A Very Short Piece for My Daughter
This was a piece originally written for Time To Talk TFMR podcast in November 2023, and captured perhaps only 0.1% of my daughter’s story.
“How can I live fully in this world now, knowing that a part of me is no longer here?” I asked my husband a few weeks after our daughter died.
In my mind’s eye, my drifting, grieving body, still recovering from D&E and taking slow walks in San Francisco, would be gently but tightly enveloped by a bubble from head to toe.My daughter was in there with me, cocooned in this protected, tiny space, completely safe and isolated. Everyone else, even my husband, was distant.
What made others even further away was a peculiar force that launched this closed unit of two into outer space. Afloat like my daughter was in her ultrasound, I observed from afar — the planet and its people seemed trivial. I was out there with her while simultaneously searching for her, somewhere in the universe, in a different realm. I wanted to stay there forever, with her.
Yet in this realm, I was still aimlessly pacing the streets of San Francisco, with no daughter nearby.
“By living in this world, she’s living through you as well, because she’s a part of you.” My husband responded, his usual hopefulness contrasting my melancholy. I knew he’d want me to be here with him, as grief-stricken as he was too.
Two years later, I’m holding our precious five-month-old rainbow baby boy close to me. He’s luckily not afflicted with fetal hydrops and heart defects like his sister was. He was born full term, unlike his sister who was given, at merely 13-week gestational age, a 99% probability of eventual fetal demise. His cells contain complete sets of XY sex chromosomes and chromosome 16, contrary to his sister who suffered from Turner syndrome and 16p11.2 microdeletion. He wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for his sister, yet I still don’t fully grasp that nuanced and bitter relationship between the two siblings. But their English names do share the same first three letters. And his Chinese name — Qiangxin — represents the strong, palpable heartbeats revealed in both of their ultrasounds. My two kids are connected in those and so many other ways.
Mary “little tomato”, September 10, 2021. We miss you forever.
I originally wrote this short piece in November 2023 for Time To Talk TFMR podcast’s social media platforms (Instagram post here). Two years later in October 2025, I read this piece at the Annual Service of Remembrance organized by HAND of the Bay Area, a nonprofit organization that offers empathetic peer support to parents and their loved ones who are grieving the loss of a baby before, during or after birth.