If I were a smoker, this is where I would take a long, slow drag deep into every last alveolus. While leaning back in my wingback chair with eyes narrowed, I would tilt my head ever so slightly to let the smoke curl out of my mouth and waft unhurriedly to the ceiling, where it would assimilate into a protective haze. And as the memories trickled from the depths of a heart that’s been layered and toughened by sadness and disappointment, I would lean in close to the computer, face lit only by the screen. Needful to release what is pressed down, I would thrust the smoldering symbol of hard knocks hastily back into my mouth, allowing it to dangle precariously from the lower right corner of my lips. The words would flow through my fingers, vehemently banging away at the keyboard, reliving what again landed me at the junction between disappointment and life-giving truth.

But I’m not a smoker. I’m just a girl lying in her bed, surrounded by chocolate to settle unstable nerves, with nothing to cloak my hardness but a telltale pile of tissues.

Halfway through writing this book, I experienced a miscarriage. More accurately, as I write this, I am still experiencing a miscarriage. There is nothing like sitting, waiting in sorrow for the child who was once alive inside of you to pass through, to exit your life forever. In miscarriage you get all the pain, all the discomfort of pregnancy and early labor, yet none of the reward. You are left with a first trimester muffin top and cramps that last for weeks. I told my husband this morning that miscarriage is a gyp.

Last Sunday I was preparing dinner for a couple of missionaries from Thailand and some dear friends who are also on staff at our church. It was a gorgeous summer afternoon, and the ranch was perfect. Our iceberg roses were in bloom and bountiful, the patio freshly swept and free of eucalyptus leaves. There was food on platters to be enjoyed at leisure. We had just gotten our pigs, so they were still small and cute, running around in their pen, making for comically sweet scenery. I had made a tasty sauce for the fish my father-in-law had caught, and we were barbecuing them for dinner. Life—so beautiful, so full of flavor and promise. Baby in my belly, friends, love, beauty, hope.

Then I felt it. That twinge in your body that says something’s not right. Early on in the evening I went to the bathroom and saw pink. Not bright red but pink, so there was hope, right? What should have been a lovely evening was, for me, full of secret apprehension. How quickly the tides change. It was like in the movies when all of a sudden the sky turns black and rain comes down in sheets though it had been sunshine and rainbows the minute before, but this time without the fun of making out under a makeshift shelter with the leading man. Snap. So fast.

The next day I paid a visit to my dear OB-GYN, whom I have seen the last eighteen years. I purposely wore no perfume. Have you ever noticed how connected scent and memory are? The right whiff can take me back to the beach where I grew up as a kid, or to my seventh-grade year and it feels like I have a perm again. I’ve learned that I don’t want to have a scent attached to days that might bring bad news. I don’t want any smell connected to the memory of a professional in a white coat telling me whether my child will live or die.

And so I went, unscented, and climbed up on that table with its pseudo-recliner angle and its unrolled paper to protect it from any unsavory emissions from my body. That thin, almost waxy paper crinkled conspicuously underneath me as I shifted in discomfort, as the doctor probed for signs of life in my womb. I read the truth on his face. Silence in the cold room with the charts of female anatomy, with the women’s interest magazines and drawers of various pads and cloths and packaged cleansing wipes. Silence that made me wish I had shaved my legs, bent awkwardly in those wretched stirrups. Silence that says there has been another death in my family, another heart ripped from my own. Another reason to shed tears, another reason to have to look my husband and son in the eyes and shake my head, saying, “No. No dice.”

Breathe.

He showed me the screen, how there was no life. He said, “This is not normal. I’m so sorry. Would you like some medicine to hurry along the inevitable?”

Medicine to pass what was left of my fifth child onto cotton pads, into the septic system. He said it would likely make me vomit and would be quite painful, so I declined. I had to wait for the nurse to give me a RhoGAM shot as my blood was RH negative, and the three minutes it took was like plugging a dam with my index finger. I was going to burst at any moment.

Hold on, hold on . . .

She looked me in the eye and said she was sorry, that it was sad. But you know, I’ve done so much mourning with strangers over the years that I felt I needed to keep these tears to myself. Needed to let God collect them in his bottle. Needed to share them with only my husband and teenage son.

So I looked away and compartmentalized.

It was fine, I told her. I would be fine. At least I wasn’t as far along as last time, nervous chuckle. Just give me the shot, lady, so I can drive and cry and pray I don’t crash.

