The Story Between Storms

April 30

Loss isn’t just one moment.
It’s a thousand tiny deaths that follow after it.
It’s the life you imagined—and the thousand lives that never get to happen.

Some days, it’s not her death that knocks the air out of me.
It’s everything we never got to do.

I never got to hear her cry.
Not once.

No piercing newborn wail announcing her arrival to the world.
Only silence and the whir of machines.

I never got to change her diaper.
Never wrestled tiny arms into sleeves.
Never wrapped her in a blanket I picked out just for her.

I never got to see her open her eyes and look for me.
Never got to hear her coo or giggle or babble nonsense words.
Never got to wonder whose nose she had or whose stubbornness she inherited.

I never got to take her home.

Never walked through the door carrying her in a car seat.
Never rocked her to sleep in a nursery I dreamed about.
Never introduced her to the neighborhood, to the world, to her new life.

The crib stayed empty.
The baby clothes stayed folded.
The dreams stayed dreams.

I never got to watch her grow.

Never celebrated a first tooth.
Never witnessed wobbly first steps.
Never threw a first birthday party or packed a lunchbox for preschool.

There would be no ballet recitals.
No parent-teacher conferences.
No teenage eye rolls or prom pictures.

There would be no watching her fall in love, no wedding dress fittings, no grandchildren’s laughter echoing through my kitchen.

Her whole life existed inside me—and a few fleeting days outside of me.

And that was it.

Grief isn’t just mourning who she was.
It’s mourning who she could’ve been.
It’s mourning the mother I could’ve been for her.

The milestones.
The memories.
The mundane, sacred, ordinary life I would have given anything to have with her.

I am left holding empty moments.
Birthdays that won’t be celebrated.
Milestones that will pass without her.
Photos that will never be taken.

And every year, every month, every day—
there will be new “nevers.”

New things she never gets to do.
New pieces of a life I’ll have to imagine instead of live.

Some people think grief fades with time.
They think it’s an event you eventually move past.

But real grief—the grief of a parent burying a child—
it grows with time.
Because every year that passes isn’t just distance from her death—
it’s distance from the life she never got to live.

I carry her with me.
In the empty spaces.
In the missed moments.
In the dreams that didn’t get their chance.

I will always wonder who she would have been.
But I will never stop loving who she was.

Even if that love has to live in the places where nothing else does.