Content note: this article contains descriptions of miscarriage and baby loss that readers may find upsetting.

“Maybe Paperchase had run out of ‘Sorry about your miscarriage’ cards,” I joked to my friend Beth, standing by a stream at the bottom of her mother’s garden, a few months after she had lost a pregnancy. Her face didn’t move. I held my breath. My tongue touched the roof of my mouth with fear; I had gone too far. I had upset my friend. I had said the wrong thing.

And then, at last, she’d smiled. Because the idea of such a card was, we knew, ridiculous.

I had been interviewing Beth for a chapter in my book Holding The Baby about how – as parents – people like me (who got spontaneously pregnant the old-fashioned way) should talk to people who aren’t. How we can reach across the frayed edges of miscarriage, infertility, baby loss, illness, money and love to hold each other close. At the time, my son was about 16 months old; in fact, as we spoke about Beth’s miscarriage, he was careering around the lawn with a wheelbarrow full of logs, smashing into flowers and shin bones with glee. It was, therefore, perhaps inevitable that, five years later, as I miscarried myself – bleeding across four days of agonising hope and increasing disappointment – Beth was one of the first people I contacted. “I’m not pregnant any more,” I wrote to her, just hours after lying in the dark, as a sonographer searched my uterus for any sign of life. And, even though she was walking into one of the most stressful meetings of her year, Beth immediately replied: “Oh love. I’m so sorry.” Because, of course, she understood.

“When my friends had miscarriages, I wasn’t sure how to respond – until I had my own”