I too have lost a child. But the difference being that I actually had to bury mine. Hit and run accident at the age of 3. That was 10 years ago, but the pain of losing him is still a very present hole in my day to day reality…it hurts beyond anything you could imagine. I’d give anything to have him still here with me.

Real grief doesn’t need a stage. It is raw, unrelenting, and often silent in its deepest hours. When you have truly buried a child, or been betrayed so viciously by those who should have held you up afterwards and not abandoned you, like my family did to me, the world splits completely open. There is no “living nightmare” rhetoric that captures it; there is only the void where a heartbeat used to be, and the knowledge that some doors close forever.

To declare someone “dead to you” while they still draw breath is a choice of severance, not the same as staring at a tiny coffin or watching your blood relatives turn their backs on you in your darkest, most painful moment. Those of us who have endured the irreversible don’t reach for public essays quite so readily…or if we do, it is with the understanding that pain isn’t a narrative to control, but a truth that demands humility.

I hope your words bring you the peace you seek. But for those of us living with losses that cannot be rewritten or reframed, they land a bit differently. Some fractures in a family run so deep that no eulogy can paper over them. True strength lies in facing that but without performance.

I say these things with nothing but pure grace and the weight of having lived this dark truth.