All week I have been in pain. Last time I had a miscarriage eleven years ago I went in for a D&C, so I have never experienced the drawn-out natural version. This version leaves you sick and with ruined underwear. A constant reminder that life is rude—that a broken world takes love, takes life from a mother’s body, and flushes it down the toilet. A reminder that there is nothing I can do to save this child. There was nothing I could do to save Daisy’s life, or the life of my second baby. I am sick with the thought that I have lost.

I lost the contest; I lost the race. I couldn’t do it, couldn’t make them survive. Only two of my children walk the earth. Only two of them are around to give and receive hugs and ice cream and prayers and corrections. Only two left. My family is like a jack-o’-lantern missing most of its teeth, its kooky smile showing its deficit.

So I sit in my bed, surrounded by a jar of chocolate chips, a banana, and cashew butter, acutely aware that not all is right in the world. It may never be. There is no better time to face another heartbreak than in the middle of writing about how great the future is, how with strength and dignity I can walk through anything. There is no better time than now to face Jesus and adjust my perspective, to view my surroundings accordingly.

I need truth. I need it when I read about the speakers at an upcoming conference who all have four to seven children, and when I feel overcome with jealousy at the pictures of beautiful people surrounded with beautiful children piled up like puppies in hipster pickup trucks. I need truth when the fear of loving anyone new creeps up, because they might just leave me and die. I need truth when I wonder if it’s safer to detach, safer when there are fewer people to love. I need truth when the sharp tang of depression flavors my thoughts—I knew it, I knew that would happen. Why is it me, always me? Why does death follow me around like a gross stray dog who pees foul yellow on every bright flower, every growing and flourishing thing?

Whenever we lose a child I feel just that—like a loser. I get this lame feeling, like I wasn’t good enough, couldn’t make the cut. When you’ve wanted something so badly you could taste it, when you’ve dreamed and named and pictured the way your future would look and it’s gone in a moment, wiped away with one ultrasound, you feel lost. When you’ve been so excited to give a baby to the family, to grow them all a gift. When you’ve hoped beyond all hope you could give the thumbs-up to the people who have prayed for you and supported you and cheered you on, and you have to face them and tell them their hopes were dashed along with yours.

Funny how it’s not my grown-out roots that make me feel like a loser (I was waiting until after first trimester to see my hairstylist), or the flannel shirt unbuttoned over an ill-fitting, dirty T-shirt. It’s not the saggy PJ bottoms or the spilled jar of chocolate chips or the mounting pile of dishes. It’s the dashed hopes, the letdown felt with every cramp, with the bleeding of hope.

Life can be sad. Incredibly sad. Like how-many-weeks-has-it-been-since-my-mascara-stayed-on-past-nine-a.m. sad. We are created as emotional beings complete with tear ducts, noses that run, and red faces that betray our true feelings. You know, even Jesus wept, and that is a comfort to me. There is a time to mourn.

Nothing stays the same. Nothing. Children grow up and people change. Church communities ebb and flow; hopes rise and fall. Marriages grow and weaken; some break up. Career paths and moves and family emergencies all paint our lives with different colors. Some are solemn and some are vibrant. For Pete’s sake, even my rear end has changed, traveled south—and she’s not coming back up where she belongs anytime soon, if ever.

So I drink in truth. I drink in the only life that is sure, the very Word of God. What was that he said? Remind me, for I can’t see through the muddle of tears, the feeling of rejection, the shaking in fear.

If I idolize a certain season of life, I will drown. I must learn to extract the joy from each and every season, or I will experience a different kind of death. I can’t live in the past; I can’t live in a place of missing the good old days. I need to agree with Jesus that, while things can be different or even disappointing, there is still a life abundant for me to grab hold of.

And now I know—after sitting for a while and mourning the baby we won’t meet until eternity, after doing the math and despising how we only have two of five children alive on earth, after the wiping of tears and the smearing of mascara, and after explaining to my family that they, too, have lost another member—I look up.

I surrender my hopes for what I wanted my family to look like, sacredly giving it to the Lord. I accept what he has chosen for us; I believe that he loves us. I look around and thank him for his generosity. I hug the baby a bit more, feeling her chubby face on my thinning one. I laugh with my fourteen-year-old son when he tells me funny stories of his friends and their crushes and how many waves he caught that day. I choose to be swallowed up in my tall, strong husband’s firm embrace, to bury my face in his barrel chest, grateful that we don’t face death alone.

I have so much.