What Do I Do With All the Love I Still Have? Hope After Child Loss
You are still their mother. And all of that love is still here.
Love after child loss does not disappear the day your child dies.
You wake up the next morning, and the next one, and the one after that, still loving your child exactly as much as you always have.
That part never changes.
What changes is everything you used to do with it.
Before your child died, you didn’t just feel your love for them. You lived it out. Every single day, in a hundred ordinary ways you never once stopped to think about.
It was making their favorite meal. Picking something up at the store because you knew they liked it. Sending a text just to check in.
Maybe you never thought of it being the way you loved them. You were just being their mom.
And then your child died.
And you are still their mom.
With all of this love, and none of the ordinary places to put it.
If that is where you are today, I want to sit with you in this for a few minutes.
The Loss Underneath the Loss
We talk a great deal about missing our children.
We talk about the empty chair and the quiet house. We talk about the birthdays and the holidays and every ordinary Tuesday they should still be here for.
But there is another loss underneath all of that, and it does not get named nearly enough.
You spent your child’s entire life loving them. And most of the time you never had to think about how.
You just did it.
Then suddenly all of those ways are no longer available to you.
But the love is still there.
It is still arriving, every day, at full strength.
And I do not believe the answer is learning how to love your child less.
I think we have to understand what happens to that love now.
Because if we donβt, it gets tangled up with our grief. It gets tangled up with regret. With everything we wish we had done differently, and everything we wish we had said.
And before long, a mother can start to believe that her pain is the only place her love has left to go.
It isn’t.
The Day I Stood in Front of the Freezer Door
Ice cream is a big deal at our house.
If you opened the freezer in my garage right now, you would see the entire door filled with ice cream. I love to buy everybody’s favorite.
This was probably 2019. Andrew went home on November 30th, 2018, and I do not think I stepped foot in a grocery store for months.
When I finally did, it was traumatic.
Most people do not grasp that. The grocery store is one of the first places we go in a public setting after our child dies.
But on the particular day I want to tell you about, I was a little further along. Far enough along to walk the aisles and put things in my cart.
If you are early in your grief journey, you know that is not possible at first.
And I came to the dairy case.
We have a certain brand of ice cream our family loves, and they make seasonal flavors. So I opened the door and reached in for the traditional favorites.
And there it was.
Andrew’s favorite seasonal ice cream. Reds Grand Slam.
I completely broke down.
Because in that moment, what I believed was that I could never buy that ice cream again.
I stood there with tears streaming down my face and my heart aching so badly I thought it was going to burst out of my chest.
My first thought was: just leave.
That is what I teach. When you hit an intense trigger, you remove yourself from it.
So I slammed that freezer door and I walked away.
What Death Actually Changed
The store was packed that day. I wheeled up and down the aisles, not shopping anymore, just trying to process what had happened to me.
And as I walked, I asked myself a question.
Teresa, how can you best honor Andrew right now, in this moment?
So you know what I did.
I turned that cart around. I went back to the dairy case. I put Reds Grand Slam in my cart and I brought it home.
When our family came together, I told them we were eating Reds Grand Slam that day in Andrew’s honor.
And we did. All of us. And we told Andrew stories about everything he loved to eat.
But underneath that whole afternoon was a question I did not have words for yet.
What did death actually change?
Because when your child dies, it feels like death changed everything. The way your family looks. The way your home feels. The future you thought you were going to have.
And if we are not careful, we can begin to believe death has the power to take it all.
Scripture tells us otherwise.
“And I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from God’s love. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow β not even the powers of hell can separate us from God’s love.”
Romans 8:38β39 (NLT)
Death Does Not Have the Final Word
I want to be careful here, because this passage is not telling us that death does not hurt.
It is not telling us that death does not change our earthly relationships.
We know that it does.
You know it every time you reach for your phone and cannot call your child.
I knew it standing in front of that freezer, realizing I could not bring Andrew home his favorite ice cream and watch him eat it.
Death changed that.
But death does not have the final word.
Because when your child dies, death can begin to feel like the most powerful thing in your story.
It isn’t.
God is.
Death changed the way I could love Andrew here. For thirty-two years I expressed my love for my son in a hundred ordinary ways. I could make him a meal. I could call him. I could buy something at the store because I knew he loved it.
After he went to Heaven, I could not do those things for him anymore.
That is what changed.
But I did not stop being Andrew’s mom.
And I did not stop loving him.
Where Love After Child Loss Turns When It Has Nowhere to Go
Love that has nowhere to go does not simply sit quietly.
It goes somewhere.
And when it can no longer move outward toward our child, very often it turns and comes back on us.
It comes back as regret. As second-guessing. As replaying conversations. As a running list of everything we would do differently if we could.
I want you to hear this clearly: The love you have for your child and the love they have for you will never stop.
That is love still looking for somewhere to go.
Your heart has not stopped doing the thing it has always done for your child. It has simply been given nowhere to take it.
So the question is not how to feel less.
The question is what that love looks like now.
Not, how do I get rid of it. Not, how do I get past it. Not even, how do I learn to love my child less so this hurts less.
But how do I continue to express the love I have for my child now that I cannot express it the way I did when they were physically here.
I did not have that answer all at once.
I began learning it in moments. And one of those moments happened standing in front of a freezer door in a grocery store.
You Do Not Have to Love Your Child Less
You do not have to love your child less in order to learn how to live again.
What changes is how you express that love.
I could not buy Reds Grand Slam for Andrew anymore.
But I could buy it because of Andrew.
I could bring it home. I could put it on the table. I could say his name. I could tell his stories. I could share something he loved with the people I love.
All these years later, I am still Andrew’s mom.
I still love my son. I just express that love differently now.
So here is one small thing to carry into this week.
Think of one ordinary thing your child loved. Their favorite food. A song they played over and over. Something they always did that made you laugh.
Whatever comes to mind, do that one thing in honor of your child.
And if you can, tell someone why you are doing it.
Say their name. Tell the story. Share the love.
Because death changed so much.
But it did not separate you from the love of God, the love for your child and their love for you. Love is eternal!
And it did not make you stop being your child’s mom.
My prayer for you this week is that God meets you in one of those ordinary moments. That He reminds you that you are held by Him. And that He gives you the courage to keep loving your child in the ways that are possible now, while you learn how to live the life that is still in front of you.
π§ Listen to the Full Episode
If these words have met you where you are today β there is more waiting for you in this week’s episode.
π Episode 321: What Do I Do With All the Love I Still Have? Hope After Child Loss
In this episode, I walk through what death actually changed and the one thing it had no power to touch. I share the full story of that day in the grocery store, and what I understood standing in front of that freezer door that has shaped how I have loved my son ever since. If you are carrying a love you cannot give the way you used to, this conversation is for you.
Next Steps
β¨ Why Am I Still Stuck?
A free thirty-minute teaching for the grieving mom who is doing everything she knows to do, but still feels like she is just trying to survive every day.
If you have wondered why you cannot seem to move forward, why everything still feels so hard, or why you do not feel like yourself anymore, this teaching will help you understand some of what is happening underneath the grief β and why trying harder is not necessarily the answer.
π Watch the free teaching here
With care and prayer,
Teresa Davis
