The deepest darkness is the discouraging reality that since my love for my son will never change, the agony of his loss will not either.

In 2016, our parish opened a perpetual Adoration chapel. Despite growing up Catholic, I was in my thirties with several small children before I ever attended a holy hour. I was captivated by the reverence and rituals of Eucharistic Adoration and quickly became a regular attendee of Thursday night Adoration at our church.

Carrying grief is hard, holy work. It has been almost 5 years and I don’t miss my son any less today than I did the day he died. But I have learned to make space for my grief. I have grown and stretched around it, learned so much from it, and become more the woman I am meant to be because of it.

The main lesson I had learned almost ten months into my journey is that grief does not leave. The weight of it stays. It is a forever season. Because it is a forever love I carry for my son.

There will be restoration and redemption of broken families and broken hearts. There will be a gathering of all the holy love that was ever poured out. Love is never lost. It is only held in the crossbeam of salvation, held in the space between the nails and eternity, waiting to be glorified and released.

John Paul Raphael. His name was a prayer, a plea for him to reveal himself to me. I held myself in this sacred moment, spinning slowly through space. The veil between what actually is and what could have been seemed very thin and I imagined three alternate realities all at the same time.

One of the hardest things about grief is that it makes me so hard on myself. For the first several weeks after my son died, I relished that there were no expectations on me or my feelings, from myself or anyone else. I was devastated and broken and the whole world around me knew it. Everyone accepted that I could not cook meals or drive my kids around or put a coherent sentence together.