08/28/2026
Grief is not something you get over. It’s something you learn to live with.
Please let that resonate in your soul. Read it again.
When someone you love is gone from this life, that pain doesn’t just leave you. You simply learn how to carry it. Like a backpack you never get to take off.
Our oldest, Isaac, never really talked about Elias, after his passing. Until this month, he really didn’t talk about him much at all. He didn’t cry. He didn’t say his name much. He just seemed to keep moving forward with life.
Before this month, I can only remember him crying three times: the day Elias died, after the viewing, and after the Savannah Bananas baseball game.
We knew he missed him. But everyone grieves so differently, especially children. So we’ve just been trying to ride the waves with them and let them grieve in whatever way feels comfortable and natural to them.
Two days ago, Isaac came upstairs from his room and threw a paper airplane at me while hiding behind my door. At first, I thought he was just trying to prank me. Then I realized he was fighting back tears.
I opened the airplane, and the image above is what I found.
A broken heart.
A crying face.
And Elias’s name.
I asked him if he wanted to talk about it, and he said yes. Then he started crying even harder, and my momma heart hurt so much for him.
How do you comfort your child when you are grieving, too?
Maybe reality is starting to set in for him. Maybe he’s beginning to understand that Elias isn’t coming back. Maybe, in his child’s mind, some part of him thought this wasn’t permanent.
And really, how could something like this be so permanent?
We held him. We gave him some of Elias’s favorite stuffed animals to snuggle with for the night. We told him he could talk to Elias whenever he wanted and that he could ask Elias for a sign that he was still close by. These two always had such an incredible bond.
Approximately two minutes later, one of the stuffed animals we let him borrow poked him straight in the eyeball.
I looked at him and said, “Well dang, that was fast, Elias.”
Elias always loved wrestling with his big brother and playing jokes on him. And for a moment, Isaac smiled, even though his eyes were still full of tears.
He clung to that dragon and went to bed.
Being a parent is hard. Losing a child is hard. Losing a child while watching your other children grieve that same loss is a kind of hard I don’t know how to put into words.
Life can be incredibly difficult to navigate. There isn’t a handbook for this. There isn’t a right way to help your children grieve while you’re trying to figure out how to carry your own grief, too.
I just hope that, somehow, we’re doing okay navigating the life we’ve been given.
For now, I think all we can do is keep riding the waves together, carry the weight when it gets too heavy for one of us, and remind each other that Elias is still so deeply loved.
Because grief doesn’t end when someone dies.
Neither does love. So we will keep searching for the signs that bring a smile to our face even with tears in our eyes.
