Nobody warns you about six months. Okay, maybe there are warnings, but I was not prepared.
They show up in the early days — the casseroles, the cards, the phone calls, the people who sit beside you and cry with you and make sure you are not alone. And that is a gift. A real and necessary gift. We were a part of an amazing Church, in relationship with people that loved and cared for one another so well. We rejoiced with one another. We cried with one another.
But six months later — when the casseroles have stopped coming and the world has largely moved on and everyone around you seems to have quietly concluded that you are probably fine by now —
That is when it got hard for me in a different way.
Not the sharp, immediate grief of the hospital room. Not the raw, tender grief of the early weeks. But something slower and heavier and harder to name. Something that had been quietly building underneath the surface while I was busy trying to hold it together.
And somewhere around six months after losing Lucy Grace —
I hit bottom.
But before I tell you about that — I want to tell you about a night that happened somewhere in that season that I have never forgotten.
Our pastor and his wife showed up at our door.
These were not strangers — they were people who had been in that hospital room with us. Who had held Lucy Grace. Who had cried with us over her small, still body. Who had shown up in the most sacred and devastating moment of our lives and stayed.
And now here they were at our front door.
With ice cream.
No agenda. No prepared words. No fix. Just ten minutes and two people who wanted us to know —
You are not forgotten.
The world had kept moving. Life had kept happening all around us the way it always does — indifferent to the fact that we were still in the middle of something that felt unsurvivable. And in the middle of all of that ordinary world-keeping-moving —
They showed up with ice cream.
I cannot tell you why that particular moment has stayed with me the way it has. Maybe because it was so simple. Maybe because it cost them so little and meant so much. Maybe because it arrived in a season when I most needed proof that someone still remembered — that Lucy Grace still mattered — that we had not been quietly filed away under tragedy we are moving past now.
Ten minutes.
That is all it was.
And it was everything.
What Grief Bottom Looks Like
I want to be careful here because grief bottom looks different for everyone. I am not going to tell you that mine looked dramatic or sudden — because it didn’t. It looked more like a slow accumulation. Like a cup that had been filling drop by drop for months and finally ran over.
What I knew was this —
I was not okay.
Not in the way that everyone occasionally says they are not okay and means they are having a hard week. I mean genuinely, deeply, something-needs-to-change not okay.
The emotions and fears I was carrying had become too heavy to manage on my own. And what I began to recognize — slowly and uncomfortably — was that not all of them were new.
Grief has a way of doing this. When it is powerful enough — and the loss of a child is about as powerful as grief gets — it strips away the coping mechanisms you have quietly built over a lifetime. The inner lies you had always managed to keep at bay suddenly have a clear and open path to the surface. The fears you thought you had dealt with turn out to have only been set aside.
And there they all were.
Old and new together. Loud in a way they had never been allowed to be before.
The Lie You Don’t Know You’re Believing
I want to pause here and say something that I think is important —
We all battle lies.
Not just people who have experienced loss. Not just people in crisis. All of us — every single one — carry stories we have told ourselves about who we are, what we deserve, what God thinks of us, and whether we are enough. Stories that were planted early and reinforced quietly over years until they feel less like lies and more like just… the truth.
Grief doesn’t create those lies.
But it removes the armor we use to fight them.
I recently found a Bible study by Jennie Allen called The Lie You Don’t Know You Believe — and the title alone stopped me in my tracks. Because that is exactly what it felt like in that season. Not lies I had consciously chosen to believe. Lies I didn’t even know were there until grief made them impossible to ignore.
This is the scheme of the enemy. He does not need us to consciously embrace darkness — he just needs us to be too exhausted and too overwhelmed to keep the lights on.
Grief can do that.
Which is exactly why that season — as hard as it was — was also one of the most important invitations of my life.
It’s Okay to Not Be Okay — But Let’s Take Steps to Get Better
I want to say something directly to anyone reading this who is in their own version of grief bottom right now —
It is okay to not be okay.
Please hear that. Six months after loss — or a year after, or three years after — the world’s timeline for your healing is not God’s timeline. There is no finish line you should have crossed by now. There is no point at which still grieving becomes a character flaw.
You are allowed to still be in it.
