Something Is Missing

There’s something missing in my life.

Most days, I carry on—do the work, answer the messages, make the meals, keep the rhythm of life going like anyone else. But there’s always something just beneath the surface. A space. A silence. An ache that doesn’t announce itself loudly but never quite leaves. A quiet missing.

It’s the space where my child should be.

Grief has many faces, but one of the most enduring is absence. Not the dramatic kind that knocks you flat in the early days, but the subtle, everyday sort that quietly reshapes your life. The kind that lingers when you set one less place at the table. When family photos feel incomplete. When milestones pass with no one there to claim them.

Child loss doesn’t just take a person—it takes a future. A set of plans. A timeline you were building in your mind. It takes all the little, ordinary things that most people get to take for granted. First steps. First days of school. First heartbreaks. Graduation photos. Weddings. Grandchildren. The sound of their voice changing with age. The look on their face when they discover something new. The small, ordinary magic of getting to watch someone grow.

You miss what was. You miss what should’ve been.

Sometimes I feel it most in the quiet moments—when the world slows down and my guard falls. Sometimes it’s in laughter, when I suddenly realize someone’s missing from the joy. Sometimes it’s in conversations where I’m calculating whether to bring up my child’s name, wondering if it will make others uncomfortable.

And sometimes, it’s in the simplest things: hearing a song they loved, or walking past a child who looks like they might’ve looked. Sometimes, it’s just in my bones—a longing that lives so deep I can’t even give it words.

Over time, I’ve learned to live around the missing. I’ve built a life that holds joy, love, meaning, and even laughter. But that doesn’t mean the space has closed. It never does. Grief carves out a room in you that never fills, and you learn to live beside it.

What I’ve also learned is that the missing is not just sorrow—it’s love. It’s all the love I still carry. All the love that has no place to go. And sometimes, that love shows up in ways that surprise me—in how fiercely I care for others, how present I try to be, how deeply I understand the quiet pains that other people carry.

If you’ve lost a child, you know what I mean. You know the way life never quite feels whole again. You know the weight of birthdays and anniversaries, the tension between joy and guilt, the way the world moves on while you carry something it can’t see.

You also know that we keep going—not because we stop missing them, but because we carry them with us in everything we do.

There is something missing in my life.

And yet—because of love, because of memory, because of who they were and still are to me—there is also something unbreakable that remains.