Time pass by: Living with the Loss of a Child

It’s been over ten years.

That sentence alone carries a weight that only those who’ve walked this path can fully understand. More than a decade has passed since my child died, and yet the moment still lives inside me with unsettling clarity. Time moves forward—measured in birthdays never had, school years never started, anniversaries marked quietly or loudly, depending on the year. But the grief, though it has changed, hasn’t disappeared.

At first, I thought it would.

People often say time heals all wounds, but I’ve come to believe that time teaches us how to carry them. The early years were a blur—raw, sharp, unrelenting. I remember waking up each morning and having to remember all over again that my child was gone. That forgetting, for just a second, followed by remembering, was its own kind of cruelty.

But something changed over the years. The grief softened at the edges. It didn’t leave—I don’t think it ever does—but it transformed. It became quieter, less consuming. It learned how to live beside me rather than take me over. I began to laugh again, to plan things in the future, to carry joy and pain in the same hand. That’s something grief doesn’t teach you at first—that joy and sorrow can exist together.

There are still days that knock the wind out of me. A smell, a song, a child’s face that resembles what mine might’ve looked like at this age. Milestones are still hard. The age my child would be now feels like a ghost walking beside me. I wonder who they would’ve become. Would they have had my sense of humor? My stubborn streak? Would we have had inside jokes, fights about curfews, shared favorite songs?

I don’t know. I’ll never know.

What I do know is that love never dies. It changes form. It becomes memory, tribute, a quiet moment in the car, a name whispered when no one else is around. It becomes the fierce compassion I feel for others who have lost children, a bond that needs no words. It becomes how I live my life, what I value, who I show up for.

Sometimes people ask me if I’ve “moved on.” The truth is, there is no moving on. There is only moving forward, and I have—but not without. I carry my child with me in everything. In how I love, in what I choose to do with my time, in how I honor the sacredness of life. My grief is a part of me now, just like my love always was.

So yes, it’s been more than ten years. And I’m still here. Changed, but here. Grieving, but living. Missing, but loving.

Always loving.