A grieving parent, who is barely two years into this journey, recently shared with me that God obviously knew their child’s death would bring so much darkness and pain into their lives and yet He allowed it anyway, and then asked if I thought their child could “be happy with our Lord in Paradise, seeing the unending heartbreak and tears left behind.”

I thought it was a great question, and decided to share my thoughts on this with other grieving parents who might be wondering the same thing.

Yes, God knows what losing our children will do to us, both short term and long term. For most of us, the first two years or more is full of a suffocating darkness that cannot be put into words. And it is impossible to see yourself back in any kind of light to live a life worth living, much less ever feel happy again.

So does this cause your child in heaven to be sad for how much you are hurting?

I believe your child sees the same picture that God sees; the same one that you cannot see right now. She or he is now on the other side of eternity, and can see beyond the darkness of our “now” here on earth.

Our children who have left this earth ahead of us are living out Romans 8:18, which tells us, “We have sufferings now. But the sufferings we have now are nothing compared to the great glory that will be given to us.”  I think it is very possible that our children are so busy dancing and laughing in that glory, being in a state of absolute perfection, and rejoicing at being face-to-face with Jesus, that they are not in heaven grieving the pain of our loss one bit.

In fact, I think it is possible that the exact opposite (of them being sad for us) is happening.

I picture my daughter ecstatic in joyful anticipation, knowing what I will be gaining, and super excited beyond what can be put into words that someday she will be there to actually meet me upon my own arrival into that glory God promised. Can you see your child that way as well?

How many kids get to greet their parents at heaven’s gates? That is actually pretty special. Talk about a change in perspective!

What I have learned in my time of being here on earth without my daughter, Becca, is that we eventually get to a point where we can choose our perspective. Am I going to live every single day for the rest of my life here on earth in the intense pain of my loss? I don’t know about you, but I sure don’t want to. Yes, I still go there from time to time, and the tears flow and my heart feels like it is breaking all over again.

But more and more often, instead of mourning my loss, I am choosing to be happy for her gain… picturing her with both legs (her left leg was amputated at age three because of cancer) in total perfection and joy that is beyond what I can even imagine here on earth. I picture her worshiping Jesus – which she loved to do here on earth (and wrote many incredible worship songs), but now she can actually worship Him at His throne!

Wallowing in the pain of my loss and how much I miss her, feeds the suffocating darkness and pain, allowing it to continue consuming me.

Meditating on her gain, causes that pain and darkness to lift to a place of making life bearable once again.

And the more I spend time thinking about her gain in heaven (how she must look in wholeness and perfect beauty, how great she must feel both physically and emotionally, how she must absolutely love being in the very presence of the actual throne room, etc.) the more it brings me to a place of my life here on earth being full again. I not only realize she is okay, but she is better and more full of life than she ever was here on this earth.

I think that heaven is so incredible, our children can no longer relate to pain here on earth. How can there be broken hearts in heaven? If that is the case, God has lied to us. Heaven is supposed to be where we are going to finally be made whole in every area of our lives, including both physically and emotionally. Would it really be heaven, if our kids were looking down on us and feeling totally broken that God decided to allow them to go there before we did, and are angry at God for letting us be in such pain upon their departure from earth? That sounds more like the absence of God, not being in the presence of God.

Several scriptures in the Bible tell us that heaven is where we will be rewarded for how we lived our lives here on earth. (As Christians, we will not be judged, as Christ took that judgment for us.) So are the rewards for our children kept from them until we arrive? And until then, do they have to suffer in heaven with deep sadness, knowing how all we want to do is die and go be with them?

Please believe me when I say I know the pain. I told God to just kill me, because I didn’t want to be here anymore without Becca! But in His totally amazing love and grace, He allowed me to continue here on this earth. Yes, I said that. And I will say it again.

It is His deep love and eternal grace that keeps us here, when all we want to do is be done and go to our eternal home.

Several years down the road, I can honestly say how thankful I am that God did not answer my plea for death to take me. Why?

• My other children would probably be really struggling if that had happened, even as adults. It has been enough of a struggle with them losing their sister, much less losing Dave and/or me on top of that.
• I am not missing out on watching my children blossom in adulthood. I get to see and be a part of who they are becoming and things like whom they are marrying.
• I get to love on a bunch more of my grandchildren, who are a huge blessing in my life! Since Becca died, two more have been born, and another two are on the way. These grandchildren are my legacy, and I am excited to be part of their lives! We are all sad that they will never know their Aunt Becca, but they won’t also be sad because they didn’t know their Grandma Lolli and Pop.
• I wouldn’t be here to encourage you!

Along with thousands of other pareavors (bereaved parents), I have turned the corner, and you can, too.  You can have HOPE that it won’t always be like this, unless you continue to choose to remain here on earth in the blackness of deep grief.

