The Hardest Pill to Swallow: Living With Loss, Love, and Uncertainty

There’s a kind of silence that follows loss. A silence that hums deep within your bones long after the world has moved on.

I lived in that silence after losing our baby girl at over 20 weeks due to an incompetent cervix. I’ve been living in it ever since I lost my daughter to CDH (Congenital Diaphragmatic Hernia).

Three weeks. That’s all the time we had.

I lived in silence again when I was diagnosed with secondary infertility. What a cruel phrase. My baby didn’t survive. Try explaining that to the countless doctors I saw after trying for over a year, reliving the same trauma again and again.

I suffered in silence when we turned to IVF because of that infertility. And again, I suffered in silence when we lost our IVF baby, our baby boy, at 20 weeks. No answers. Just a pamphlet about the "stages of grief."

Three weeks to memorize her face. Her scent. The sound of her breath. Even if the ECMO machine overshadowed it, I still remember. Three weeks to live what I had spent my entire life preparing for, motherhood.

And then... it was gone.

No one talks about what comes after. No one tells you how your body still aches for something it will never get back. Or how your mind becomes a battlefield, where hope and reality collide again and again.

I’ve done everything — the shots, the scans, the bloodwork. I’ve lived through the brutal cycle of trying to create life in a body that no longer remembers how.

And now, I find myself facing the most brutal truth of all:

I might never become a mother again.

And I’m angry.

Not the loud kind of anger that yells or breaks things. It’s the quiet kind. The simmering kind. The kind that builds with every, “Maybe it’ll happen someday.” Every “Just relax,” Every baby announcement.

I’m angry that my body failed me. Angry that I did everything right, and it still wasn’t enough. Angry that grief clings to me like a shadow, appearing in the moments I should’ve celebrated.

But underneath the anger, there is love.

A deep, unwavering love for the baby I held — and for the ones I’ll never meet. A love that does not fade, even when the world expects me to “move on.”

This isn’t a story about giving up.

It’s a story of survival.

Of learning to live inside the ache. Of carrying both love and loss — side by side — every single day.

I used to think the hardest part of infertility was the treatments: the injections, the waiting, the endless cycle of hope and heartbreak.

But this is harder —Accepting a future that looks nothing like the one I dreamed of... and still finding meaning in what remains.

This is the hardest pill to swallow. Not because it’s bitter — but because it feels final.