12/09/2025
There’s a different kind of heartbreak that comes with raising kids after losing someone who would’ve adored them. It’s a heartbreak that doesn’t crash over you in a single, drowning wave. Instead, it seeps in slowly, a gentle, persistent rain that finds its way into even the sunniest of days. It’s the shadow that lives inside the light. You are building a beautiful, noisy, vibrant life, and the very beauty of it highlights the silence where another voice should be.
You watch your children grow, laugh, learn, and live… and every beautiful moment reminds you of the person who didn’t get to stay. It’s not just the big, framed milestones. It’s in the silly, unscripted magic you know they would have cherished. Your daughter’s fierce concentration as she ties her shoes, her tongue poking out the side of her mouth—just like *they* used to do. Your son’s uproarious, belly-deep laugh at a cartoon—a laugh that echoes one you haven’t heard in years. These moments are gifts, and you receive them with full hands and a full heart. But they are also addressed to someone else, returned to sender, and you are left holding the unopened joy, wondering what their reaction would have been.
You imagine how they would’ve smiled at the little things. The way they would have winked at you across the room when your child said something unexpectedly wise. The way their eyes would have crinkled at the corners, holding a secret pride meant just for you two to share. You can almost see them, clear as day, nodding along to a rambling story about dinosaurs or friendship drama, treating it with the gravity of a state address.
How they would’ve bragged. Not in an obnoxious way, but in that quiet, bursting way that comes from pure, unadulterated love. You can hear their voice on an imaginary phone call, “You should see her, she’s the smartest thing.” Or picture them subtly slipping a photo from their wallet to a near-stranger in the grocery line. That pride wouldn’t have been a trophy for them; it would have been an offering, a way of saying, “Look at this incredible thing that is part of us.”
How they would’ve loved. Not perfectly, but completely. With sticky hugs, with patience worn thin but never out, with a love that was supposed to be a steady background hum in your child’s life. They would have been a sanctuary, a second home, a source of stories and spoiling and a different kind of unconditional safe harbor. Your children would have been known, deeply, by one more person. And that person would have been forever changed by knowing them.
And even in your strongest moments, there’s a soft ache that never fully goes away. It lives beside your contentment. It’s the third presence in the room during bedtime stories. It’s the faint echo after the birthday song is sung. You can be fully immersed in joy, laughing until your sides hurt, and in the next breath, feel a tender, bruised spot in your soul that whispers, *This. They missed this.* The ache isn’t a sign of weakness or ingratitude. It’s the evidence of a love that was, and a love that should have been. It’s the space between what is and what should have been, and that space has its own weight, its own shape.
Grief doesn’t fade with time. It’s not a color that bleaches in the sun. It’s more like a stone that water runs over for years. The edges become smoother, less jagged, less likely to cut you when you accidentally brush against it. But the weight remains. The stone is still there, in your pocket. You get used to the heft of it. You learn its contours.
You just learn how to hold it while you keep loving your kids with everything you have. You learn to cradle the ache in one arm and your child in the other. You discover that your capacity expands in ways you never thought possible. You love *for* two. You pay attention *for* two. You remember *for* two. You become the curator of a legacy they never got to build themselves. You say their name. You tell their stories. You point out, “You have your grandma’s hands,” or “Your laugh is just like your uncle’s.” You weave the thread of the lost one into the vibrant tapestry of your child’s life, so they grow up feeling connected to a love that transcends presence.
You do it for you, and for the one who can’t be here. It is an act of fierce, loyal love. It is parenting with ghosts, but not haunted by them. Accompanied by them. You are living a life that honors two profound truths at once: the truth of a devastating absence, and the truth of a magnificent, ongoing presence. You are teaching your children, without a single lecture, that love is stronger than death. That we can carry people with us. That a story isn’t over just because a chapter ends.
So you keep going. With photos on the walls. With recipes in the kitchen. With mannerisms you cheer on. You are the bridge between a past love and a future they are creating. And in that sacred, heartbreaking, beautiful work, you might just feel, now and then, that they *are* seeing it. Through the light in your child’s eyes. Through the love that stubbornly, persistently, grows in the garden they helped to plant.
