Twenty-three grams. When he was born, my baby weighed 23 grams. Only when the funeral home told me that seemingly minor detail about my son—the only tangible thing I ever knew about him—did the weight of what I had lost begin to sink in. Before that, in hospital, he was ‘remnants of conception’ and ‘foetal tissue’. My baby was anything the medical staff could call him that would protect them from the humanity of the situation. And in turn, their word play hid the truth from me too. The truth that, as we peered at the strange shape on the ultrasound machine, we were staring at a death.

‘We will take care of “this”,’ said the doctor when they couldn’t find a heartbeat—a woman with a salt-of-the-earth country feel. As though this tiny human whom I had continued to carry long after he had stopped breathing were a disease they would now cure me of. The doctor patted my leg as she repeated, ‘We will take care of it’, avoiding my eyes as effectively as she avoided nouns.