Writing this is all I do. Writing this is everything I do.

I journey here and I journey to my parallel, private writings about my son, and those are my main avenues to any real sense of “arrival”—that feeling that you are interacting with a larger aspect of the world. I no longer get that feeling from teaching a class, say, or interviewing someone for an article. I’m (not) sure I will again one day, but for now I arrive right here, at a writing table that has traveled from New York City to San Francisco to Santiago.

I have to come to it, sit at it, and open the pages that talk about Lorenzo, and circle back over the week where we had an ultrasound in Santiago on a Monday afternoon and I delivered him on a Saturday morning in California. I have to go back over it to understand and come to terms with the information we gathered, the impossible decisions we made as parents, the expressions on the faces of the doctors and the nurses as they told us we were still good parents, the sense of how grave everything really was because of the kindness that was extended to us from all sides, and the once unfathomed emotions that are now part of the rest of everything. I have to go back over it because it’s impossible to accept what happened on a Friday afternoon into Saturday morning without first understanding what happened on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday. For now, those days are still very private.

I reach out from that privacy as I can. I write this. I access a compassionate community I never knew existed: a series of beautiful people I have sought and found through a process that began with a hospital-appointed social worker in a delivery room and continued through calls to three grief counselors who all called me back immediately. The process included somewhat desperate emails to two other mothers like me who I hoped might help me deal with the impossible emotions that come tethered to the decisions we had to make as parents. The process led to Ruby. The process then hit a wall, as I gathered information for some dozen professional therapists scattered amongst all three of the previously mentioned cities my desk has resided in, only to never reach out. Really, I, no longer sure of where to turn to get the emotions out, hit the wall. I found the acupuncturist instead. This week, I’m drinking grapefruit juice to help my liver, which I’ve learned is also responsible for filtering our strong emotions, our extreme sadness or fear or happiness.

Like that week, the process also circles. I email the other moms, I walk Ruby, I go to the acupuncturist, I sit down here. A few circles ago, a mom asked what we were planning to do in tribute to our son. Very early on, I thought we would hold some sort of ceremony in California soon after, where he was made on a first anniversary in Carmel (it always seemed very meant to be that way) and where he came to rest in my arms in the hospital where I was born (as it never seemed meant to be). But it would have been lodged forever in the still raw wound of this. Since then, Ryan and I have not been in a rush to figure it out. Lorenzo lives in our hearts always. He taught us that our life here together is but a nanosecond, but that that doesn’t mean we don’t have to be patient.

Recently the same mom shared that she reads about Lorenzo here and suggested that perhaps my writing this is my tribute. I love her for saying so, and I think she’s right. I think it’s always been about that, consciously and not so consciously. My uncle put it another way—that it feels religious. That is not to overestimate my own writing, but it is to say that two people (one whom I’ve never met and another who has known me my entire life) see something lasting here that I want to be seen. That in writing about Lorenzo, he somehow travels out of that anguished week and through me and into your minds, however you picture him or gain meaning from his life.

I’m learning that there are many ways to tell the story of grief, of losing, of who the person who changed you so categorically really was. I don’t know who Lorenzo was going to be. He was not going to be the healthy-hearted boy I keep dreaming about when my mind ventures too far from the realities of that week. That would be as much a fantasy had he lived outside of me as it is to me now. But I do not know what he would have been like or funny things he might have said if he lived long enough to see humor in the world or all the terrible pain that would have led up to then because we decided to bestow it upon him. I can only tell you that he and babies like him are so loved, so missed, so whole in our minds it’s as if they grew and ran and laughed. It’s as if they lived entire lives before they spiraled back down into the moments when we lost them. They did live their entire lives.

I don’t expect you to relate. Sometimes I can’t even relate to other parents like us because I catch one different detail and spin out from there… Oh, but she didn’t deliver. Oh, but he wasn’t her first child. Oh, but she didn’t have to make that choice. I’m sure the delicate bridge we’re walking across teeters when they arrive at the differences in my story. It makes us ask: How do I live through this exactly if no one else did exactly? These bereaved journeys are terribly unique. But as much as I search for our story out there, I don’t wish for anyone else on the planet to know exactly what Ryan and I know exactly. I only wish that we continue to see one another across our respective fields of adversity. That is what compassion is. That is what we try to share. That is me writing this to you. That allows me to have read the enclosed Elisabeth Kübler-Ross quote, given to me by a beautiful friend, and to understand instantly its meaning.