Cosmopolitan ^ DECEMBER 2016 ^149
feature
online
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jennifer wolff perrinephotographeD b y
landon nordemanto have a miscarriage or cancer Diagnosis? one woman conFesses.
“no he a rt be at, no ba by.”
Anna shared this news
on BabyCenter.com on July
9, 2013. It was the latest in
a series of anxious posts.
The 26-year-old psychiatric
nurse had written that she
had become pregnant 10
weeks before her wedding,
only to start bleeding three
days before the marriage. An
ultrasound revealed a beating
heart, and the ceremony
went on. Anna had posted
that when she returned from
the honeymoon, a checkup
revealed an empty sac the
first scan had missed. She
had actually been carrying
twins, and one twin had died.
Now the other one was gone
too. “It’s all over,” she wrote,
and more than 30 women on
the message board chimed in
to offer their sympathies.
As Anna grieved, the
pregnancy-loss forum
became a kind of therapist’s
couch. “There’s not a day that
goes by when I don’t think
about my angels,” she wrote.
She solicited advice on how
to honour her twins—she
named them Charles and
Tyler. “I want ornaments in
memory of our boys,” she
wrote. “I don’t want them
forgotten on Christmas.”
Anna struck a chord with
women on the forum, all of
whom had gone through
miscarriage, stillbirth, or the
death of an infant. “I would
absolutely get your babies
an ornament or a gift,” one
woman wrote. “They were
real live living people.”
Anna soon became
pregnant again—this time,
with a girl. But three days
before what would have been
the due date of her twins,
she lost that baby too.
Online, Anna was f looded
with sympathy. Off line,