No one tells you what it feels like to keep breathing after your child stops. Not in a poetic way. Not in a spiritual way. In a purely physical, disorienting way—like your lungs are committing some kind of betrayal by continuing without permission.
This wasn’t part of the plan. It wasn’t hidden in the fine print of parenthood. We’re taught to expect scraped knees, late-night fevers, heartbreaks we can’t fix. We’re not taught how to survive the moment when the future you were promised simply evaporates. One second, your child exists in the world. The next, they don’t. And somehow you are still here, expected to carry on as if the laws of reality weren’t just violently rewritten.
I still catch myself waiting for proof this is a mistake. A text that won’t come. A door that won’t open. A voice I know better than my own that will never call my name again. My brain keeps scanning for them like muscle memory, refusing to accept the update that says they’re gone forever. My body remembers holding them. My arms still expect weight. That’s the cruelest part—your instincts don’t get the memo.
Other parents talk about graduations and jobs and grandchildren. I listen politely, while inside I am standing in a room that has no future left to imagine. My child’s timeline just… ended. No next phase. No “one day.” Just a brutal full stop in a story that wasn’t finished being written.
People tell me I’m strong. I don’t feel strong. I feel like someone hollowed me out and left the shell standing. I get out of bed because gravity still works and the world doesn’t pause for grief. Not because I’ve accepted anything. Not because I’m okay.
Losing a child doesn’t just break your heart. It breaks your identity. It breaks your understanding of how life is supposed to work. It leaves you loving someone who no longer has a place to receive that love.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. It still doesn’t make sense. And I don’t think it ever will.
But I am here. Loving a child who is no longer alive. Carrying a grief that will never graduate into something softer. Learning how to exist in a reality I never agreed to.
And that is my life now.
© Love & Loss
All that's worth Remembering 