—I will soon awaken from this nightmare—seemed plausible.

I remember when my uterus finally started to writhe with contractions. I remember my partner holding my hand and music softly playing from a small speaker. I remember how the pain ebbed and flowed and ebbed. And then it stopped. The midwife laid my swaddled baby girl in my arms with such aching reverence. My tears pooled into the crook of my neck as I held my beloved child against me. My partner wept.

I remember the drive home from the hospital. Without her. Blasphemous. What to do with my hands as my partner steered the car through busy city streets teeming with life? I couldn’t bear to lay them on my empty belly, the place she’d lived for 40 weeks, so they hung limply by my sides. In the driveway, I hesitated to leave the car and enter our house. Crossing the threshold into our prepared nest without her would be a surrender, a submission to my fate. And to hers. The story would be over, my life would change trajectory, and I would not be able to hit rewind. But, by lingering in the car, I could delay the last scene. I adjusted the car’s vent. I leaned back into the headrest. I waited.

I remember the very next morning. At my kitchen table with my mother, I silently ate toast, sipped earl grey tea, and then swept my entire house. It was something to do before returning to bed. I remember the phone ringing and ringing and ringing. The deliveries of food and flowers and cards. Staring through the sliding glass doors at the barren trees. Barren, just like me.

I remember saying her name aloud, self-conscious at first until finally letting Carly fall from my lips became natural. She deserves to have her name spoken.

I remember the reentry into the world. I was like a naked ghost—simultaneously exposed and invisible—while I made my way down the aisles of the too noisy grocery store, while I fumbled through the litany of questions when ordering pizza, when standing in line at TJ Maxx, a pair of post-pregnancy jeans in hand.

I remember the arrival of spring ushered in early morning choruses of birdsongs, young forsythia and dogwood buds in the wooded trails, and sprouts of daffodils everywhere. Has spring always been this lush? I felt closer to my missing daughter when surrounded by signs of new life in the natural world. Maybe she was as near to me as the bluebird overhead. I found a way to comfort myself.

I remember the first anniversary of the day she was born, and the day we’d said goodbye. I donated children’s books in her name to a Ronald McDonald House. I sat in the sunshine sipping hot cocoa and wrote her a letter. I made it through the first year. I miss you. My heart is broken, but it still beats. I will always remember. 

And I do.