Sacred Grief

     When you lose a child, when you are a parent with one child your new friend will never meet, when you imagine milestones, smiles, and tears...because you can't *experience* them, when the grief is as fresh ten years later as it was ten seconds after... when that is your reality, many choose to become an advocate.

     You champion the children coming, you fight to make this world just a little bit safer, kinder, healthier. You fight for it, because you fight for your own child lost. You carry a burden that is so heavy, you use the full weight of it to change *something*.

     I never felt called into advocating for testing, medicine, or even awareness...that was not the burden that I felt, is not the burden I feel...but I do see a place God has led me in this. The change I want to see, the legacy I want to leave as a mother who is missing a vital piece.

     Grief.

     There is a sacredness in grief, in grieving, in mourning what was lost. Weeping should come, it needs to come. And we, as a society, we need to support it. Allow it. Encourage it.

     If we do not grieve, how then will we be comforted? If we do not let the heavy, soul racking sobs come, how will our tears be dried?

     Over the last ten precious years I have seen my pain mirrored on faces of people who love me, love my family and loved sweet Eden, even if they never met her. That mirroring pain has been a soothing balm. It has shown me that I have permission to *feel*. It has reminded me that I can and will be comforted. It has allowed my baby to live, even while she is gone. It has pointed me back to God more times than I can count. My grief has been sweet, in it's utter bitterness.

     We need not be afraid of grief, that it will swallow us whole, that it will leave us with nothing left. We need to look at it, hold it in our hands, sit with it, and recognize that it is a part of us. That it has shaped us in ways we could not otherwise have been shaped. Grief has beauty in it's depths.