Christmas Time, Years On: Missing the One Who’s Not Here

*It’s Christmas time again.

The lights go up. The music returns. The world leans into joy—into celebration, into tradition, into togetherness. And yet, even all these years later, my heart still pauses.

Because someone is missing.

Every Christmas since losing my child has carried a dual weight: the warmth of what is, and the ache of what should have been. Time has passed—more than I once believed I could survive—and I’ve learned how to navigate this season. I’ve smiled, I’ve baked cookies, I’ve wrapped gifts. I’ve even laughed, genuinely. But the emptiness doesn’t go away. It just finds quieter corners.

In the early years, the pain was raw and unrelenting. The holidays felt impossible. Every carol, every stocking, every well-meaning greeting card felt like a reminder of what I’d lost. I remember walking through stores in December and feeling like the world had forgotten how to breathe. My grief was so heavy I couldn’t hear the joy around me—it was muffled, distant, unreachable.

Now, years on, the grief is different. Softer, but still sharp in its own way. I’ve learned how to carry it, how to hold space for it. I’ve even made peace with the idea that joy and sorrow can sit beside each other at the same table. But Christmas still brings a unique ache. There’s an extra chair, an unbought gift, a name I say quietly when no one else is around.

I wonder who they would be now. What they would’ve asked for this year. Whether they’d be helping decorate the tree or staying up too late watching movies. Whether they’d be rolling their eyes at family traditions or embracing them. These questions don’t haunt me the way they once did—but they never fully go away either. They’ve become part of the season, like the candles and the snow.

Grief doesn’t end. It changes. It becomes part of your story. And at Christmas, that story glows just a little brighter and aches just a little deeper.

So if you’re reading this and you’re also missing someone this Christmas—especially a child—I want you to know you’re not alone. Whether it’s your first holiday without them or your twentieth, whether you light a candle, hang a stocking, say their name, or hold your feelings close to your chest—your love is real. Your loss is real. And your place in the world is still sacred, even if it feels fractured.

This Christmas, I will carry my child in the lights, in the quiet, in the spaces in between. I will honor their absence by living with intention, by loving fiercely, by remembering gently.

And I will leave room in my heart for both grief and gratitude—for the child I lost, and for the love that never left.