We hear the heart rate at 85 bpm. This is close to what mine is, normal for an adult, but it isn’t right for a seven-week embryo’s, whose heart rate should be double that. We all hope for our children to race ahead of us, dream up and do things we never could; in a sense, these early rapid heart rates signify their readiness to do that, to grow and become someone of their own. But this baby isn’t going to.

As I wait for a doctor to come tell me What It All Means, what I already know, my mind wanders to the trail of boogers that an older child has left on the wall at home, up the stairs and down the hall, and the corresponding trail of post-it notes that someone else has put up to point out where they all are. Who would have ever thought to do something so gross and ridiculous? Not me, that’s who; it could only be another person, once a fragile embryo himself, now on his own pathway through the world (a pathway apparently marked by accusatory post-it notes), driven by his own ideas and doing things his mom would never dream of. I reflect on what an incandescent miracle it is for anybody to live long enough and develop the self-determination to leave trails of boogers on the wall.

The doctor says we have a few weeks to see how things go. I resolve that if this is all the life on earth this baby is ever going to have, we are going to count every moment and live it to the max. One child has a jiujitsu tournament, and we all go in force to cheer him on, pumping it up with fight songs (“Went the distance, now I’m not gonna stop / Just a man and his will to survive.…” Survive, fighter baby! Go the distance!). Another child turns four and a half and is convinced, from the bottom of her sparkly heart, that this is as deserving of a party as an actual birthday. Is she wrong? No, she is not. So we make cupcakes, cover the house in balloons, and celebrate yet another miracle. This is your family. You are part of this.

I desperately want to convey to this baby, struggling to develop and keep that heart going, how much he or she is loved, supported, cherished, not alone. But how can I communicate this? I can talk and sing, but the hearing won’t develop for another several weeks. I can sort of poke around from the outside like a greeting, but this does not say what I want it to: I, your mom, am with you, I am here. In the end, it seems the only way to express this is to do what I’m already doing – just be home and sustenance, just be love, just be.

At some point I wonder if God might feel the same way for us, wishing to express a love we don’t yet have the capacity to recognize. “Oh Jerusalem,” says Jesus, “How often have I longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings” (Matt. 23:37). Even when we don’t know it, we are enveloped all the same.

One thing the baby and I do together almost every day is go for a walk in the forest. The trees lifting to the sky remind me of Terabithia, the secret country dreamed up by two children in Katherine Paterson’s 1977 Newbery-winning novel Bridge to Terabithia. Ten-year-old Jesse is trapped in what already seems like a drab, misunderstood existence when a new kid moves in next door. “The person had jaggedy hair cut close to its face and wore one of those blue undershirtlike tops with faded jeans cut off above the knees. He couldn’t honestly tell whether it was a girl or boy.” Leslie – “one of those dumb names that could go either way,” Jess thinks, though he senses she’s a girl – is determined to make friends with him, as much as he tries to brush her off. But when he finally lets her in, more than one world opens up to him.

Every afternoon, they swing across the dried-up creek bed at the border of the woods and become king and queen of Terabithia, “here where the dogwood and redbud played hide and seek among the oaks and evergreens, and the sun flung itself in golden streams through the trees to splash warmly at their feet.” There, they build a castle stronghold, fight invaders, and explore their realm. Jess is wary of the deeper forest, “dark places where it was almost like being underwater,” which he feels are haunted, but Leslie explains it is a sacred place that “even the rulers of Terabithia come into … only at times of greatest sorrow or of greatest joy.”

Even outside Terabithia’s enchanted borders, where his older sister picks on him for his “girl friend” and his father is never not disappointed in him and everyone is small-minded and no one has enough to make ends meet, Jess and Leslie take on new adventures in a way that Jess had never known before. When an older girl bullies his little sister May Belle, they take great pleasure in cooking up a scheme to get back at her. But when they catch that same bully weeping over circumstances even crueler and more powerful than herself, they find themselves, to their own amazement, coming to her rescue.

Then the rain begins. The dry creek bed turns to swollen rapids. Jess and Leslie go into the sacred grove and pray to overcome the “spell of some evil, unknown force” the rain portends. Jess is filled with dread while Leslie, as ever, seems to live without fear. One morning, she tries crossing into Terabithia alone, but falls on a rock and drowns.

In his grief, Jess feels that Leslie “had tricked him. She had made him leave his old self behind and come into her world, and then before he was really at home in it but too late to go back, she had left him stranded there – like an astronaut wandering about on the moon. Alone.”

By the time of the next ultrasound, the little life has slipped away. I deliver my dead baby, name her (?) Leslie, and bury her in a tiny blanket stitched with a Celtic knot, a symbol of forever.

The next day it rains, hard and cold and unrelenting. Although I know her spirit is long gone, I can’t bear to think of her body, now for the first time apart from me, all alone under the freezing wet earth.

