What Life Feels Like Years After TFMR Loss

I am sitting cross-legged on a green couch. The light flooding the room comes through a dirty window facing a parking lot-home to iguanas and squirrels. Children are playing nearby. Men are fishing in the canal.

Outside this room, the world is alive.

But in here, the air feels tight. Or maybe it isn’t the room. Because the truth is, wherever I go, I struggle to breathe.

This is how I have been living since the day I found out something was wrong with my pregnancy. Since that moment, I have moved through life with a tight chest, wondering if the next breath will come.

I am told this won’t last forever. But when vitality seems to exist everywhere except within you, every second stretches into something endless.

I blink.

Three and a half years have passed. I have two beautiful girls. Despite the exhaustion, (my bones tired and sleep always just out of reach) I feel alive.

I think back to that couch, to the fear that life would always feel heavy. That I would always feel hollow. I no longer live with a lump in my throat, bracing for the moment something might crack me open. But in the quiet of the night, I still cry when I think of my son.

I grieve the woman I used to be. The life I imagined with him. The family we might have had.

There is a particular kind of loneliness in this grief.

I don’t want to feel grateful for the worst thing that has ever happened to me. But without it, I would not have my girls.

And that is a truth that doesn’t fit neatly into words- one that feels almost impossible to explain to anyone who hasn’t lived it.