I don’t wear my pain on my face anymore, and most days I’m thankful for that. I’m thankful to not be a walking billboard for what child loss is, or a representation of the yellow brick road your life turns into after you become a member of this most unwanted club.

That hurt that physically manifested in my life after loosing Kamren was ugly on so many levels. And worse than that, it was the exact opposite of what his life was and always will be for me.

But that’s the kicker.

Now that the pain isn’t displayed front and center every minute of my day, Kamren isn’t either. It’s such a contradiction. The place of peace that I’ve reached with our life, and which I refuse to walk away from, seemingly negates his existence when I look at my reflection in the iris’ of whoever is looking back at me.

I wish that wasn’t the case.

I wish that even the most foreign set of eyes could look at me and see you. I wish they could see the authenticity you filled my world with before you had to go. I wish they understood the depth of my compassion was multiplied a million life times over from the 284 days that we spent together. Or how my ability to see past the incessant ugliness of the world is only possible because I know what the purest form of love looks like.

I wish the calm in my face was the representation of the calm that you brought into my world. The anxiety that you made extinct. The fear that you replaced with hope. The purpose that wasn’t quite lacking, but not yet defined either.

Because that’s what I see when I catch my reflection in the store window, or the rearview mirror.

I see the woman that’s been reshaped and redirected. I see the girl that once lived for concrete and indisputable evidence of the love and beauty in her life, replaced by the woman who instinctually feels your love & beauty in the most simplistic parts of life.

If only they could look at me and see that every part of my day reflects the way I’ve learned to love the you that you are now. The you that never leaves my side, even after I stopped carrying you inside me or in my arms. Or the you that knows how to nudge me just enough to remind me of my need to breathe. Even if only enough to keep breathing in those little remnants of love that you leave for me still.

Maybe one day this two way looking glass that is life without you will be made available to the public.

Until then, you will always belong to me & the sun sweet boy.

This is what it means to be held, how it feels when the sacred is torn from your life and you survive. This is what it is to be loved, and to know that the promise was that when everything fell, we’d be held.  – Natalie Grant