I know at the beginning there isn’t a choice – grief just overtakes us because death is a huge loss, and the death of a child is not normal (and the most devastating loss we can experience on this earth according to most experts).

But the death of our child is not where God reaches His limits, nor did it blindside God. He has a plan we cannot see. He has light for our darkness, and brings life from death. He can and will help you come out of the darkness and back into light and life again.

It will probably take longer than you want it to, and there can be many “setbacks,” but I can tell you, it is worth the fight, when you are ready to learn how to live again here on earth until you are greeted by your child with a huge hug and the words, “Welcome home!”

Losing a child is a trauma and working your way through the suffocating darkness is a long hard road. Grieving Parents Sharing Hope (GPS Hope) is here to help navigate you through the journey. We would like to continue, by sending you (from our free resource library) a list of “Thirty Ways to Comfort and Take Care of Ourselves.”

This will also allow us to send you a Weekly Word of Hope, which you can unsubscribe from at any time, by clicking a link at the bottom of any email.

Expressions of Hope is written by author and speaker Laura Diehl to bring hope, light and life to bereaved parents. If you would like more information about Laura as an author or speaker click here.

When my husband, Dave, graduated from college with a Computer Science degree, he wanted to get a job in the area and not relocate. The only job offered to him locally, after several months of searching, was with a non-profit organization. The pay was miserably low and it was difficult to make ends meet. However, the employer made up for it in insurance benefits, which at the time was not a big deal to us. But God knew that within the next few months we would need those benefits. That was when Becca (who was only three years old at the time) was diagnosed with cancer, had her leg amputated, and went through nine months of chemotherapy.

During that time her medical bills were easily in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, but we only had to pay less than $1000 of the medical costs. When we look back, the job God provided that did not seem like it was meeting our needs, turned out to be exactly what we needed with incredibly good insurance, which far outweighed our need for better finances.

Each time a terrible event happens in our lives, we can get upset at God, even angry, wanting to know why He allowed it. But for many of us, as we continue on and are able to look back, often we can actually see God’s hand was in it. We may not have been able to see Him at work in the middle of the crisis, but now that we are further down the road, we can connect the dots and see how God used that situation to bring direction we might not have even known we needed at the time.

So in other words, when we are questioning, “God, why did you let this happen to me?” His answer could very well be, “I didn’t let it happen to you. I let it happen for you.”

As a grieving parent, you may be thinking at this point, “There is no way I can read this and have Laura tell me the death of my child was something God did for me.”  And I am not about to say that!

I have been in that place of suffocating darkness myself after the death of our daughter, and have told God to just kill me now and take me off this earth. I am not going to tell you that God allowed your child to leave this earth as something good He did for you.

However, we need to realize that the death of our children did not blindside God. He knows what we cannot possibly know. He can see what we cannot see.

Our lives will never be the same. We will never be the same. But within that, we can allow the death of our child not to be wasted. We can allow God’s love to wash over us, to heal us, and to take the change in us and use it against the enemy who brought death into this world.

Although it hurts so much we just want to die and go to be with our child, the fact is, our child is safe in the Father’s arms. (If this is something you question, or that torments you, click here to be sent chapter eight “Looking Out the Window of Fear” from my book When Tragedy Strikes: Rebuilding Your Life with Hope and Healing After the Death of Your Child, which talks about this.) Plus, our child does not have to face the pain and tragedies this world puts us through.

When we think of our loss, our pain can make it hard to even breathe at times. But when we think of our child’s gain, it lifts some of that suffocating darkness, and allows us to see a glimmer of hope and even the possibility that maybe God isn’t as cruel as we thought He was, and that it is possible to believe we can live again and actually even find happiness while finishing our time on this earth.

God did not do this to you. Yes, for some reason (which we may never know this side of eternity) He allowed the death of your child and my child.

And He does have something for each of us.

• God has light and life that penetrates and shatters the suffocating darkness and intense pain.
• He has a peace for each of us that goes beyond anything we can understand. This peace causes us to delight in His mercy and grace in our lives within the horrible earthly loss.
• God has a plan for every single one of us. It is a plan that has blessings for you (and me) that we don’t even know about yet.

No, God did not do this to you. Once you can believe this truth, you will be well on your way to receiving the light, life, peace and blessings God has for you beyond the darkness and pain.

Expressions of Hope is written by author and speaker Laura Diehl to bring hope, light and life to bereaved parents. If you would like more information about Laura as an author or speaker click here.

Do you know someone who has lost a child? Are you surprised at how much they are struggling during the holidays, especially if it has been over a year since their loss?

As someone who has experienced this deep loss, please allow me to shed some light on this for you.

