While many people know the grief of losing someone, there is another kind.

The particular kind of grief of standing beside the ones who are experiencing loss. The sisters. The aunts. The friends. The ones who love the grieving.

I know that grief.

It is the grief of watching someone you love walk through something you cannot fix.

And it changed me just as permanently as anything I have ever experienced firsthand. (Learn more about the origin of Old to New Creations here).

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Madison Joy

My niece Madison Joy was born on Christmas morning.

I want you to sit with that for a moment — because it matters. Christmas morning. The morning the whole world celebrates the arrival of a baby who came to bring life and light and hope. And there she was — Madison Joy — arriving on that same morning, full of promise and possibility and that particular joy that only a brand new baby carries.

She was beautiful like her momma.

She was here.

She was loved.

She was ours.

For thirty-five days.

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The Call No One Expects

I am going to keep some of the medical details close — they are my sister’s story to tell in full, and I want to honor that. What I will tell you is that Madison Joy suffered a brain bleed. Emergency surgery followed. And then came the waiting — the desperate, faith-filled, on-your-knees waiting that every person who has ever sat in a hospital waiting room knows intimately.

We prayed. Our family prayed. Our church – our community – prayed. People who had never met Madison Joy prayed — because that is what you do when a thirty-five day old baby is fighting for her life and you believe in a God who can intervene.

We had never imagined God wouldn’t save her.

And then He didn’t.

Not the way we asked.

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Three years after Madison Joy, our family faced a similar and devastating loss of our own – you can read Lucy Grace’s story here.

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Walking Alongside

I want to speak for a moment to everyone reading this who has ever been the one walking alongside.

Because grief has many seats at the table — and not all of them get acknowledged.

Watching my sister and brother-in-law walk through the loss of Madison Joy was one of the most life-changing things I have ever witnessed. I say life-changing deliberately — not as a figure of speech but as a literal truth. The person I was before that season and the person I became on the other side of it are not quite the same.

What I observed in that hospital, and in the months that followed, was something I did not have adequate words for at the time.

My sister — in the middle of the most devastating loss a mother can experience — found what she later described as a peace that passes all understanding.

Not on the other side of it. Not after the grief had softened or the tears had slowed.

Right there. In the hospital. In the middle of the worst moment of her life.

The grief was real — crushing and bottomless and every bit as heavy as you would expect. The pain did not disappear. The tears did not stop. But underneath all of it, arriving as a gift from God Himself, was something steady and unshakeable that had absolutely no business being there, given the circumstances.

That is not a human peace. You cannot manufacture that in yourself. You cannot think your way into it or grieve your way toward it.

It is given. Freely. By a God who does not wait for the storm to pass before He shows up in it.

I recognized it. I had felt it myself in my own hospital room years later.

It is the kind of peace that does not make sense from the outside. The kind that makes people who don’t know Jesus tilt their heads and quietly wonder. The kind that can only come from One place.

I want to be honest though — we each carried a different measure of grace for our role in this. My grief as the sister was real and it was heavy. But it was not the same as my sister’s grief as the mother, or my brother-in-law’s grief as the father. Walking alongside someone through loss does not mean carrying an equal share of it. It means showing up faithfully for whatever portion you are asked to carry — and trusting God to sustain the ones carrying more than you can imagine.

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I wrote specifically for the fathers and the men here.

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The Hardest Part of All

In the weeks and months after losing Madison Joy, grief did what grief often does —

It uncovered things that were already there.

For my sister. For her husband. For me, in ways I would not fully understand until years later when I faced my own loss.

Grief has a way of stripping away the coping mechanisms we have quietly built over a lifetime. The inner lies we have always managed to keep at bay suddenly have a clear path to the surface. The emotional pain we thought we had dealt with turns out to have only been set aside.

That is not a flaw in the grieving process. That is the grieving process doing exactly what it was designed to do — bringing everything to the light so that healing can reach all the way down.

It is painful. It is disorienting. And it is one of the most important things I want you to know if you are in the middle of it right now:

The grief that is uncovering old pain is not punishing you. It is inviting you toward a deeper healing than you have ever had.

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Helping a Two Year Old Understand

My nephew was two years old when he lost his baby sister.

Two years old.

Old enough to know something was wrong. Old enough to miss her. Young enough that the concept of death was completely beyond his reach. Helping him understand — or even begin to understand — was one of the most difficult and tender challenges my sister faced in those early months.

And every morning, without fail, he would pad down the hall and find her.

And every morning he would ask the same question.

“Mommy, is Madison sleeping?”

He asked because he didn’t have other words — he had done it so many times before when Mommy was reminding him to keep his voice down because the baby was resting. He asked out of love and out of hope and out of the beautiful, heartbreaking logic of a two year old mind.

And every morning, my sister’s heart caught in her chest.

That question is the reason this blog exists. That question is the reason a book exists. You can read the full story of how it became a book here. And that question is the reason I kept writing long after it would have been easier to stop.

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If We Can’t Bring Her Home

Before I close I want to share something my sister said — because it is one of the most faith-filled sentences I have ever heard spoken in the middle of grief.

In the hospital, facing the unsurvivable, my sister and brother-in-law made the decision to donate Madison Joy’s organs.

And my sister’s heart behind that decision was this:

“If we can’t bring our daughter home — maybe our faith can be used by God to make it possible for someone else to bring their child home.”

I have turned that sentence over in my mind hundreds of times since she said it.

In the middle of her own devastation — before the grief had even fully arrived — she was thinking about another mother. Another family. Another child who might live because of hers.

That is not a human instinct. That is the Holy Spirit working through a broken heart that chose, even in the worst moment, to remain open.

Old to new.

Even here. Even this.

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For the Ones Walking Alongside

If you found this post because you are not the one who lost someone — but you love someone who did — I want you to know that your grief is real and it matters too.

You do not have to have all the right words. You do not have to fix it. You do not have to be strong every moment.

Show up. Stay. Hold their hand. Sit in the quiet with them when there is nothing left to say.

And trust that God is doing something in you through this season too — something you may not be able to see yet. Something that will matter more than you know.

“He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.” — Psalm 147:3

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Next week I want to take you inside the story of how a two year old’s morning question became a children’s book — and why I believe it is a resource every family needs before loss arrives, not just after. Subscribe below so you don’t miss it.

And if Madison Joy’s story touched you today — share it. Her thirty-five days mattered. They still do.

If you are walking alongside a grieving family right now and looking for a tool to help anchor your own faith through uncertainty, the Old to New Journals were designed for exactly this season.