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

WRITTEN BY RYAN TEDDER

I never walked inside your shoes
I won’t pretend what life was like for you
You always kept me close and safe
I wish I could’ve done the same for you

I wanna tell you everything
I love you and I mean it
But when you left, I lost my peace of mind

How could you say goodbye without saying goodbye?
How did I stop and notice you were lost and hopeless
And we still ran out of time?
I know you must’ve had your reasons to leave us all behind
I’ll never know why

You knew me better than they did
You always took the worst of it alone
You sacrificed so much, I know
A heart of gold, but such a tortured soul

I wanna tell you everything
I love you and I mean it
But when you left, I lost my peace of mind

How could you say goodbye without saying goodbye?
How did I stop and notice you were lost and hopeless
And we still ran out of time?
I know you must’ve had your reasons to leave us all behind
I’ll never know why

I Wouldn’t Wish the Pain, But I Would Wish the Perspective

I wouldn’t wish this ache on anyone—not even on my worst enemy.
But the clarity?
The way grief sharpens everything until only what truly matters remains?
That… I’d wish on the world.

Because when you lose someone you love—truly lose them—
life is never the same.
There’s the world before.
And then there’s the one after.

Grief strips away the unimportant.
It silences the noise.
It burns through the pretending.
And what’s left standing is raw, sacred, and painfully real.

You see time differently.
You speak more honestly.
You stop saving joy for later.
You take the trip. You say “I love you.”
You hold people tighter and forgive more freely.

Loss teaches you how fragile everything is—
and in that fragility, you find the courage to live more boldly.
Not perfectly.
But purposefully.

I would never wish the pain,
but I’d give the perspective to anyone willing to receive it.
Because it wakes you up.
And if there’s anything this grief has taught me,
it’s that presence is everything.
And time… is the most precious thing we’ll ever hold.

Writer unknown

I sent this to my son once and he said “Mom that is me in a nutshell”.  It can be a blessing and a curse to feel more than others.  Your expectations can always be let down.  I miss you Billy and all that you were.  You were my favorite human .

Someone wrote this and it really sat with me ❤️

“The child you once were does not disappear. They do not fade into the past like an old photograph or dissolve with the passage of time. They live within you still woven into your fears, your longings, your habits of self-protection. They are there in the way your body tenses at a raised voice, in the way you hesitate before asking for what you need, in the ache you feel when love seems just out of reach.

Healing is not about leaving this child behind. It is about turning toward them with the love and presence they were once denied.

Trauma is not just what happened to us it is what did not happen. It is the touch that never came, the safety that was absent, the soothing voice that never told us, You are enough just as you are. When we experience wounding at a young age, we do not just lose a moment in time. We lose trust, we lose connection, we lose the full expression of who we were meant to be. The child learns to survive, to adapt, to become small, quiet, or pleasing anything to maintain attachment. And so, they remain trapped in us, frozen in time, waiting for someone to come back for them.

But no one is coming except you.

Healing is not about discarding the past, as if we could simply will ourselves into a new story. It is about remembering. Not in the sense of reliving pain endlessly, but in the sense of reclaiming what was lost. To truly heal, we must become the very presence our younger selves longed for. We must speak to them gently, hold them in their sorrow, let them grieve the love they never received.

We do not heal by rejecting the child within us. We heal by turning toward them and saying:

“I see you. I know how much it hurt. I know how alone you felt. But I am here now. You are no longer abandoned. You are no longer unseen. You are safe with me.”

This is the work: to break the cycle of self-abandonment. To stop running from the echoes of our past and instead meet them with tenderness. Healing does not mean forgetting it means integrating. It means that the child who once felt unworthy of love is finally given the love they always deserved. It means that the pain that once defined us becomes the doorway to our deepest wisdom.

And so, the question is not whether the child within us still exists. The question is whether we will have the courage to go back for them.”

Connected By Nature
Altar Of Earth
@highlight

Ernest Hemingway once wrote: “The hardest lesson I’ve had to learn as an adult is the relentless need to keep going, no matter how shattered I feel inside.”

This truth is both raw and universal. Life doesn’t pause when our hearts are heavy, our minds are fractured, or our spirits feel like they’re unraveling. It keeps moving—unrelenting, unapologetic—demanding that we move with it. There’s no time to stop, no pause for repair, no moment of stillness where we can gently piece ourselves back together. The world doesn’t wait, even when we need it to.

What makes this even harder is that no one really prepares us for it. As children, we grow up on a steady diet of stories filled with happy endings, tales of redemption and triumph where everything always falls into place. But adulthood strips away those comforting narratives. Instead, it reveals a harsh truth: survival isn’t glamorous or inspiring most of the time. It’s wearing a mask of strength when you’re falling apart inside. It’s showing up when all you want is to retreat. It’s choosing to move forward, step by painful step, when your heart begs for rest.

And yet, we endure. That’s the miracle of being human—we endure. Somewhere in the depths of our pain, we find reserves of strength we didn’t know we possessed. We learn to hold space for ourselves, to be the comfort we crave, to whisper words of hope when no one else does. Over time, we realize that resilience isn’t loud or grandiose; it’s a quiet defiance, a refusal to let life’s weight crush us entirely.

Yes, it’s messy. Yes, it’s exhausting. And yes, there are days when it feels almost impossible to take another step. But even then, we move forward. Each tiny step is proof of our resilience, a reminder that even in our darkest moments, we’re still fighting, still refusing to give up. That fight—that courage—is the quiet miracle of survival.

What’s the hardest lesson you’ve had to learn as an adult, and how has it shaped who you are today?