The thing about miscarriage is that the word itself does no justice to the great tragedy that it is. There are very few things I know anymore, but I do know this: Birdie will always be a part of our Hanukkah story.

I was only pregnant for seven and a half weeks before my miscarriage. There was no body, no breath; there was no measurable part of a lifetime spent together. I’d only known there was life inside my body for three and half weeks, and yet the experience seems to still have a heartbeat.

“If we think too hard, we’ll never do it,” Kellie said. She was right. A cost-benefit analysis would yield no practical reason to grow our family. The only reason to make a new baby was that we felt like it, and we could.