In the Middle of Five Months

Five months.

Half a year is almost here, and somehow that feels impossible to say out loud. Time after loss does something strange. It stretches and folds in ways that make no sense. On paper, five months have passed since our daughter went to be with Jesus. Five months since the doctor quietly told us there was no heartbeat. Five months since the world split cleanly into before and after.

Five months sounds like a long time. And yet, I can still feel the moment as if it happened last week. I remember the room. The quiet shift in the ultrasound tech’s voice. The way the air suddenly felt heavy.

I remember the doctor’s words — the ones no parent should ever hear. The moment everything we thought the future would hold disappeared in a sentence.

Those memories are still so sharp. And yet somehow, five months have still passed. That’s the strange place grief holds you in — the tender middle. Where time moves forward whether you’re ready or not. Where the calendar insists on turning pages, even when your heart is still standing in a hospital room.

I believe with my whole heart that our daughter is with Jesus. That she is more alive than we are, held in the presence of the One who formed her. That heaven knows her laugh, her voice, her tiny personality in ways we didn’t get the chance to. That truth brings comfort. But it doesn’t erase the ache of missing her here.

Some days I can feel healing happening in the quietest ways. I laugh a little more easily. I can say her name and tell a story without immediately breaking down. I can breathe again in spaces that once felt suffocating.

And then there are days when the grief rises up just as strong as it did in the beginning. Days when the weight of missing her presses against my chest. Days when the silence where she should be feels impossibly loud. Days when I’m reminded again that while she is with Jesus, we are still here learning how to live without her in our arms.

Healing, I’m learning, isn’t a straight line. It’s slow. Uneven. Quiet. Sometimes invisible. It looks like taking two steps forward and one step back. It looks like functioning normally all day and then crying the second my head hits the pillow. It looks like learning how to carry love and loss in the same hands.

Five months doesn’t mean we’re “past it.”It just means we’ve been loving and missing her for five months now. Five months of wondering who she would have been. Five months of imagining her face changing, her little personality emerging. Five months of wishing we could watch her grow. Five months of trusting that while we don’t get to raise her here, Jesus is holding her in heaven.

And that’s where hope quietly lives inside the grief. Because heaven isn’t just a comforting idea to us — it’s a real place where our daughter is. Where our other two precious babes already reside. The place that once felt distant is actually deeply personal for us.

The hope of heaven means this goodbye isn’t forever. It means there will be a day when faith becomes sight. When the arms that left the hospital empty will finally hold her again. When every tear will be wiped away and every broken thing will be made whole.

Until then, we live here in the tender middle. Where time moves both too fast and not at all. Where grief and love sit side by side. Where missing her is part of loving her.

Five months without her in our arms. Five months of loving her. And five months closer to the day we will see her again.