My TFMR Saved My Life
One year after losing my daughter, I came across a quote.
A tree with no leaves won’t protect you from the rain,
but the rain will protect you from a tree with no leaves.
I found out I was pregnant a week before my engagement. Visiting my parents for Thanksgiving, I took the test in my childhood bathroom. The two dark pink lines appeared immediately. Over a grainy video call, I shared the news with my soon-to-be fiancé.
A few weeks later, after a confirmed heartbeat, I kept repeating “I’m so happy, I’m so happy” in ecstatic disbelief as he and I left the appointment, hand in hand.
My sister, who years earlier had made good on her promise that I’d be the first to know when she became pregnant, felt playfully slighted that I had not done the same for her. As a consolation, she asked us to FaceTime when our NIPT results came in so we could at least find out the gender together.
The report appeared in the portal one night after dinner. My fiancé and I sat on the couch with my laptop open, my sister on video call as we made our final guesses: boy or girl. I clicked the link.
When the page loaded, the first word I saw was “Positive.”
I stared at the screen. “I’m so sorry,” my sister whispered before hanging up. I rocked back and forth, sobbing, as my fiancé rubbed my back. I didn’t sleep that night.
For three days, I did nothing but scour the internet for data points, outcomes, and anecdotes, clinging to percentages and fractions—anything that suggested my daughter might still fall on the right side of the numbers.
Our appointment with the genetic counselor extinguished that fragile arithmetic.
A week later, at my chorionic villus sampling (CVS) appointment, the ultrasound revealed the baby had physical abnormalities consistent with the chromosomal condition. The prognosis for my daughter was fatal. The numbers no longer mattered. My baby would die.
We were given the option of what doctors call a TFMR, or termination for medical reasons: the decision to end a wanted pregnancy because of severe fetal abnormalities, genetic conditions, or risks to the mother’s life. In plain terms, it is an abortion performed because a pregnancy cannot safely continue.
In even plainer terms, I would have to schedule an appointment to end my baby’s life. There was no version of that future that felt survivable.
And still, it wasn’t the diagnosis that broke us. It was what followed.
Since we first told our families I was pregnant over Christmas, my fiancé’s mom asked us day after day when she could share the news with her friends. Once the test results came in, it became harder to keep deflecting her messages. When I could no longer field them, she started texting my sister for updates.
“I can’t handle this. Please talk to her,” I begged my fiancé.
“I will,” he promised.
He never did.
She called him one evening while he was sitting next to me on the couch. The phone wasn’t on speaker, but I could hear every word. The conversation shifted from questions about his friend’s upcoming baby shower to the ones I couldn’t bear.
“What about your baby? What happened to your baby?” she asked frantically as he glanced at me awkwardly. “Did you lose your baby? You lost your baby?”
He answered her questions vaguely as tears rolled down my face. I left the room.
The next morning, his mom texted us a photo of my fiancé’s jury summons. She never mentioned the baby again, and neither did anyone else in their family.
Not one “I’m sorry.” Not a single “Are you okay?”
It felt as though our baby had never mattered. In my own home, she felt like an inconvenience I was left to deal with alone.
That weekend, my fiancé went home to New Jersey for the baby shower. I chose not to go. A baby shower felt unbearable, and so did facing his mom. That night, he texted me from a bar. He was out with friends until midnight.
The earliest appointment I could get for the abortion was two weeks away. By then, I would be nearly sixteen weeks pregnant. I was determined to be seen sooner, terrified I might begin to feel my baby move.
I sat cross-legged on our bed, crying between calls to doctors’ offices, hearing my fiancé laugh from the other room as he scrolled Instagram.
The following day, my OB’s colleague offered an earlier surgical slot that Friday. I texted my fiancé, apologizing that it might interfere with the Super Bowl parade. He said it was fine, asked if I’d mind if he went to Shake Shack for dinner, then sent a screenshot of his work calendar conflicts.
Later, my phone rang. A cancellation had opened an even earlier spot. I would go in the next day for the pre-op appointment, and the TFMR would happen on Thursday, the day before Valentine’s Day.
“It will be the final ultrasound for baby,” I pleaded.
I went alone.
At the pre-op appointment, the medical team walked me through the details of the D&E procedure, and, through tears, I filled out paperwork authorizing my baby’s cremation. When the doctor printed the final ultrasound, the image came out blurry, giving me strange relief, as if the lack of clarity made her less real.
My fiancé had a work presentation the day of my TFMR, and he didn’t try to move it or take time off. I asked my friend if she could be there for me instead, and she said yes without hesitation. She and her husband just needed to make sure they could rearrange their childcare.
The doctors wouldn’t let me leave the exam room until I could confirm someone would be there the next day. I explained that my fiancé had a work conflict and I was waiting to hear back from a friend.
“What does he do for work?” they asked.
“Marketing.”
My surgery was scheduled for 6 a.m., three hours before my fiancé’s workday, so he accompanied me to the hospital. The plan was that he would leave after I was taken into the operating room, and my friend would be there when I woke up.
A nurse and a series of doctors met with us before I went under, all of them equally alarmed that he would be leaving me at the hospital.
“What kind of work do you do?”
“Marketing.”
“Where’s your office?”
“I work from home.”
My medical team saw what I could not.
