Letting people see your words brings a certain fear. Not the everyday sort, like the missed deadline, the awkward sentence, but something far more exposing. The fear that asks. What if they see too much? 

Years passed before I shared any writing publicly, still carrying that fear. Because my story wasn’t just a story. It was a loss.

In the early 1990s, I experienced the heartbreak that quietly reshapes a life: the loss of my baby. It was difficult to find places to speak about it openly at that time. Grief, especially that kind of grief, lived behind closed doors in my community. People acknowledged it in hushed tones and harsh ones, and I would endure.