Two weeks before taking the ferry across a bumpy stretch of the North Sea to the Danish island of Bornholm this March, I was sixteen weeks pregnant. As I watched seabirds flee the nose of the boat as we came into harbour in Rønne, I was alone in my body.

It wasn’t a miscarriage, as I’d experienced last year. The pregnancy was very much wanted, but ended with something I thought I'd never have to consider: a termination, for medical reasons. The pregnancy was far enough along for a very small baby to be born, but far too early to survive, even if all forty-six chromosomes were somehow intact.

In quiet moments, before falling asleep or waiting for coffee to drip through the filter, I think I can still hear her heartbeat – the final proof, alongside a Trisomy 18 diagnosis, that she would not be able to survive outside the womb.

As the specialist doctor held the ultrasound to my stomach, we listened to the thud-sss as our baby stretched her arms on the screen, the second part of the beat the sound of oxygen leaking from her heart chambers. With each thud-sss, the doctor’s face twisted, as if the noise offended her and everything she’d learned in medical school. She knew, and increasingly so did we, that nothing could heal our baby.

If I continued the pregnancy – and I reached full term without problems, which was unlikely – she’d likely live for minutes at most.

In the last of many appointments hoping for a miracle, I was the one who had to sign the papers. When Iain and I came back to the hospital the next day, my stomach still swirling with the morning sickness that had filled most of the last two months, everything that happened – a long, painful, but somehow beautiful process that was very much a birth – happened in my body.

With time, I’ve come to realise that our daughter only knew the warmth and comfort of my womb. That so much additional suffering – and risk for me – was avoided. That it was a decision that wasn’t really a decision at all. But still, I couldn’t be the same person again. Everything had changed; deep, deep down, on what felt like a molecular level.

Our trip to rainy Bornholm was a blessing of sorts. In those weeks after I left the hospital, shocked and exhausted by grief, we could barely put together a shopping list, let alone plan a holiday. But this was already planned, designed as a welcome break after my morning sickness hopefully faded to spend some time in nature not too far from home.

We went ahead with the trip, finding ourselves in the wake of our tragedy in a town called Gudhjem (God's home) on Easter Sunday with plenty of time to think about life, death, and everything in-between as waves crashed against the rocks outside our holiday apartment and rain streamed down the window.

Two weeks after returning from Bornholm, I was still bleeding. When it got heavier, I went to my local doctor who sent me to hospital. After scans showed my uterus was full of blood clots, caused by retained placenta after the birth, I was told I had to stay in for a D&C surgery the following day. (A surgery that thankfully isn’t political here. If I lived in Georgia, things might have looked very different.)

After waking up from the operation, we got a taxi home and I got under my duvet on the sofa to watch an episode of One Day. I stood up to get a glass of water and felt blood start pouring. Lots of blood. In five minutes, it was everywhere – through pads, clothing, and onto the floor.

We called the hospital and didn’t get through. We called the medical advice line and an automated voice said we were sixth in line. Finally, we called for an ambulance, which shuttled us back to hospital, an IV in my arm before we reached the end of our road. After a second surgery the next day, my healing finally began.

Darkness and light live so closely together in a life, and that’s what this story is about, really. It's a chronicle of just one healing journey, starting from a place where healing felt impossible.

While unable to work for most of the last six months – seeing two therapists, prescribed a cornucopia of pharmaceutical crutches, and escaping into nature for comfort – I’ve read a lot. Mostly gentle books (I loved Sipsworth by Simon Van Booy recently) or escapist books (anything by Elin Hilderbrand), but also books about grief and how our culture memorialises losses.

I came across a story I somehow didn’t know – about how, at Roskilde Festival in 2000, nine men died in a crowd crush during a Pearl Jam performance. West of the stage, there’s a memorial with a stone bearing the inscription "How fragile we are" surrounded by nine birch trees.

Lest we forget how fragile we are, sings Sting in “Fragile,” the song that inspired the inscription.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this – how fragile life is, but also miraculous.

Several times this year, I haven’t wanted to be alive. (This, the statistics show, isn’t particularly unusual. PTSD, depression, and self-blame are common after pregnancy losses.) But this month, my due date came and went. Seasons have changed. And I’m here.

Since moving to Copenhagen in 2021, I've sought refuge in the city’s green spaces. On good and bad days, I’ve cycled from the Danish capital up the coast to summerhouses, wild camped in old-growth forests, and watched nature change with the weather. And in my grief, I’ve felt a call to go deeper: further into the natural world, away from the city, more north.

Go north, my mind and body have whispered at the hardest moments, nudging me onto trains over the Øresund bridge to Sweden, hiking close by in Skåne but also taking overnight trains far, far north, beyond the Arctic circle to Sápmi, the land the Sámi people have looked after for generations. 

I’ve found a place of guidance, solace, and belonging – a place for grappling with who I am, what life is, and what I want to do with it – where the harshness of the environment feels more welcoming than any warm, predictably cheery summer climate.

The further north I go, the more the landscapes open up; there are not just fewer people and buildings, but fewer trees, too. Being able to see for miles in any direction, with berries, mushrooms, reindeer lichen, and low birch shrubs underfoot, streams flowing by with water so clear you can fill up your bottle and drink right from it. 

I’ve discovered in the outdoors a spiritual syllabus; a school of life taught through the harsh climate where nature prevails, putting worries into perspective and redefining what matters. Wild northern landscapes have been the backdrop for my pain and healing, but also a reflection of life's rhythms as I've encountered them: new life, flourishing, fading, death, and new life again. It’s all part of it. The devastatingly difficult and beautiful everyday reality of life on earth. We are all, sooner or later, blindsided by grief.

It’s here, both at home in Copenhagen – where our daughter is buried in the beautiful green space of Bispebjerg cemetery – and away, that I've slowly put the pieces of my life back together. The meaning of healing isn't what I thought. There's no back to normal. It's more a case of rebuilding; a letting-in of the light, all the way to the darkest corners. And in those corners, in the midst of grief, there can be an outpouring of love and even beauty.

As I’m slowly learning, it turns out there’s such a thing as post-traumatic growth. But in any case, even when there is no growth – when everything sucks and you can’t see a way out – loss hurts because it’s on the other side of love.