Parenting
When a baby enters the world, you start measuring their age in fleeting moments. It’s astounding how life can transform so dramatically in just a few hours. Just moments ago, everything felt one way, but now it’s clear that an irreversible shift has taken place. You’ve always understood love, but now you find a depth of affection that makes previous feelings seem pale and flat. Initially, you track your baby’s age in hours, quickly moving to days, and then, like counting down your pregnancy in weeks, you transition to weeks. It feels so precise—6 weeks, 8 weeks, 12 weeks old. It aligns perfectly with the milestones noted in your baby books. Eventually, though, counting in weeks becomes cumbersome, and you switch to months. You can hardly fathom that one day, you’ll be thinking in terms of YEARS regarding your child’s age. In fact, someday, you might even use their age to calculate how old YOU are!
The experience of timing feels strangely similar when grappling with the loss of a child.
How could Max have been vibrant and full of life just moments before I reached the water’s edge? They’ve been searching for him for hours. Max has been gone for an entire day! It’s been a week since our lives shattered, two weeks, three. Could it really be a month? Do we now start counting in months? But his favorite sneakers, which he never had the chance to wear, are still sitting by the door. He still gets mail, for heaven’s sake!
When we measure the weeks, we recall a Thursday at 6 PM. When we think in terms of months, we remember the 8th. It’s a double dose of heartache. Will there really be a time when we only think of the passage of time in YEARS? What about decades? I believe so. And while Max won’t age, we will. He will forever remain just shy of 12 ½.
During your child’s early years, you celebrate milestones, and although you may wish away the particularly tough days, there’s an underlying desire to slow down the years and savor every moment of his childhood. Now, with the loss of a child, you mourn as the divide between the “before” and “after” of your family’s journey becomes increasingly vast. Yet, at the same time, you find yourself hoping the years pass quickly because a future without him feels overwhelmingly daunting.