Infertility is a unique kind of grief. It’s like mourning a life that was never there.

For a long time, I felt guilty for being so sad. After all, no one died. There wasn’t a funeral. There was no graveside to visit with flowers. Still, each month the realization of another negative pregnancy test, the gut-wrenching sorrow of “not this time,” felt like its own cruel death over and over again.

I didn’t know grief before infertility. After a year of trying to conceive and a visit to a fertility specialist, I had a medical diagnosis that wrecked my world....