We text daily a lot of the time. We video chat twice a month. But all four of us have only met in person twice. The first time last May, when one loss was so raw and so wrong in the way it will always feel because nature moved out of order in our lives. Then, we gathered in triage. We all needed the tears that came for all of our babes. H. was four months old at the time, my active motherhood still new, my gratitude full yet Lorenzo painfully missing—just as any mother’s heart expands when another one of her children is born.

This year, we traveled to Colorado. Loss no longer raw, but still—always—wrong. A new life was there, too, a life that was hard for her mom to dare dream of last May. But here she is, finding her fingers and dancing to Taylor Swift and making us all feel better.

Forty-eight hours with my loss mamas is my kind of retreat. I don’t need massages (though I wouldn’t turn one down), but this trip is much more of a salve for the soul. We speak in our shorthand. We mention our lost babies’ names as fluidly as we do our living children’s. We vent in a safe space about those who still don’t get it, one and two and three and nine years out. We shoulder the comments that seem so innocent to the Innocents, but that remain with us until we can take them to people who get it, where they can finally dissipate. We don’t judge. We don’t always say the right thing either, but if we miss the mark there is an immediate acknowledgment, a reframing. We don’t move on until things feel OK.

I apologize if I sound a bit vague. Part of it is to protect the sanctity of these visits as well as the personal losses of such valued women and sources of support. I am privileged to know the color of their grief and how they have braided it into the lives they’ve gone on to create—for themselves, their partners, and their children both here and not. I trust them: they are among the very few who have ever seen a photo of Lorenzo. Another part is that it’s difficult to describe wondrous things: hazy dreams that leave a feeling more than a vision, the deep sink of a needed hug, the sudden overwhelming when we think we’re going along just fine.

I can describe this: On our final day, we drove out to Garden of the Gods. I can’t imagine a more mystical place to take our healing bodies. The red rocks rise in staggered shapes from this swath of high desert. The sun is close overhead, asking us to shed our layers as we climb closer to Balanced Rock, a wonder of time and physics. Even at 290 million years old, it’s fall someday is inevitable. But on this day with these women under this sky, I realized that we have already fallen. We are standing again, side-by-side. Most of the time we reside in our four separate states, but once a year we make it matter that we breathe the same oxygen for a couple of days. We cook and have second cups of coffee and take walks and play with the baby and stay up late talking and all those normal things good friends who live far away do when they get together. We also cry and ask for help with a new corner of the grief and offer support for where our separate journeys do or don’t overlap and express how it feels for life to follow loss.

The air is thinner up this high. The sun 6,000 feet closer. The horizon clearer. I missed H., too, all these miles away from her. When I stepped back down, I was ready to travel home to her and Ryan and Ruby. We journey in both directions.

If you are grieving I will say this: Find your people. Because we can’t expect the Innocents to get it though some, in their brave empathy, do. It took me a year to find these women, and we are still getting to know each other. But they know the most significant part of me, as I do them. That’s what we truly see clearly, wherever we are.