Before there was Terabithia, there was music class – one half-hour, once a week, when Jess and the kids of Lark Creek Elementary would take flight. Gathering on the worn-out rug, they let the chords ripple over them, and sang of “a land bright and clear / And the time’s coming near / When we’ll live in this land / You and me, hand in hand.” With the teacher strumming the guitar, “people began to join in, quietly at first to match her mood, but as the song built up at the end, their voices did as well, so that by the time they got to the final ‘Free to be you and me,’ the whole school could hear them.” Even the kids who pretended it was beneath them couldn’t help but be swept up in the spell.

When I was their age, I went to a choral camp where I learned, or thought I learned, a version of “For the Beauty of the Earth” that was totally distinct from the familiar hymn. It was soaring and ethereal and lifted me on wings I didn’t know I had. But after the summer was over, I couldn’t recall any strain of the new melody, or the name of the arranger, or any other unique detail, and had no idea how to find it again. My feeble attempts to search for it only brought up the ubiquitous original – and after some time, I started to doubt whether the song I thought I remembered had ever actually existed, or had somehow been a dream.

Years went by. I grew up. One All Souls’ Day, I was profoundly moved to hear John Rutter’s Requiem performed at church. I tracked down the recording of it, as well as every other work by that composer I could get my hands on. The Requiem was what I returned to the most, the sonorous dread from the depths raised up into a wail, and then – mercy. A peace bathed in eternal light.

The rest of his music sat quietly on my computer until one day, on a whim, I set my iTunes library to total random play while I puttered around getting ready to go out. Suddenly, there it was. The song from a decade ago that I had ceased to believe in. I froze across the room, staring agape at the laptop. “For the beauty of the earth,” sang John Rutter’s Cambridge Singers, “for the beauty of the skies; for the love which from our birth over and around us lies.” (A mother might amend that love begins before our birth, but I digress.)

Light and untroubled, so unlike the Requiem in tone, it yet offered the same hope: that what seems to be lost or even nonexistent might not be so, in the end.

Miscarriage is a loss that many have experienced, a loss felt most in what might have been. In the commonness of its occurrence, it seems to take its sad place in the order of things.

But the death of a child is shocking. It seems to cut against the very fabric of reality that such a thing should somehow be allowed to happen.

Bridge to Terabithia grew out of such a devastating loss. When Katherine Paterson’s son David was eight years old, his best friend, Lisa, was struck and killed by lightning. Paterson said in a 2009 interview for the audio edition that she wrote the book to “try to make sense out of a tragedy that didn’t make sense.”

What sense is there to make in that? Isn’t it almost offensive to even try?

Certainly, Bridge has often been protested or “banned” here and there because “death isn’t an appropriate subject” for children, Paterson has explained. “No, it isn’t,” she agrees, “but it happens.”

After David lost Lisa, he blacked out so much of the experience that he couldn’t even remember what she looked like. Decades later, as an adult, he saw a picture of her and was gobsmacked to realize that she looked just like one of his own children’s friends, a girl whose face had always fascinated him though he had never made the connection why. Her presence is also felt in the way that any number of people who never knew the real Lisa have felt an uncanny kinship with Leslie.

With respect, I don’t think Paterson did make sense of the tragedy. What she did do, strangely enough, is make something beautiful. This itself does not make sense – what is there of beauty in an event like this, and why would anybody want to read about it? – and yet it is sublimely beautiful, in a way that points to – what? “Banned” as it is, the book is also beloved in a way that people struggle to articulate, often gesturing toward the magic of the few pages spent in Terabithia, the world within a world. But, as Jess comes to believe, the real significance flows outward.

It was Leslie who had taken him from the cow pasture into Terabithia and turned him into a king. He had thought that was it. Wasn’t king the best you could be? Now it occurred to him that perhaps Terabithia was like a castle where you came to be knighted. After you stayed for a while and grew strong you had to move on. For hadn’t Leslie, even in Terabithia, tried to push back the walls of his mind and make him see beyond to the shining world – huge and terrible and beautiful and very fragile? (Handle with care – everything – even the predators.)

Now it was time for him to move out. She wasn’t there, so he must go for both of them. It was up to him to pay back to the world in beauty and caring what Leslie had loaned him in vision and strength.

Jess takes his sister May Belle, who has only ever wanted him to love and include her, and puts flowers in her hair. He builds a bridge across the creek bed he and Leslie used to swing over and ushers her across. “Shhh,” he says to May Belle. “Look.”

“Where?”

“Can’t you see ’um?” he whispers. “All the Terabithians standing on tiptoe to see you.”

“Me?”

“Shhh, yes. There’s a rumor going around that the beautiful girl arriving today might be the queen they’ve been waiting for.”

My own Leslie, traveler to the undiscovered country, has indeed gone far beyond me and what I know. But the love she brought into being remains, needing to be shared somehow.

In the world she left behind, huge and terrible and shining, there are intimations, echoes, clues of a peace that passes all understanding. They’re not always there when you want them. There is no resolution to the mystery. They don’t erase the grief. But they have something to say.

A story that bridges truth and fiction, life and death. A strain of music blown in from some other plane. The irreducible beauty of a life that ever existed at all. A gaze up through the solemn trees into the wide open sky, seeking contact with the love that’s all around.