Every time the door opens I cringe inside. I’m afraid it’s visible but I cannot make it stop. The room is full enough; I never want to see another person cross the threshold. But they are all welcome, and I sigh as the door opens yet again, I hate to see her, but I know she belongs here.

At first it is the only place you feel normal. Where you remove your filter and people still smile and nod at whatever comes out of your mouth. After a while it becomes a haven, this room is the only place that no one will ever tell you to move on, or get over it. You can talk all you want about the things no one wants to hear about, because here it is ok. It’s all ok, because nothing is ok and never will be again.

It is a meeting of the club. The awful club that every member wishes would never grow by another soul. The club you enter for free by paying the most massive price imaginable. The club where every member has nothing in common except their compulsory membership, yet they are united in an understanding that defies the outside world.

It’s the dead baby club.

I go once a month and sometimes Leo comes too. Most of the faces in the room are becoming familiar as we travel the path away from the few fleeting days with our son. Some are further down the path, and they nod knowingly as I say that I hate how the passage of time makes those days seem smaller and smaller and smaller. Some just got here, and they stare at me blankly, they can’t imagine that time will ever pass, I feel them so acutely. I just sat in their place, it seems like I blinked and here it is three months later.

We cry, sometimes for ourselves but more often for the hurting mothers and fathers around us. We speak of things that no family ever wants to imagine, visiting gravesites, choosing our favorite tributes, charities, ways to remember, how to honor the names of our children who have all gone to heaven while we sit here and try to figure out how to make the life we have left matter. There is talk of new babies and how confusing the storm of emotions that surround their arrival. Talk of families and friends and countless knowing glances and nods at every comment. The air in this room is always tight with grief, but the tension is greater from the physical support being offered. Every gasping sob is met with a shift in the air as the rest of the room pulls what they have left and sends it hurtling toward the hurting soul. No one will fall here, no one will be alone. Somehow even when we can’t carry ourselves we will always find strength to carry the grieving woman next to us. It creates a web stronger than steel, tangible and invisible, real and necessary.

We are tied to each other, grateful for the chance to care about someone else. I have no idea what I would have had in common with them in another life. But this is the only life I have, and to live it well I will love them all as fiercely as I can. I know it is no substitute for the empty nursery, but my heart is full for them. As we spill back into a world that cannot understand, we mention that the less we are understood the better. It means that we are alone in the club, and we would all have it that way if we could.

Some of us hang around, talking feels good. We have more in common than we may have imagined. Friendships are forged here, based on grief but proof that things can grow in this space. I hope the door never opens to another new broken heart. I know it will. But we will all be here, ready to understand, ready to cry, ready to show them that hope and life still exist, even after you are forced to join the club.