I want to talk about the particular cruelty of a grief that has no event at its center. With most losses, something is taken from you. With infertility, nothing is taken - something simply fails to arrive. And the world is not designed to register the loss of what was never there.

There is no funeral for an imagined child. There is no moment of before and after. There is only the slow erosion of a possibility, consultation by consultation, test by test, until one day you're sitting across from a doctor who says certain words in a certain order and you understand that the future you had been assembling - not planning exactly, assembling, the way you assemble a house from pieces before the foundation is poured - is not going to be built.

My partner and I talk about it differently. We are both grieving. We are not grieving the same thing. I am grieving a child that felt specific to me - a person I had already imagined in some detail, whose absence is a particular absence. She is grieving the architecture of a life. Both of us are right. Neither of us can fully reach the other.

What I keep encountering is the invisibility. The culture has elaborate rituals for other kinds of loss. For this one, people say things like at least you know now and you can always adopt, which are not wrong facts but are not the point. The point is that I had a future and now I have a different one, and the adjustment from one to the other is real work that happens in private.

What do you grieve that the world provides no ceremony for? Where do you put the losses that have no names?