My daughter went into that hospital carrying a child, and the child came out into the world, and my daughter did not.

Chloe never came home.

My grandson did.

That is the whole terrible shape of that day, the symmetry of it, one life leaving as another arrived, and I have carried both halves of it every day since.

And in the space of one sentence, I stopped being a mother and became something else, something I had no name for and no preparation for, a woman of a certain age standing in a hospital corridor with a newborn who would need everything I had left.

People do not tell you what it is to lose a child.