Unborn Love
On the grief of what never got to breathe
I share this piece with the deepest humility. I am a mother and a maternal-child nurse, and I recognize that the physical loss of a child is a sacred, shattering grief that stands entirely alone. I am not equating these experiences. Rather, I am exploring a specific ‘echo’—the unique ache of holding space for a love that was fiercely sensed, but for reasons beyond our control, was never allowed to take root and grow into its potential.
There’s a quiet kind of grief that floats just beneath the surface of ordinary life— a grief so soft, so formless, it’s hard to name.
But when it stirs, it stirs everything.
A friend of mine recently told me about someone close to her who’s walking through an unthinkably difficult decision—a pregnancy that may not carry forward.
A life that may not have the conditions to fully arrive.
And this stirred something in me.
Something about the grief that comes before the loss even happens.
The anticipatory ache of letting go before you’ve even had the chance to hold it.
And it got me thinking
About motherhood.
About possibility.
About what it means to begin bonding with something that hasn’t even taken its first breath.
When I was pregnant with my daughters, I remember walking through the world with a paradoxical mix of awe and terror—the wonder of carrying life, and the irrational fear that at any moment, it could be taken from me.
That something could go wrong.
That I might not get to meet the soul I was already bonding with and loving.
It felt like a miracle that everything aligned.
That they both arrived safely, healthy.
But that fear never really left.
Even after birth.
It just moved—
into the crevices of joy, into the long nights, into the part of me that wondered:
“What if something happens to me before they’re grown?”
“What if this beautiful moment I’m living is interrupted?”
And now, in a very different chapter of life,
I’ve found myself facing a different kind of grief—
the grief of a love that was never born, but was very, very real.
A love that sparked suddenly, clearly, divinely.
A connection that didn’t feel casual or fleeting, but like it had been written long before we met.
It moved fast. It defied logic.
It woke something up in me.
It felt like a seed that had already taken root before I even realized I’d been planting one.
It felt like this person had been hidden in my heart just waiting for the right time to be found.
But just as quickly as it began, it ended.
Or rather—
It was never given a chance to grow.
No real conversation
No attempt to understand
No space to say, “This is what hurt. This is what I need. Can we find our way through?”
Just… silence.
But his name is now forever-engraved on my heart.
Not all pregnancies happen in the womb.
Some happen in the heart.
Some begin in the glance across a room,
the electric conversation,
the warmth of a shared night,
the slow unfolding of what could be.
And when those kinds of love are never allowed to become—never allowed to take form or be nurtured or named—the grief that follows is just as real.
Not because something ended.
But because it never had the opportunity to begin.
I still find myself looping through the same questions:
Why did it collapse before it could grow?
Why didn’t he allow it even the smallest chance?
And beneath that, something more tender:
Why can’t I seem to get this out of my system?
Why does it still live in my chest, in my skin, in my breath?
It also stirs something violent:
Why does it feel like a sucker punch to my solar plexus?
The truth is, when something lodges in your somatic memory—when love lives not just in thought but in touch, in feeling, in the soft corners of your nervous system—it doesn’t leave just because logic tells it to.
It leaves through ritual.
Through remembering.
Through letting it be real
Even if it was invisible to the world.
There’s a part of me that feels strange comparing these things.
The grief of an unborn child and the grief of an unborn love are not the same.
But both carry the weight of what might have been.
Both require us to say goodbye to something no one else ever really saw.
And in that way, they echo.
So today, I’m honoring all the unborn things:
The babies who begin gestation in our womb, but don’t arrive.
The loves that ignite our heart, but never fully materialize.
The lives we imagined and began to build in silence, and then had to bury without ceremony.
We don’t talk enough about those losses.
We don’t name them.
But I am naming this one now.
I loved something that never got to live.
And still—
I am grateful that I got to feel it move me from within, even for a moment.
Even if I was the only one who stayed for the burial and mourned the loss.
To the mothers I have cared for: I have seen your strength in the face of the unthinkable. Your journey is a sacred one. I name this ‘unborn love’ not to diminish your path, but to honor the weight we carry when a heart prepares for a future that doesn’t arrive.
In the end, perhaps all our losses—the ones the world sees and the ones we carry in secret—are part of a collective grief. A testament to what it means to be human, to be brave enough to love, and to hold one another through the silence of everything that began, but never fruited.