We were driving to the hospital for my scheduled c-section. On my lap I carried a bag filled with gifts for our daughter; a peach-colored hat with matching socks and a cheerful blanket of orange, blue, and white stripes. There was also a pristine white blanket with a delicate pattern knitted by my mother, the blanket we would later use to bury our child.

We had discovered she was a girl, about 16 weeks before, around the same time that she was diagnosed in utero with homozygous achondroplasia, a lethal combination of the healthy form of dwarfism my husband and I both share.

We named her Tracy Elizabeth. On that early, snowy December morning, we did not know for certain if Tracy would ever get to feel the warmth of the blankets wrapped around her. The doctors could not guarantee that Tracy would be breathing once removed from my uterus, and the resuscitation plan, painstakingly crafted by my husband Gibson and me, determined she would not be hooked up to a ventilator. We drove on through the snow toward an immediate yet uncertain future.

The only certainty granted to us, one with which Gibson and I were both familiar, is that pregnancy can be a risky proposition for a couple like us. Any child of ours has a 25% percent chance of receiving a matching set of dwarfism genes, always a fatal condition in early infancy. In deciding to become pregnant, we focused on the 75% chance of having a healthy child and held our breath.

Sadly, the odds did not go our way. As a result, there were choices to be made. The way we looked at it, none of the options offered to us could spare us from a painful grief. Ultimately, it was just a matter of choosing the grief we thought we could handle. In deciding to continue the pregnancy, and in deciding not to place Tracy on a ventilator once she was born, we were choosing our own avenue of grief—one that suited us, and her (we hoped), in spite of how horrible it felt.

Ours was a complicated grief, but not an altogether miserable one. Not long after the diagnosis, we noticed that Tracy responded to our voices, and we had fun poking my belly to see if she would kick back. We’d laugh as the magazine resting atop my belly would suddenly take a reverberating leap. One day while swimming, I casually placed my hand on my belly, and found it misshapen from the curve of her round bottom. It was electrifying, that first, sudden contact with my child.

But the few items of clothing I had bought before her diagnosis became the only clothes Tracy would ever have. The guest room remained a guest room. We would hang on to my old beat-up Subaru for another year, instead of buying a newer one safer for the baby.

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