Writer Mitch Albom said that when you lose a parent, you lose direction, but when you  lose a child, you lose the security of the world making sense. Once the worst happens, you feel like anything and everything bad WILL happen.

I think most of us here in the child-loss club can relate to this. The world no longer makes sense after our child dies. The things that mattered before no longer matter. It seems shocking that cars still zoom past on the road, people still shop for groceries, bills still arrive in the mail. Our world has stopped and we are shocked by how the rest of the world continues to spin.

After my son died, I didn’t even know how to be in my body. I felt like an infant needing to be cared for every step of the way. In many ways, child-loss is a rebirth into a new way of existing in your body, of relating to God, of being in the world. We are in shock. Our system-wide shut down is actually the mercy of God, I think.  We might not survive otherwise.  

For me, early grief was like landing in a foreign country.

People would speak to me and I watched their lips move, but the words made no sense. I stared back blankly, relieved that I didn’t have to respond since I couldn’t even understand. I lost entire days sitting on the couch in my family room, a mini-shrine of photos and cards spread on the table before me. Flowers slowly died and left their sweet stench. A new favorite blanket sent as a condolence gift lay across my lap.

Part of my grief was missing the woman I used to be. I wanted to return to unknowing. To the innocence before loss. To the illusion of rightness in a world where my family felt safe and terrible things couldn’t happen to you.  I wanted to put down the fear of knowing this pain again. 

Once you know loss, you are keenly aware of everything else you could still lose.  

For years, death seems to lurk around every corner.  Fear and anxiety of losing another loved one, or God forbid another child, are very common.  You can no longer pretend it won’t happen to you.

And yet, we all reach a point in our grief when we have to decide how we will live. How we will find the courage. The grace. The strength. The hope. The patience. The endurance to carry our cross, to keep on loving, to keep on living.

I am so grateful I did not have to rely on myself for any of this. Only Jesus. Always Jesus. The only way. Every way. His courage, his grace, his strength, his hope. I turned to him minute by minute day by day and he taught me how to be in the world, how to be in my body, how to live with my grief and love with courage. How to hold on to him with no guarantees except his love.

In time, Jesus gave me the strength the re-engage with the world, but never in the same way again.

I was a new woman, forever changed by the hole blown through me in the death of my son. I had a new shape, a new mindset, a new compassion for others who were hurting, and a new conviction to mourn with those who mourn and weep with those who weep. And yes, there was the possibility that the Lord will allow another terrible loss in my life, but at least it isn’t a foreign county anymore. I know how to live here. I know how to love here, even in the sorrow.  

Natalie Grant has beautiful lyrics that express how I make sense of my new world –

This is what it means to be held, how it feels when the sacred it torn from your life and you survive.  This is what it means to be loved and to know that the promise was when everything fell, we’d be held.

It’s the only thing we will never lose: the promise of being held no matter what the world throws at us. I am so sorry you know the pain of losing your child.  May you also know the pain of being held and loved in and through that pain.