When we lived in Japan, my husband took me on a date to a cemetery. In his defense, it was a famous cemetery in an Ewok-worthy forest on Mount Koya known for gimmicky headstones in the shapes of rockets and coffee cups.

Yet they didn’t interest me as much as the hundreds of stone Jizo statues that lined the wooded paths. These small figurines dressed in red caps and bibs honor the souls of babies who are never born. Crowding their feet are toys and snacks left by parents to comfort their children in the afterlife. Sometimes a woman would turn away as we approached her on the path. Sometimes the flowers would still be fresh.

My husband, Brady, and I were young enough then to assume that tragedies happened to other people and not to us. This was a belief we carried for years until the day we held hands on an ultrasound table watching the technician turn off the monitor and tiptoe out of the room. A miscarriage at 10 weeks produces no body, so there would be no funeral. “What do we even do?” I asked the doctor.

She wrote me a prescription for Percocet: “Go home and sleep.”

We went home. I didn’t sleep. I spent a week throwing myself around the house I’d decorated to look like a dojo — that’s how many souvenirs I brought when we’d moved back to the States from Japan. I was itchy with sadness. I picked at my cuticles and tore out my hair. I had all this sorrow and no one to give it to, and Brady couldn’t take it off me because his hands were already full of his own mourning. We knew miscarriage was common. But why wasn’t there anything people did when it happened?