But — and I say this with all the love and honesty I have —
Not okay is not a place to stay forever.
Not because grief has an expiration date. But because you were not made to carry this alone. And there are people and resources and tools that God has placed in this world specifically for the moments when the weight becomes too much to manage by yourself.
I wrote about the power of presence over words – and the nurse who taught me that – here.
For me that looked like counseling — and I want to remove any shame from that word right now. Seeking help is not weakness. It is not a lack of faith. It is not an admission that God is not enough.
It is wisdom.
It is the recognition that God often does His healing work through people — through trained, compassionate, skilled people who have been given tools to help us find our way through the things we cannot find our way through alone.
There are many forms that help can take —
Professional counseling with someone trained in grief and trauma. A grief support group where you are surrounded by people who understand from the inside. A church community that creates space for the hard conversations. A trusted friend or mentor who will sit with you in the honest places without trying to fix you. A Bible study that names the lies you have been carrying and replaces them with truth.
You do not have to choose just one. You do not have to have it all figured out before you reach out. You just have to take one step toward help — and trust that God will meet you there.
The Long and Nonlinear Road
I want to be honest with you about something —
Healing did not happen quickly for me.
The counseling helped. The community helped. The tools I was given helped. But the deeper work — the lies, the fears, the patterns that grief had exposed, the renewing my mind — that took time. More time than I expected. More time than felt comfortable.
Nearly five years.
I want you to sit with that number for a moment — not to discourage you, but to give you permission.
Five years of God quietly, faithfully, persistently doing something in me that I could not always see or feel or measure. Five years of choosing — imperfectly, inconsistently, one day at a time — to trust Him with the broken pieces. Five years of acting my way toward faith even when the feelings weren’t there yet. (I wrote about the harder prayer and what defiant joy looks like in the middle of grief here).
And then one day — not dramatically, not with a trumpet fanfare — I realized something had shifted.
I had accepted my imperfections.
Not resigned myself to them. Not given up on growth. But genuinely accepted that I am a person God loves and has a purpose for — exactly as I am, in the middle of the story, with all the unfinished edges still showing.
I had let go of control.
Not perfectly. Not permanently. But in a real and lasting way that had not been possible before. The need to manage outcomes, to hold everything together, to protect myself from the next unsurvivable thing — I laid it down. Not because the fear disappeared but because I finally trusted that God’s hands were more capable than mine.
And I was free.
Not from grief — the missing is still there and always will be.
But free from the lies that had been using grief as a doorway.
Free from the weight of carrying things I was never meant to carry.
Free to be who God created me to be — shaped by the loss but not defined by it. Devastated but not destroyed.
The spiritual formation practices that eventually gave me solid footing again are the ones I wrote about here.
God Was There the Whole Time
Here is what I know looking back —
God was not more present in the hospital room than He was in the grief bottom.
He was not closer to me in the sacred moments than in the shameful ones. Not more available in the bold prayers than in the seasons when I had no prayers left at all.
He was there.
In the counseling office. In the grief group. In the Bible study that named the lies. In the five slow years of one step at a time.
“The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.” — Psalm 34:18
Close to the brokenhearted.
Not close to the ones who have it together. Not close to the ones who are praising Him with confidence and clarity and unwavering faith.
Close to the brokenhearted.
That is where He was. That is where He is. That is where He will always be.
If You Are in the Bottom Right Now
You are not alone.
You are not too far gone. You are not beyond help. You are not a burden to the people who love you. And you are not a disappointment to God.
You are a person in the middle of something hard — and that is exactly where He does some of His most profound and lasting work.
Take one step today.
Make one phone call. Send one text. Look up one grief counselor or one support group or one Bible study. Tell one person the honest truth about where you are.
Just one step.
And trust that the same God who met me in a hospital room at 2am — and in a counseling office six months later — and in the slow quiet years of healing that followed —
Will meet you exactly where you are.
“He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion.” — Philippians 1:6
If this post found you in your own grief bottom today — please reach out. Leave a comment, send a message, or find a trusted person in your life and tell them the truth about where you are. You were not made to carry this alone.
And if this resonated with you — share it. You never know whose six months this might find.