In the Middle of Family Gatherings

There is something sacred about watching your child surrounded by family.

Watching Sully run through a house full of cousins, hearing squeals from another game of chase, singing "Happy Birthday" around crowded tables, watching grandparents scoop little ones into their arms…it is beautiful. It is loud and chaotic and full in all the best ways.

And yet, in the middle of all that joy, there is always an awareness of who is missing.

Haven.

Hope.

Baby Z.

Canon.

Baby Rod.

Their absence is felt in ways that are hard to explain to someone who hasn't lived this kind of loss. It isn't that the joy isn't real. It is. We laugh. We celebrate. We take pictures and make memories and soak in every precious moment.

But grief has changed the way we experience family gatherings.

Now, when I watch cousins playing together, I can't help but imagine the little ones who should be among them. I wonder what Haven's laugh would have sounded like. I wonder which cousin she would have chased through the house or whose hand she would have held as they ran from room to room. I wonder who each of them would have become.

Their places feel both deeply empty and incredibly full all at once.

Because while they are absent from our tables, I believe they are not absent at all.

Scripture tells us that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. And while heaven remains a mystery in so many ways, I cannot help but picture our babies there together.

I imagine them whole and healed.

I imagine them known.

I imagine them loved.

I imagine grandparents who have gone before us welcoming them, watching over them with the same tenderness we witness here on earth as grandparents rock babies to sleep, hand out extra cookies, and cheer from the sidelines.

Maybe those images aren't perfectly theologically precise. I don't know. But I do know this: heaven is real, Jesus is there, and our babies are more alive than they have ever been.

And that changes everything.

Because our story does not end with loss.

It ends with reunion.

The goodness of God is not found in the absence of sorrow. It is found in His presence within it. It is found in His promise that death does not have the final word. It is found in the hope that one day every family gathering will be complete, every empty place filled, every tear wiped away.

Until then, we live in this tender middle.

We celebrate birthdays and holidays while carrying grief. We watch cousins play while imagining the ones we cannot see. We hold joy in one hand and longing in the other. And we trust that both can coexist because of the goodness of God.

One day, by His grace, there will be no more missing faces.

Only reunion.

Only wholeness.

Only joy.