A jarring racket fills our camper on this untamed night in the Sol Duc watershed of the Olympic National Park. Large pockets of water form on Douglas Fir limbs above, collecting, collecting, collecting until…splat, kerplunk on top of the metal-roofed truck camper. Hundreds such collection systems drop like random rocks.

I’m sorry I couldn’t go to your wedding and that my explanation was vague and seemed rude. My doctor wouldn’t let me fly. I couldn’t find the words. I worried that mentioning pregnancy loss would cloud the conversation of your celebration.

A woman appearing before you desperately frightened by the usual gesticulations, the kicks and rolls inside of her becoming suddenly still, by the warm trickle down her leg, fluid or blood but too soon, too soon. What if you took her by the hand and walked her to a room much like a bedroom, with bleached sheets and pillow cases, bassinet and muslin blankets, with warm light coming through a southern window but stark for its waxed floors where blood pooled at your feet just last week, now a shadow upon which you sometimes slip for the mercilessness of memory? Merciless because this isn’t the first time and, by the wickedness of fate, it will never be the last.

I was twenty-nine. I didn’t know what to feel, or what it would feel like. That first sonogram seemed other-worldly. At every twitch I thought I was feeling the first flutters, but when they began to come with regularity, the realness set in that I was at a different stage of being a woman.

My friend came over and we slowly drank wine and talked—her miscarriage (a couple years earlier), my miscarriage (current), the moments that blindsided each of us in a wash of grief, what the aftermath was like for her and what getting pregnant again was like. I was smack dab in the middle of my experience and found comfort in talking to friends who had been there and who had now had time to assimilate it within a zoomed-out picture of The Rest of Life.

May 18, 1980 – Mt. St Helens volcano in Washington State exploded with the force of 500 nuclear Hiroshima bombs, taking lives, destroying homes, spreading 540 million tons of ash over 22,000 square miles, and flattening trees for 220 square miles. It was the worst avalanche in U.S. history. Within two weeks ash had drifted around the globe.

“I’m expecting,” I told my four-year-old daughter as we trudged into the leafy woods around our home. It was a cold September day, and in her hands she held two dozen seed packets of bluebells to scatter into the rich soil beneath the trees.

A happy face on a stick transforms me. My breasts become tender, fatigue overwhelms. It becomes part of my being. Growth sprouts into a grain of rice, a blueberry, and a raspberry with duck feet. By spring, a plum dangling from a tree branch—fingernails, toes, bone.

I’d only told the baby daddy when I was sure. “So, you’re not getting rid of it then?” He’d said.

Keep mum until you've passed the first trimester. This is the gospel according to the matriarchy, and I’d followed it religiously. The latent fear is that miscarriage pursues you at your back like a winged chariot.

I am waking from a dream. No, a nightmare. My temple leans against the cool, foggy window and the sudden movement of the car shifting into gear pulls me forward, causing my head to lift. Consciousness rolls in and I remember why I am here. This is not a dream.

It is ingrained in my brain like nothing else has ever been. I can still smell the gel that they put on the ultrasound wand. I can still see my husband’s tears as he hears our baby’s heartbeat for the first and what would be the only time. I can still feel the anger at the ultrasound tech, who was so joyful at our first appointment and called my baby our little bean.

It was 3 o’clock in the morning when I attempted to rouse my husband.

“Um, baby, I think I’m pregnant. There are two lines on this thing I peed on.”

This lack of interest and compassion still haunts me to this day. I keep on wondering if I am entitled to my pain. Am I just carrying on? Am I being overly dramatic? I was and am hurting. Right after my loss, I was sad. I was angry. But above all, I missed my baby and all the things that could have been. Yet, it was just I, missing my little bean. And I still miss my baby. Maybe not everyday but I think of my little bean a lot and try to imagine what it would look like now. I keep these thoughts hidden from most people and they feel like a guilty pleasure that no one should know about. In these instances, the thoughts about being entitled to my pain and grief creep up on me again.

Because earlier today the promise of growing life in my belly was silenced just like the exam room as the nurse searched again and again for the heartbeat at a routine prenatal visit. "Is this how people find out?" I thought, suddenly floating though a cloud of emotionless reality, confused why I had felt kicks just last night in bed.