I know that others want desperately me to be “better”. They want me to be happy and carefree and back to the Melanie they knew before child loss.
And not just for their sake, for mine too.
It’s hard to watch someone you care about in pain.
But my reality has been forever changed.
Read the rest here: Love Doesn’t End
International Bereaved Mother’s Day is observed the Sunday before Mother’s Day in the United States. This year it’s Sunday, [May 4, 2025].
I didn’t even know such a day existed until I was a mom that needed it.
For those of us who have children in heaven, setting aside a day to acknowledge that unique mother/child relationship is helpful.
Traditional Mother’s Day is meant to be a time of celebration. A day when children send cards or flowers or give gifts to honor their mom and let her know that years spent pouring into their lives are appreciated.
Lots of church pews and restaurant tables are filled with family as children come home to be with mom.
But Dominic can’t come home.
That makes Mother’s Day complicated for me.
It means that while I am thrilled to spend it with the children who can make it home, there is always a tinge of sadness to the celebration. And I hate that. Because they deserve a whole-hearted mama.
So I’m thankful this other day exists. Thankful for a day when I can think about and speak about and embrace the child that won’t be with me next weekend.
Because Dominic is STILL my son. He is still very much a part of my heart. And I need to be able to speak that aloud for others to hear.
Some mamas will be drawing or painting hearts on their hands and writing their missing child’s name inside as a beautiful outward testimony to an inward reality. Every day we carry our missing child in our hearts.
So if you know a bereaved mama, give her a hug Sunday.
Make time and give space for her to share.
And then listen, love and lift her up.
I bend down and bump my head against memories.
“Mama, look at THAT!”
“Have you ever seen one of those?”
“Is it true toads give you warts? He lives under that rock. Don’t move it-let him live there because he eats bugs!”
“Why is the tail blue? What happens when it breaks off?”
Young boys found toads and luna moths, blue-tailed skinks and lizards Older boys hid with air-soft guns to ambush the other team. Young men changed oil and car parts.
And one summer a laughing Dominic lifted me high in the backhoe bucket so I could paint the top trim of the house.
Synapses fire and lightning flashes through my brain in seconds. ONE corner of my house-all this.
Every room holds memories. Every footfall echoes past days. Every window frames some precious vignette in my mind’s eye.
Inescapable.
Most days I’ve learned to turn down the volume. But today it would not be denied.
And I think, “How would I have survived those precious, precious years if I had known what was coming?”
Thank God I didn’t.
Can I just say I’m not a fan of church signs?
I could list a dozen reasons but here I will simply list one: It is impossible to constrain good theology to the few words that will fit on most church signs.
The temptation to be funny, cute or trite generally overcomes any desire to be biblically accurate.
Case in point-just down the road from me is this sign:
THERE ARE NO PROBLEMS, ONLY OPPORTUNITIES FOR GOD TO WORK.
I could write for days on why I hate (yes, HATE!) this sign. But I’ll restrain myself.
Here are the top three reasons I want to close my eyes when I pass it:
This week alone I have dealt with at least ten “problems” that required practical solutions in addition to prayers that God would help work them out.
Did He make some things fall in place that otherwise might not? Probably. And for that I am very thankful.
But did He shower solutions from the sky like raindrops? No. I had to face the problems, look for solutions and ask for help from others.
When Christ instituted the church it was not for us to sit inside four walls and dole out pithy platitudes to passersby. It was for us to be His hands and feet in the world.
Truth is that God DOES work. But most often He works through US.
All around us are people hungry for the Good News of Jesus Christ.
If we are going to put out a sign, could it just say, “We welcome the broken, the wounded, the hurting, the ones with no hope”?
Isn’t THAT what Jesus came to do?
God bless the inventor of Band Aids!
That little tacky plaster has soothed more fears and tears than almost any other invention in the world.
Skinned knee? Put a BandAid on it.
Bee sting? BandAid.
