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I recognize this feeling. It’s calling back the first time I understood that “heartache” was literal, like a sprained coronary muscle, one that radiates numbness to the rest of the body.

Lying on an examining table, my belly covered with cold, clear jelly, a transducer traveling across the swell, over and around and back again, a frown on the tech’s face.

Another failed pregnancy. I knew before the doctor was summoned to pronounce what he called “a fetal demise.”

Only it’s not me this time. My reproductive years are long behind me. It’s my daughter. I wasn’t with her for her most recent sonogram; her husband was. Yet I can picture it so perfectly that it sets off the heart clutch, the nausea, the weight in the chest.

What can I say to this beautiful child of mine, who herself arrived between my first and second miscarriages? Her brother would be born after the third pregnancy loss, that last one at the beginning of the fifth month.

Now my daughter has caught up to me. This is her third miscarriage.

I know better than to offer any platitudes. “This is nature’s way of taking care of something that wasn’t right.” “You can have other children.” “It wasn’t meant to be.” Blah blah blah.

Thirty-seven years ago, I wrote about this very same topic, trying to explain that it was this baby I wanted, not another one, and…