The World Is Celebrating. And You Are Surviving.
For the mothers whose arms are empty and whose love never stopped.
Maybe you woke up this morning and for just a split second — that half-breath before full consciousness — everything was okay. And then it wasn’t. And then Mother’s Day started anyway.
If you looked at social media today, Mother’s Day is everywhere. Brunch photos. Flowers on doorsteps. Children holding hand-painted cards, grinning gap-toothed grins. Every scroll is another reminder that the world is deep in celebration — loudly, publicly, with pink balloons and restaurant specials and a hashtag — and nobody stopped to think about what this day is like for you.
Nobody posted for you. Nobody commented, “I know today is brutal. I haven’t forgotten you.” Almost nobody.
I’m writing this because someone I love lost her child. And I watched the world keep moving, the way the world does, and I watched her learn to carry something that doesn’t get lighter — it just becomes more familiar. I’m not writing from the inside of that grief. I’m writing from the seat next to it, which means I’ve had a front-row view of what this day costs people the world forgets to include in it.
So let me say it plainly: I haven’t forgotten you. And I don’t think you should have to survive today in silence.
You are still a mother. That doesn’t end when a heartbeat does. It didn’t end in the NICU. It didn’t end at the graveside. It didn’t end on the anniversary nobody else still marks on their calendar.
Here’s what nobody talks about — grief has a shelf life for the people on the outside. They loved your child. They really did. But at some point the casseroles stopped coming, the check-in texts slowed down, and everyone quietly returned to their normal lives. For you, there is no returning. For you, it just changes shape.
Some years it’s a dull ache, something you’ve learned to carry the way you carry your keys — heavy in your pocket, always there, mostly forgotten until suddenly it isn’t. Some years it knocks the wind out of you all over again, and you’re back at the beginning, back in that room, back on that phone call, back in the moment where everything split into before and after.
And today — today of all days — the world wants you to smile and post something and move on.
You don’t have to do any of it.
Whether you held your child for years or for only minutes, whether you said goodbye before you ever got to say hello — the shape of that loss is yours. I’m not going to tell you what it should feel like or how to spend the day. What I will tell you is that however you make it through the next twenty-four hours, that counts. That is enough.
And if you have faith — if you are the kind of person who can reach for something bigger than yourself on the hard days — then today, reach. Let it hold you. You don’t have to understand why. You don’t have to have a theology that makes sense of this. You’re allowed to just need to be held by something larger than your own aching chest.
And if you don’t have faith. If the question of why your child died feels like the exact reason you can’t believe in anything — I see you too. You’re not doing it wrong. You’re doing the hardest possible thing, which is surviving without a net. Without a story that makes it mean something. Just surviving because you woke up this morning and the day started and you’re still here.
That is enough. You being here is enough.
Grief and gratitude are not opposites. They are not even strangers. They live in the same house, in the same body, sometimes in the same exhale.
And here’s the thing about that — you can hold both. You can be grateful for whatever time you had, however much or little that was, and still be devastated that the time ended. You can look at mothers around you today and feel genuine happiness for them without it canceling out your sadness. Joy in someone else’s story doesn’t have to negate the grief in yours.
Today can be both. It gets to be both. That’s what it means to have loved someone completely.
The world may have moved on. But the love you have for your child has not diminished one single degree. It is the same size it was the day they were born, or the day you lost them before they ever took a breath. It’s just that now it has to exist in a different shape, in a world that doesn’t always have room for it.
Make room for it anyway. Today especially.
— For every mother whose child isn’t here to hand them a card today — I see you.