The Red Papasan Chair

On this year's Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day, I dedicate this piece to Jeanne Menary, Beyond Choice support group, Parenting After Loss moms and dads, and HAND of the Bay Area.

The first night I held my one-year-old son to sleep in the red papasan chair was the night that I realized I simultaneously hadn’t thought about my daughter in a while and also missed her terribly.

Tears streamed down my face as I kissed my spunky toddler’s forehead after he peacefully fell asleep in my arms, with little struggle. He had just paid a spontaneous visit to the beach after dinner and saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time. Pacifica in early June welcomed us with a routinely foggy and windy evening. Despite the cold air briskly moving across our bodies and faces, my son was in awe the moment he laid his eyes on the ocean. His awe was our poetry.

Perhaps it was the ocean’s mesmerizing sound that swayed my son to sleep. Perhaps it was more than a year of sleep troubles, countless trial and error, tears and fights in the dark, a growing baby that fiercely insisted on being rocked or held to sleep, the resulting back and sciatica pain… Perhaps it was the magic spell of the red papasan chair itself. Whatever worked, we came a long way to be able to hold our son close, sink into the cozy, bowl-shaped chair, and he’d fall asleep cuddling with me.

The nights after D&E, my grieving and aching body sat in that same papasan chair for solace, my daughter gone. On the third night, our little girl came by to soothe us. The palpable vision of a tiny, translucent figure bewildered and captivated me - a little flying soul that my mind’s eye beheld and traced. She first landed on my chest as I curled up in the papasan chair, hugged me and kissed my cheeks. Then, she floated up to my husband’s left shoulder as he leaned against the door, and kissed his cheek gently as he wept in defeat. She seemed like a dancing spirit as music played, and vanished soon after music ended.

The next time I saw her was when she sat next to my husband as he improvised a melancholic tune on the piano. That was the last time she ever entered my vision, even though she never stopped visiting. After-death communication became a fascination of mine since then.

The red papasan chair seemed comically large when we picked it up from the Craigslist seller. Newly pregnant with my daughter, rootless and anxious in the new apartment we had just moved to, I followed my therapist’s advice and sought out any object of comfort to fill a small breakfast nook. “You can designate a particular area in the new place to call it your own. Make it comfortable and welcoming, a new home.” She proposed.

The chair’s magic spell first led us to its previous owner who happened to reside in the same neighborhood that I called home for the first four years in San Francisco. An old stomping ground of my wide-eyed singledom, Cole Valley’s charm never faded even years after I moved away, got married, and planned to have children. Returning to Cole Valley for the papasan chair felt like receiving a surprise gift from the old home to the new.

A gorgeous, long-haired Retriever bolted out of the door in an instant, followed by the owner carrying the papasan chair and a full-sized red velvet cushion. An affectionate pup always catches my attention before anything else. As if first-trimester fatigue had disappeared, I energetically petted the dog, while my husband walked up to the owner for a handshake.

The chair then cast its second magic spell. As I crawled into its massive plush cushion and eventually rediscovered the pregnant body’s fatigue, the Retriever jumped into the chair and immediately snuggled up, as if to protect me. Surrounded by softness, my daughter and I were held by not one but two gentle giants.

The full-grown pup then bounced up to hug me and zealously moved about my body, shedding a large amount of fur everywhere. But I didn’t mind. I treasured any moment of pure joy amidst the daunting prospect of becoming a first-time parent.

“She never does this!” The owner exclaimed, puzzled. “She’s usually kind of indifferent toward other people.”

He didn’t know I was pregnant, but she did. It was too early in the gestational age for my bump to show, but she likely sensed from altered hormones and scents that I was carrying a baby. Or perhaps even more mysteriously, she intuited that I was pregnant with a baby that was very sick. But no one else knew at the time.

We walked away from the transaction with our hands full and our hearts warmed. The large papasan chair filled the small breakfast nook with its larger-than-life presence, but not in an intimidating way. I lounged in that chair often while pregnant with my girl, singing songs from Sesame Street with my husband, reading books to our baby, and shedding tears. The chair carried me as I carried my daughter, even just for two short months.

The first night I held my one-year-old son to sleep in the red papasan chair, “Burn incense” popped up as a calendar alert on my phone. Underneath a snug sleepsack, my son also happened to wear his “Little Brother” onesie to sleep. Almost exactly three years ago, I found out I was pregnant with my daughter.

My daughter was telling me something. She never stopped visiting or watching over us, even as baby care and postpartum anxiety left little space for us to grieve her death. She might have been the one casting a magic spell that gently carried her little brother to the ocean, and then to dreamland after almost a year of sleep woes. She planted a seed in my mind, a promise to both of my children that I’d hold my son to sleep in the red papasan chair for as long as he allowed. In a way, I’d be holding my daughter too.

“We’ve truly come a long way.” My husband whispered, his voice tinged with bittersweetness.

In honor of the unique grief journey of countless loss parents during this Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness month, a portion of all paid subscriptions to Fieldnotes from a Watcher from October 15 to October 31, 2025 will be donated to HAND of the Bay Area. HAND is a San Francisco Bay Area-based 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.