There are so many memories attached to the holidays, especially based around our own personal and family traditions. These can be triggers over and over again as in-our-face reminders that our child is no longer here on earth and will never again be part of these traditions. Our memories with that child are now all we have, and there will never be another opportunity to create new holiday memories with that child, which is so very wrong, and so very painful.

Things like Christmas shopping can be almost impossible, as we are constantly bombarded with gift ideas that make us think of our child for whom we will never be able to buy another gift.

Some family gatherings will probably be unattended, as it is impossible to watch the other children (young children, teens or adult children) and not to be immersed in the painful emptiness of our child who is missing and who will never again be joining in the laughter, festivities and seeing the growth and changes from year-to-year like everyone else is with their children.

But we are not just thinking of ourselves. We would rather stay home and allow our loved ones to celebrate without the presence of our grief dampening the joyous time for everyone else, as we have learned it is our job to make everyone around us comfortable with our grief (which can be very draining).

As a parent who is on this path, I would like to offer you three suggestions on how to help the pareavor in your life during the holidays, which can be very difficult, no matter how long ago that loss happened.

1. Give them lots of space and lots of grace

Losing a child can be compared to having an amputation. Part of our very being has been cut off from us.

The daughter we lost, Becca, had her left leg amputated when she was only three years old, so we had a front row seat to what it was like to live with an amputation. (You can read about her story here.) There are so many things one doesn’t think about unless you have been in that position, such as what size shoe do you buy when one foot grows and the other does not (until she gets her new yearly-made leg to keep up with her growth)? Every morning she had to decide if she was going to put on her leg as she got out of bed, or if she was going to hop around on one leg for a while. (Yes, she had a little walker when she was young and then crutches, but she rarely used them unless she was unable to wear her leg for some reason.)

The same is true for parents who have lost a child. There are so many things that come at us as daily reminders of our child who is no longer here, whether we want them to or not. We are constantly navigating through what is normal day-to-day life for everyone else, but are grief triggers for us.

It will also be helpful for you to know that for most bereaved parents, the second year is worse than the first. This is because the fog of grief has lifted and the weight of the loss hits us full force.  The third year and beyond is when we begin the journey of figuring out how to live with our child being amputated from us, and for most of us it takes a few years to figure that out. I am five years into this journey, and pareavors who have been on this road for twenty or thirty years will tell me it is still fresh for me and that I am still in the early stages.

2. Find a way to honor or remember their child

Since memories are all we have now, anything that helps us remember and honor that memory and life are very precious to us. Some suggestions are:

• Have a tree ornament made with that child’s name, picture, or something significant
• Have one of the child’s shirts made into a stuffed bear
• Give a gift in their child’s name.
  • A donation could be made to a charity associated with something about the child no longer here
  • A group/family could put their money together for something that would be seen by the public, such as a park bench
  • Make a donation through an organization like Compassion International, such as purchasing a goat for a needy family in another country
• Place a memorial brick in a memory garden or memory wall in your community
• Have a piece of jewelry made that has the child’s name engraved on it
• Have a blanket made with a favorite photo of their child

You can easily do an internet search to find places that will do these things for you, or you could search for more ideas.

3. Don’t just talk about them, but pray for them

It is very easy to sit around and talk about us with others; about how we are still such a mess and it has been over six months (or two years or eight years…), how we never go out any more, wondering when we will be back to normal, about the weird things we do now, and on and on it goes.

That really doesn’t help us. In fact, that could be considered gossip, and adds to the way people tip-toe around us and even say these hurtful things directly to us.

When we come to mind, or come into a conversation, pray for us. We are very, very broken, and need to be held up before the Lord in our woundedness. Only God can heal a broken heart, so help that healing by bringing us before Him often, not just a week, a month, or a year down the road, but for the rest of our lives when you think of us.

I would like to add one more thought here. Many people are concerned about saying the wrong thing; something that will actually sting a parent who has lost a child instead of comfort them. If you are one of those people, I have put together a list of bad things to say, and a list of helpful things. You can find the list here.

Let me close by saying thank you. Thank you for wanting to help someone close to you during the holidays. Thank you for being someone who doesn’t just get frustrated with us grieving parents and turn away, leaving us in more painful isolation. Thank you for not just saying that you care, but for actually going out of your way to take the time to read this, finding out what you can do, and acting on it.

May God richly bless you, as you bless and serve with love the one you know who has lost a child from this earth.

Laura Diehl is an award-winning author, national speaker and singer. She and her husband, Dave, are the founders of Grieving Parents Sharing Hope (GPS Hope). Dave and Laura travel full time in their Hope Mobile (a 38-foot motor home) to be more easily available for speaking and ministry requests.

If you would like to receive monthly updates on their travel adventures click here and submit your name and email at the bottom of the page. 

If you would like more information about Laura as an author or speaker click here.