As a child, I knew only that my grandmother had died when my mom was still a baby. The one time I asked what had happened to her, a bolt of panic flashed across my mother’s face. “A household accident,” was all she said.

I was twelve years old when she finally told me the truth. Some friends and I had got into a long after-school discussion about abortion, prompted by the gruesome posters that a protester had staked in front of the Planned Parenthood in our Vermont town. I had already begun reading my mother’s Ms. magazines cover to cover, but this was the first time I’d encountered a pro-life position. When I hopped into my mom’s car after school, I was buzzing with new ideas. I had almost finished repeating one friend’s pro-life argument when I saw the look on Mom’s face. That’s when she told me: the “household accident” that had killed her mother had, in fact, been a self-induced abortion.

Her hands were tight on the steering wheel as she spoke. I realized later that it wasn’t the topic of abortion itself that made her so uneasy—she was a nurse and a Roe-era feminist who usually responded straightforwardly to even the most embarrassing health questions. Rather, her anguish arose from sharing a truth that she’d been brought up believing was too terrible to speak.

Sitting beside her in the passenger seat, I struggled to absorb the meaning of what she’d told me. I had only just grasped what abortion was a few hours earlier, and was still trying on this new pro-life idea. “O.K.,” I said, “but what about the uncle or aunt I never had?” Mom whipped toward me, face taut with a rage and fear that I somehow understood had nothing to do with me. “What about the mother I never had?” she said.

Until recently, everything my mom knew about her mother fit into one three-ring binder. Inside were letters, documents, and photos that my mother had collected over the years. After the election last fall, as an Administration hostile to women’s reproductive rights settled into the White House, I asked her to send the binder to me, and did some sleuthing of my own. I got in touch with aging relatives and family friends, who offered crumbling bundles of my grandmother’s letters, carefully preserved for decades. My questions about her life and death hadn’t changed since I was twelve years old. What felt new, in the Trump era, was the urgency of her story.

My grandmother, Winifred Haynes Mayer, was born in New York City, in 1912, to an upper-middle-class family. Her father, a doctor, spent time in France during the First World War, helping set up orphanages, and returned to the U.S. in love with a Frenchwoman and seeking a divorce. Win and her brother were raised in the Bronx by their mother, Nyesie, a nurse.

Nyesie was determined that her daughter receive a college education, and in 1929 Win enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. There she majored in English, helped found a literary magazine, and, in her senior year, met my grandfather, Eddie. Win was lean and athletic, with high cheekbones and windblown hair. In photographs, she always looks as though she’s just returned from a brisk stroll.

Win and Eddie married in 1939. She got pregnant immediately but miscarried after her doctor prescribed some medication, possibly for morning sickness. In a short letter to her mother, dated “Thursday, I guess,” she wrote, “I lost the little kangaroo early Wednesday morning and am now lying in an empty and ethery tearful state of mind.” Nyesie wrote back, with some words crossed out, “I wish so much that I were near enough to be useful to you.”

My uncle Peter was born in 1941. (“He is a very funny looking little squirt but we like him,” Win wrote Nyesie. “Are there any chipmunks in our family?”) Soon after the United States entered the Second World War, Eddie was recruited by the newly formed Office of Strategic Services, and the family moved to Alexandria, Virginia. They rented a small apartment from some friends, Katrina and Chandler Morse, whose rambling house was a gathering place for a community of O.S.S. families.

Sooner or later, they knew, Eddie would leave for London. But the dates and duration of his deployment kept changing, and the uncertainty began to wear on Win. With Eddie away on a three-day business trip, she noted, “I am getting a foretaste for which I do not particularly care.” When he finally departed in April, Win was seven months pregnant with my mother, Judy. Eddie would not meet his daughter until she was six months old.

Katrina, their friend and landlady, needed the apartment for her sister-in-law and infant niece, so Win moved away, to a nondescript block of Army housing. She spent the summer of 1943 caring for her two children alone in the thick Virginia heat. Her letters to Nyesie convey a parent’s mix of joy and fatigue. “Judy is a sweet, juicy little girl as ever,” she wrote. “She howls from 7 till 8:30 which is very dull because by then I am fed up with children and want only to sit on the front porch in the cool of the evening.”

Eddie’s letters indicated that he’d likely be returning in November, but that month came and went with no sign of him. Then, just before Christmas, Win’s neighbor ran over to relay an urgent message from Katrina—she’d heard, through the O.S.S. grapevine, that Eddie was on a flight home. Win quickly cleaned the house, and then rushed with the children to the grocery store. When she called Eddie’s office from the A. & P., they told her he was waiting at the train station. “So we all dashed in to meet him!” she wrote to her mother. “T’is wonderful to have our family whole again.”

It wasn’t to last. Eddie’s commanders had decided that his project would require him in Europe indefinitely; once deployed, under the best scenario he’d have short leaves every six to eight months. “I really don’t think the Lord would have had to try boils to find the limit of my endurance after that,” Win wrote. That winter, a preoccupied tone crept into her letters to Nyesie: “I . . . heard from Beth that Winston had been killed over Munster . . . and that his widow has had twins, a boy and a girl,” she wrote. “Birth and death follow each other so swiftly these days that one has no time for the appropriate feelings about either of them.” A few weeks later, Win learned that she was pregnant again.

This pregnancy, unlike the others, is never mentioned in her surviving letters. Nyesie came to visit the first weekend in April, and it’s likely that Win asked her in person for help in obtaining an abortion. This would not have come as a shocking request. Nyesie was part of a large social circle of progressive doctors and nurses, and she would have known which of her colleagues might be willing to perform a “D. and C.” in violation of the law. In the nineteen-thirties, she had arranged an abortion for her son’s wife, an actress. The couple had gone on to have two daughters.