Thirteen years.
That is how long I have been carrying the grief of losing Lucy Grace. And sixteen years since we said goodbye to Madison Joy.
People ask sometimes — usually gently, usually with hope in their eyes — whether it gets easier. Whether time really does heal. Whether the missing eventually fades.
I want to be honest with you.
You do not get over grief. You learn to carry it differently.
That is not a discouraging thing — though it might sound like one at first. It is actually one of the most freeing things I have learned. Because once you stop waiting to get over it — once you stop measuring your healing by how little you feel — you can start measuring it by something else entirely.
By how differently you carry it.
By what you have learned to do with it.
By who you have become because of it.
Here is what thirteen years has taught me.
You cannot carry it alone.
I tried. For longer than I want to admit.
I was good at holding it together. At showing up. At performing fine when I was not fine. At being the kind of person who did not make her grief other people’s burden.
But grief was not designed to be carried alone. And the harder I worked to carry it that way — the heavier it became.
What changed was not finding the right people. It was learning to let people in.
That is a different thing entirely. The right people were already there — they had been there for years. What was missing was my willingness to let them see what I was actually carrying.
There was a couple in our lives — people who became some of our closest friends — who showed us what it looked like to be truly known. To bring the real thing into a friendship and have it held rather than fixed. To say this is hard and be met with we know — we are here.
Through one of the hardest seasons our family has walked through — a season that had nothing to do with infant loss and everything to do with the kind of grief that does not come with a sympathy card — they showed up. And in their showing up I realized something I had missed for years.
God had been building our community all along.
Not just through this season. Through all of them. He had been placing people in our lives — some for a little while, some for longer — always for a purpose. Always for exactly the season we would one day need them for.
I had just been too busy carrying it alone to notice.
You Have to Give Yourself Permission
Permission to feel it. To name it. To not perform your way through it.
Grief does not respond well to performance. The more you manage it — the more you control the narrative, the more you hold the acceptable version of your sadness up for people to see — the longer it takes to actually move through it.
Permission sounds passive. It is not. It is one of the hardest things I have ever chosen.
Permission to cry at the grocery store when a song comes on.
Permission to say I am not okay today without immediately following it with but I will be fine.
Permission to say her name — Lucy Grace, Madison Joy — out loud, in public, to people who might not know what to do with it.
Saying the name out loud is an act of defiance against the part of grief that wants to go quiet and invisible. It is a way of insisting that the person who died mattered — that the love did not stop — that the missing is not something to be managed but something to be honored.
Grief is not linear — and it does not end on a schedule.
There is no timeline. There is no finish line. There is no point at which you are supposed to be done.
I have met people who are embarrassed to still be grieving something that happened years ago. Who apologize for crying. Who wonder out loud whether something is wrong with them for still feeling it.
Nothing is wrong with you.
Grief comes back. It comes back on the anniversary. On the birthday. On the holiday that will never feel exactly the same. On an ordinary Tuesday when a song plays or a smell drifts through the air or a child says something that cracks you open all over again.
That is not regression. That is love. It is the cost of having loved someone — and it is worth paying.
Community is not something you find. It is something you let in.
I used to think community was about finding the right people. The right church. The right small group. The right friend who would understand.
And those things matter — the church, the small group, the friends who show up.
But what I have learned is that community starts with a decision you make before you ever walk into the room.
The decision to be known.
Not the curated version of known — not the version where you share enough to seem relatable but not so much that anyone sees the real thing. Actually known. The afraid version. The falling apart version. The version that does not have it together and is not pretending to.
Our small group, our church community, the friendships God has built around us over the years — they have been one of the greatest gifts of my grief. Not because they fixed anything. But because they stayed. They showed up. They said her name. They held the weight alongside us without trying to take it away.
And I almost missed all of it because I was too busy being fine.
What thirteen years has taught me about God.
He is faithful. Not in the way that means everything goes the way you prayed. But in the way that means He has never once left you in it alone.
I look back over thirteen years and I can trace His faithfulness in the people He placed in our path. In the seasons that broke us open and the community that caught us when they did. In the ways He provided — not always the way we asked, but always in the way we needed.
He was building something all along. In the grief and through it. With the people He brought and the ones He kept and the seasons that cost more than we expected.
And what He was building — slowly, over thirteen years — was us.
Not a finished product. Not a neat before and after. Just people who are better at carrying it. Who have learned to let others in. Who know that you do not get over grief — but that you do not have to carry it alone — but that you do not have to carry it alone.
And that makes all the difference.
If you are in the early days of grief right now — or the middle days, or the days that were supposed to be over by now — I want you to know that what you are carrying is real and it is heavy and it is allowed to be both of those things.
You do not have to be over it yet.
You do not have to carry it alone.
And God is not finished with what He is building in you — even here, even now, even in this.
If you are looking for a place to start — grab the free Prayer List — prayers for yourself, your spouse, and your kids for every kind of season. And if you want to go deeper — the Old to New Creations Journals were designed for exactly this kind of slow, intentional carrying.