Austin's Blog

I have known death since I was a child. I’ve lost grandparents, my father, a mentor, family friends, an uncle, friends, and more but nothing compares to my son. Child loss is different. Parents, grandparents, mentors, and even close friends represent our past in many ways. They leave behind cherished memories, guidance, and love, but they often lived their lives before ours. Their loss, while painful, aligns with the perceived “natural” order of life outside of Eden. However, the loss of a child disrupts that order. They belong to our future, not our past. Children embody our future, our hopes, and the promise of the next generation. When we lose a child, it’s as if time has been inverted; they were meant to carry on after us, not the other way around. Child loss is an offense to everything good, true, and beautiful in this world. It defies our expectations of life and challenges the core of our existence, which is why it feels so uniquely debilitating.

What does it mean to heal after burying a child? It is less like a wound that must heal where scar tissue grows in its absence and more like learning to walk again after an amputation of your leg. The pain of losing a child may never leave; instead, with time and grace, it becomes something we carry—a lifelong weight that reshapes us but doesn’t define us entirely.

Healing, in the context of child loss, might not mean arriving at a place where the pain is gone. Instead, it’s a journey of carrying the grief while finding ways to live with faith, hope, and love. If they were worth loving, they are worth grieving and we will love them for our lifetime and beyond. Healing is not about forgetting or moving past the loss but learning to live with the love we have for our children, even in their absence, as we anticipate the life after this one.

Barbara D. Rosof closes her book The Worst Loss: How Families Heal from the Death of a Child saying, “You never get over a loss like this, they say, any more than you would get over the loss of a leg. Instead, you find ways to live your life despite it. You continue to hold your child in your mind. You find people you can talk to about your child. You work at keeping the lines of communication open with your partner and your other children. You put your energy into what’s important, and you let the rest go. You make a decision that you will let yourself feel whatever you feel and deal with it as it comes. You get through the bad days because you’ve learned that they do end. The pain overwhelms you, but then it recedes. You are stronger than you ever thought, stronger than you ever wanted to be. You never forget what you lost. You learn to value what you have.”

Child loss is not something to get through as if there is an upcoming and inevitable final point. It is simply something that with the sustaining grace of Jesus, we carry until the End when the longest chapter with our kids begins, the Life after this life. Healing through His grace is about holding onto hope in the resurrection and the promise that our relationships with our children will continue in the age to come. Healing, then, is less about closure and more about carrying the loss well as we shepherd and steward their legacy and treasure them in anticipation of our reunion.