We had a plan: if it happened at home, ostensibly in our bathroom toilet, because we were optimists even in the midst of that personal tragedy, I would not try to retrieve the fetus. Our midwife had suggested that we could have a ceremony, but that didn’t feel right for us. We were sad, collectively, often in entirely different ways, but we didn’t feel
particularly in need of a ritual. Instead, I would just flush it, send it away, a subterranean passage between what we had imagined and what was actually happening, the unlikely closure we needed. I am a girl who knows how to stick to a plan. And so I did.