After my surgery, my friend helped me dress and comforted me as I opened the hospital’s memory box with my baby’s footprints. A patient transporter wheeled me to the entrance to wait for our Uber and parked me beside another woman in a wheelchair, her newborn cradled in her arms. My friend made small talk so I wouldn’t have to. Back at her house, she cooked me a late lunch and didn’t leave my side until my fiancé came by after his workday ended.
The following day was the Super Bowl parade, and my fiancé had plans to go with a friend. I woke up that morning in diapers, alone in the apartment because he had gone to the gym. The drugs that allowed me to feel peaceful and numb the day before had worn off, revealing an unbearable pain beneath, an acute sense of emptiness.
“I want my baby…” I cried on the living room floor.
He ended up skipping the parade because his friend had decided it was too crowded, and I was relieved not to be left alone as I bled.
Two weeks after the TFMR, my fiancé left for a ski trip to Lake Tahoe. Worried about my crashing hormones, I asked him to text me when he was heading up the mountain so I’d know when he’d be unreachable, and before going to bed each night so I’d have something to wake up to.
He did neither.
By the time he was boarding his flight home, I was in tears.
“This is ridiculous,” he texted.
My grief was unrelenting. I cried every time I was in the shower. I cried every night after my fiancé fell asleep.
When we visited his family, it was as if nothing had happened.
“She’s had miscarriages, too. She understands,” he reassured me repeatedly about his sister. She never once acknowledged the loss.
Desperate for support, I discovered TFMR groups on Reddit. I never posted, but reading other women’s stories made me feel less alone.
As I grieved my daughter in isolation, something else came into focus: the person I believed I was building a life with was not there when the storm came.
At first I thought the tragedy had changed him. Now I understand that it revealed him.
Two months after the TFMR, we were arguing over text while at a concert with his family. I cried during “Chicken Fried.” At the end of the exchange, he sent a single line.
“You should seriously consider killing yourself.”
I avoided him the rest of the night, hiding my tears from his parents.
The next morning, he texted me, “I’m horrified reading through this just now. I wouldn’t blame you for leaving me.”
He promised not to drink anymore that weekend. By 2 p.m., he had already cracked open a beer. Later that night, he met friends at a bar while I stayed behind at his parents’ house.
In July, we moved to Seattle, packing our whole lives into a 16-foot Penske truck. Our new apartment was well-priced for the area—the finished basement of a house with a daycare upstairs, toddlers crying and objects dropping on the ceiling from morning to evening.
The apartment was still full of boxes. I was weeks behind on work. Each passing month that revealed another negative pregnancy test ripped open the wound. When my fiancé grew irritated that I hadn’t unpacked yet, I apologized. I told him I was struggling and that the grief felt overwhelming.
“Your sadness is ruining my experience here,” he replied.
Our baby’s due date came and went.
A couple weeks later, my fiancé said, “I have something to tell you, but please don’t be sad.” His sister was pregnant with her fourth. A girl. He had found out around our baby’s due date.
Labor Day weekend came days later. The tension finally broke after a night of drunken karaoke with his out-of-town friends. The cruelty in his voice and the contempt on his face carried an intensity I hadn’t seen before. It scared me.
I texted his parents because I didn’t know what else to do.
His parents never texted back.
The next morning, he said he was sorry for throwing water in my face (an apology he would later rescind), but I shouldn’t have texted his parents. I pushed for repair, reminding him we were a family. Grieving, strained, but still a family.
Later that week, we flew to Los Angeles for my 37th birthday. In my birthday card, he wrote: “In this new chapter, we’re rebuilding not just a home but our family.”
I believed him.
The day after we returned, I posted photos from the trip—him holding me close on the beach in Malibu, him kissing my cheek in the stands of the Rose Bowl. His sister texted him asking him to call her when he was out of the house so they could “catch up.”
A couple of weeks later, while I believed we were still together, his dad unfollowed me on Instagram. Then he blocked me. His brother blocked me too. I realized I had been removed from the family group chat.
At times, my fiancé admitted he didn’t understand their behavior. At others, he dismissed my pain entirely.
He ended our relationship the first weekend of October, minutes after getting off a call with his family to wish his sister a happy birthday.
Later that month, I came across texts my fiancé had exchanged with his sister a few days before our L.A. trip. She had written lengthy, insistent paragraphs, speaking about our relationship as if it were already over, warning that continuing “couple things” like trips or living together would only make it harder for me to accept things were ending.
“A relationship should be about wanting to be there,” she wrote, “not about feeling like you have to.”
He replied that he planned to “end it next week” after L.A. She had hearted his message.
On Christmas Eve, for the first time, I shared a post about losing my baby. His sister started watching my stories again. On New Year’s Eve, she unfollowed me everywhere.
For three years, we had visited their family constantly, taking the train from 30th Street Station to Absecon for birthdays, Christmases, and life’s quieter milestones. I had carried their granddaughter. Their niece. I was still grieving her. And yet she and I were discarded without care.
It was loss piled onto loss: my baby, my fiancé, my chosen family, my imagined future.
People who love me have told me my daughter saved me from a life that would have hurt me. I understand what they mean. I also understand that I would give anything to live in the future that still holds her, her tiny feet, her first words.
But the rain came when it did. And when it did, I saw the tree clearly. It had no leaves to protect me.
