Chapter 5 — The Loss

And then, in the middle of all of it — the humiliation, the betrayal, the divorce, the pregnancy, the relentless pressure from the people who should have protected me — something happened that I can still barely write about.

I lost the baby.

Our fifth child.

I am not going to describe that loss, or the days around it, because some griefs are not for retelling, and this one is mine, and I have carried it privately for a long time and intend to go on carrying it that way.

I will say only this: that the grief of it nearly ended me, that it arrived on top of everything else at the moment I had the least left to withstand it, and that I learned, in those weeks, that a person can lose a husband, and a sister, and most of a family, and still not know the true bottom of grief until they lose a child.