Nobody prepares you for the moment your six-year-old points to the funeral home from the bank drive-through and says — that’s where Lucy is.
We had driven past that building a hundred times. It was just part of the landscape of our town. Until it wasn’t. Until it became, in my son’s very concrete six-year-old mind, the place where his baby sister lived now.
It took us a while to understand what he actually believed. And longer still to gently, honestly help him understand what had really happened — without correcting him in a way that made him afraid to say the wrong thing again.
That is one thing about parenting remaining children through loss that is easy to forget. It is not one conversation. It is a hundred small moments — at the bank drive-through, at the dinner table, in the middle of a completely ordinary Tuesday — where your child hands you something real and raw and you have approximately three seconds to figure out how to hold it well.
They Think in Pictures. Literal, Concrete, Specific Pictures
My son was six when we lost Lucy Grace. My daughter was four — young enough that the conscious memories did not follow her the way they followed the rest of us. But she was there. She felt what our family felt. She carried it in the way a four-year-old carries things — in her body, in the atmosphere of our home, in the grief that was simply part of the air we all breathed for a long time.
She knows Lucy Grace is part of our family. We still pray together and praise God for our family — for Lucy, for Madison Joy, for all of us. The memory may not be there — but the belonging is. And there is something quietly profound about that.
My daughter carried the grief without the memory. My son carried both.
In those early days the children drew pictures — the way children do when words are not enough. Lucy’s face was purple in their drawings. They drew what they had seen. Or what they imagined. Or what their small minds had constructed from the pieces they had been given.
I have kept those pictures. I have not shared them publicly — they belong to my children. But I have thought about them a thousand times. The purple face. The careful crayon-colored specificity of a child trying to make sense of something that does not make sense.
Children do not grieve abstractly.
They grieve in color. In location. In the questions that surface when a thought floats up — and then they pivot, immediately and completely, back to something entirely ordinary.
Following Their Lead
My son would ask a deep, gut-wrenching question about Lucy Grace — where is she, is she okay, will I die too — and then, before I had finished answering, he would be back to playing. Or he would say he was hungry. Or he would just — move on.
It felt careless at first. If I am honest — it hurt. And sometimes it frustrated me. To talk about her and then just drop it and move on felt so abrupt. So at odds with the weight of what we were discussing.
But I learned something quickly — something a grief-trained nurse who walked alongside us through that season helped me understand:
Take their lead.
Children process as much as they can in the moment they can process it. The pivot is not carelessness. It is self-protection. It is a small person doing the only thing a small person knows how to do — carrying what they can carry, and putting it down when it gets too heavy. And then picking it back up when they are ready again.
Once I understood that — I stopped trying to extend the conversation. I stopped correcting. I stopped staying in the grief longer than they needed to be there.
Because the moment I made it about what I needed from the conversation — they stopped bringing me the real questions. They started trying to answer in ways that would please me instead of being free to process when they could.
So I learned to follow. To answer honestly and truthfully when they asked. To let them put it down when they needed to. And to trust that they would pick it back up again.
They always did.
The Questions They Actually Asked
Several of the questions in my children’s picture book — Mommy, Is Madison Sleeping? — came directly from my own children. The book grew out of real conversations, real moments, real questions that real children asked when they were trying to make sense of loss.
Is she sleeping?
Where did she go?
Will I die too?
Why do I still feel sad?
This one — Will I die too? — my son asked. And I learned, later, that underneath that question was a fear he carried quietly for a long time. The fear that what happened to Lucy Grace could happen to him.
Children need honest answers to honest questions. Not answers that minimize the fear — but answers that hold the fear and offer something true alongside it. That was the whole reason I wrote the book. Because I lived the conversation. I know how hard it is to find the words in real time.
And I know how much it matters to find them.
What Grief Does to a Child Over Time
Twelve years after losing Lucy Grace — my son, eighteen years old at the time, told me something I have thought about every day since.
He said he had thought of Lucy Grace for the first time in a long time. And in thinking of her — he began to ponder a question he could not quite fully form. Had her loss shaped him? Had she changed him in ways he was only beginning to understand? Losing a baby sister at six years old — when you are already living out that instinctive older brother protectiveness — does something to a person that takes years to surface.
He could not fully articulate it. And I don’t know that I could, either. But I had watched it unfold.
I affirmed him completely. Because he was right. He was impacted — deeply, lastingly, in ways that are still unfolding. He processed something as a six-year-old that most adults struggle to carry. Without the language for it. Without the theology for it. Without even fully knowing he was doing it.
And now — at eighteen — he was beginning to find the words.
That is what grief does to a child over time. It does not disappear. It grows with them. It resurfaces at new ages and new stages with new questions and new layers. The six-year-old who pointed to the funeral home becomes the eighteen-year-old who realizes — quietly, in an ordinary moment — that he has been carrying something significant his whole life.
That is not damage. That is formation.
Your Kids Can Handle More Truth Than You Think
I had good advisors. A grief-trained nurse who walked alongside us and gave me language I did not have on my own. Adults who spoke honestly into our family — who told us we could be truthful with our children, that it was okay to show emotion, that our kids could handle more honesty than we feared.
That last one was the most important.
We are often tempted to protect our children from the full weight of grief. To soften it. To skip to the hope before we have sat in the loss. Maybe we’re trying to avoid it ourselves, but children have remarkable capacity for truth when it is offered with love. They do not need us to have all the answers. They need us to stay in the conversation.
Here is what I know now that I wish I had known then:
Let them ask the real questions. Even the ones that stop you cold. Even the ones you do not know how to answer. I do not know is an honest answer. Let me think about that and we can talk more is an honest answer. What is not honest — and what children feel immediately — is deflection.
Follow their lead on timing. Do not force the grief conversation. Do not extend it past where they are. When they pivot to play or hunger or something completely ordinary — let them. They will come back when they are ready.
Say the name. Out loud. Regularly. Naturally. Not just in grief moments — in ordinary ones. Lucy Grace is part of our family. Madison Joy is part of our family. Children need to hear the names said easily — not just in hushed, heavy moments — so they know it is safe to say them too.
Let them see your emotion. Not in a way that frightens them or puts them in the position of caring for you. But honestly. A parent who never cries teaches a child that grief is something to hide. A parent who cries and keeps going teaches a child that grief and hope can live in the same body at the same time.
Expect it to resurface. At seven and at twelve and at eighteen and beyond. Each new stage brings new capacity to understand what happened — and new questions you did not anticipate. That is not regression. That is the ongoing work of a child becoming a person who has carried something real.
What My Children Taught Me
Nobody handed me a roadmap for this season. It arrived before I was ready — and suddenly I was parenting children through grief while barely keeping my own head above water.
What I learned is that my children needed me to walk through it with them — honestly, imperfectly, at their pace.
They taught me that grief in a child looks nothing like grief in an adult. It is faster and slower at the same time. More concrete. More colorful — literally. More willing to pivot and return and pivot again without apology.
They taught me that children are braver than we give them credit for — when we give them permission to be.
And they taught me that Lucy Grace left a mark on every person in our family. Even the ones who were too young to remember. Even the ones who are only now — twelve years later — beginning to understand how deep that mark goes.
She was gift of light. She still is.
If you are parenting remaining children through loss right now — the free Prayer List includes prayers for children and for you as you navigate these conversations. And if you you’r elooking for a resource to read with your child — Mommy, Is Madison Sleeping? was written from exactly these conversations. Subscribe below to be the first to know when it is available.