After a terrible loss, most of us find ourselves in a crisis of faith, wondering, what was God thinking? Why me? In my case, why my child? We reach for Spirit in our pain, and often He feels very far away.
In my darkest moments, I’ve imagined this one conversation with God, over and over again. It’s like a dream, yet a moment so vivid, so otherworldly, it feels etched into my soul. It happened before I even came here, into this life…into this body. God comes to me, a presence both infinite and intimate, offering an invitation:
“In the big, beautiful life you will have, you can also have this boy,” God begins, and my heart leaps at the vision He weaves. “He will be beautiful—his smile will light up rooms, his laughter will echo in your soul. He will be funny and kind, with a wit that keeps you on your toes and a heart that makes you believe in goodness. He will be brilliant, his mind curious and ever-reaching, his creativity boundless. He will fill your days with joy, your heart with love, your life with meaning you cannot yet imagine.”
And then, the tone shifts, softening but not breaking. “But,” God continues, “this boy—this extraordinary boy—will not stay with you. He will be yours for 16 years. Just 16. And then he will die.”
The world stills. My breath catches. In this moment, I am suspended between ecstasy and despair. The weight of the question presses against my chest. Do you still want him?
I sit with that question, the enormity of it filling the silence. I do not answer yet, though the answer is already etched into my soul. For how could I begin to measure what it means to love so deeply, to lose so profoundly?
It’s a privilege of our modern world to imagine that we’ll get to see our children grow older, to presume upon decades of shared milestones, that we’ll go before they do. Not so long ago, mothers like me lived under no such illusion. In the era before antibiotics, before vaccines and modern medicine, illness swept through households like a thief in the night. Child mortality was heartbreakingly common. By the 19th century, nearly 1 in 5 children in the U.S. didn’t survive past their fifth birthday. Families braced themselves for the unthinkable because it was, for them, utterly thinkable.
And I wonder: how did those mothers endure? Did they hold their babies tighter, play one more game, sing one more lullaby before bed, knowing how fragile it all was? Or did they keep their hearts guarded, afraid to love too deeply what they might lose?
In moments of stillness, I imagine myself among them. I wonder if they, too, looked back and kicked themselves for the moments lost in life’s minutiae—hurrying through chores, dismissing a child’s laughter for the relentless call of the to-do list. Did they grieve the same way I do now, in a world where the loss of a child was an ever-present shadow?
Grief is timeless, yet the shape of it changes with our times. For me, it is shaped by modernity’s expectation that our children will outlive us. But those mothers—they lived with a different calculus, perhaps more attuned to life’s fragility and fleetingness. Yet my guess is they, like me were mothers living in the chasm between loss and love, between aching absence and profound gratitude. My grief doesn’t make me forget the privilege of Sammy’s life, nor does my gratitude diminish the weight of his death. They coexist, a paradox I carry as tenderly as I once carried him.
So here I sit, reflecting on what God might have said if She had told me the whole truth—not just about the joy and the heartbreak of having the gift of my son so briefly, but about what would come after.
“After your child dies, you will fall apart. It will be unbearable. There will be moments when you can’t see the way forward, when the weight of his absence feels too much to carry. You will rage, you will weep, you will ache in ways you didn’t know were possible. But you will endure. And through this pain, you will grow. You will learn truths about love and loss, about resilience and grace, that will transform you.”
“You will take what you’ve learned, and you will give it away—to other mothers, to other families. His story, and what you’ve learned through him, will save lives. You will become a source of healing, a beacon for others who walk the same path. And through it all, his love will remain, shaping you, guiding you, forever a part of you.”
If I could have known all of this—the joy, the devastation, the growth, the purpose—would I still have said yes?
Oh, yes. A thousand times, yes.
Because those 16 years with him were worth every second of the pain. To love him, to know him, to be his mother—it was the greatest privilege of my life. And if my journey, forged in the fire of grief, can bring even a glimmer of light to another’s darkness, then my answer remains the same.
God’s question wasn’t just about my son. It was about love itself—the kind of love that transcends time, death, and pain. It’s the kind of love that says yes, again and again, even in the face of heartbreak. Yes to the gift, no matter how fleeting. Yes to the lessons, no matter how hard-earned. Yes to the beauty, the grace, the love.
Always yes.