Tiny bump that no one can even see? Oh, sweetie, let me give you a BandAid.
Simply acknowledging pain and woundedness is so often all that is needed to encourage a heart and point it toward healing.
Read the rest here: Loving the Wounded
This was one of the first posts I wrote. It hadn’t been long since I was introduced to an online community of bereaved parents and began to see that I wasn’t the only one who had friends and family that misunderstood child loss.
I was spending a lot of time in my life trying to help others comprehend, just a little, what it felt like to bury a child.
Trying to give them a tiny taste of how this pain is so, so different than any other I had experienced. Begging them to toss the popular ideas bandied around that grief followed “stages” and was “predictable”.
I re-share every so often because it seems to help, a little. ❤
People say, “I can’t imagine.“
But then they do.
They think that missing a dead child is like missing your kid at college or on the mission field but harder and longer.
That’s not it at all.
It isn’t nostalgia for a time when things were different or better or you talked more: it’s a gut-wrenching, breath-robbing, knee-buckling, aching groan that lives inside you begging to be released.
Read the rest here: What Grieving Parents Want Others to Know
In my grief and sorrow it is tempting to dig a moat, draw up the bridge to my heart and wait out life like I am under siege.
But that would be wasting this pain and I won’t do that.
I won’t dishonor Dominic and dishonor Jesus by refusing to love.
Just a few days after Dominic ran ahead to heaven, my youngest son wrote this:
“If you are surrounded by life you will be surrounded by death, if you feel love you will also feel pain. But never let the fear of death or pain rob you of the joy of LIFE and LOVE.”
Fear is a thief.
It sneaks in and can rule my heart before I even know it.
I will not bar the door to love, but I will barricade it against fear.
I refuse to let fear win.
It’s oh, so hard to know what to do when you are watching a heart break.
You want to reach out and make it better, make the pain go away, make a difference. But it seems like nothing you can do will matter much in the face of such a huge loss.
While it’s true that you cannot “fix” the brokenness in a bereaved parent’s life, there are some very important and practical ways you can support them in their grief-especially as the weeks turn into months and then to years.
Here are five practical ways to support grieving parents:
You may be surprised how often I get discouraged and feel alone.
An outstretched hand at just the moment when my strength is fading makes all the difference.
Dominic’s Heaven Day fell right in the middle of Holy Week this year-Wednesday, April 12th marked three years since he entered Heaven and left us here.
And every day since then I’ve been homesick. Homesick for what I used to know and homesick for what I know awaits me when I join him there.
I can’t say that I handled this awful anniversary any better than the previous two but I did handle it differently. This year I was determined to create space for both mourning and dancing.
I cried a lot from Palm Sunday through his Heaven Day and into Resurrection Sunday morning. I found new wounds that needed attention and realized some old ones weren’t as patched up as I thought.
It was costly in terms of personal and relational energy but for the first time since Dom ran ahead to heaven, I was able to reclaim a holiday gathering.
And it was beautiful.
I missed him, of course, but things flowed and people loved one another and ministry happened and laughs floated through the air.
Everyone left with extra food and smiles on their faces.
This used to be my house every holiday, almost every Sunday. It hasn’t been that way since Dom left.
But for a few hours it felt like home again.
It happens when I least expect it.
I try hard to manage life so that I’m not blindsided by grief-that I don’t find myself in the middle of people when I can be sure some trigger will start the flow of tears
But you can’t prepare for what you have no way to predict.
So even three years down the path of child loss, there are times I am overwhelmed by a wave of grief and cannot stop the tears.
I used to try to hide them. I don’t anymore.
I will not be ashamed of my tears.
They are proof of my love.
They are evidence of a heart that refuses to grow cold, hard or bitter even though the frost of death has blown hard across it.
They are testimony to the promise that God is collecting them in His bottle and that one day all this will be redeemed and restored.
I will wear them as a badge of honor until I see Dominic again.
thelifeididntchoose 