Decades On: Living with the Loss of My Child

It’s been decades now.

Decades since I held my child. Since I spoke their name into a room they were in. Since I saw their face with the light of this world on it.

And yet—they are still with me. Not in the ways the world measures presence, but in quieter, deeper ways. In the marrow of my bones. In the shape of my days. In the way I see the world differently now, as if through a pane of glass only I can feel.

When you lose a child, time stops. At first. Everything freezes—your breath, your heartbeat, your belief in how the world is supposed to work. And while eventually the clocks start ticking again, something inside you never fully rejoins the rhythm. You begin to live in two worlds: the one everyone else sees, and the one only you carry.

In the early years, grief was a tidal wave—knocking me off my feet, pulling me under, then receding just long enough to let me breathe before crashing over me again. Back then, I couldn’t imagine getting through a single year without them, much less decades. I didn’t know how life could go on.

But it did. Not in the way it used to—not in the way people expect when they speak about “moving on.” That phrase has never fit. It still doesn’t.

What I’ve done is live with the loss. It’s woven into everything now—into my relationships, my perspective, my capacity for empathy, my silence in certain conversations. Into how I measure joy, how I hold space for other people’s pain, how I remember birthdays no one else recalls.

Grief doesn’t stay the same, and neither do we. It evolves. It settles. It no longer screams—it whispers. Sometimes it sings. Sometimes it simply waits, tucked into the corners of a quiet morning or a dream that brings them close again, if only for a moment.

There are days I can speak of my child without crying. And there are days I cry without warning. Both are normal. Both are sacred.

One of the hardest things about this long road is that the world forgets. The cards stop. The check-ins fade. Life moves on for everyone else, and you learn to carry the absence yourself. But forgetting is not something a parent ever does. Not after ten years. Not after twenty. Not after a lifetime.

My love for my child didn’t end when their life did. It changed form. It became the way I speak their name in private. The way I advocate for others. The way I remember who I was before, and who I’ve become since. Their legacy is not just in what they did or didn’t get to do—it’s in me, in what I do with the years I’ve been given.

So, if you’ve walked this path too—whether it’s been five years or fifty—I want to say this to you: Your grief is real. Your love is forever. And your child still matters.

Even decades on.