Rain Sounds and Midnight Reflections

from the silent mourner — 

“I’ll carry this grief for the rest of my life. The ache of loss is a heavy, permanent thing. “

It’s funny how much you think when you’re in a dark room at midnight, listening to the rhythmic rain sounds from your child’s sound machines. The world outside feels so far away, while your thoughts spiral into every corner of life: love, friendship, loss.

Grief is such a strange thing, isn’t it? It only exists because love exists. To never feel grief would mean to never feel love. And love, well, isn’t that everything? People have started wars for love, built monuments for it, written poems and songs to capture even a fraction of its weight.

I thought I knew what love was before I became a mother. I thought I’d felt it fully and deeply. But I was wrong. Becoming a mother rewrites your understanding of love entirely, like flipping a switch you never knew existed. It’s consuming, unrelenting, and the purest thing I’ve ever known.

And yet, that love makes this so much harder. Knowing my child is in pain, how do you hold that? I would give anything, everything, to trade places with them, to take the weight of their suffering into my own hands. I wish I could rewrite fate, shift the course of their story to spare them from this. But that’s not how it works, is it?

I’ll carry this grief for the rest of my life. The ache of loss is a heavy, permanent thing. But would I rather have never known this love at all? To never have seen their face, held their hand, or heard their laugh? Honestly, I don’t know the answer. The weight of love and grief are so intertwined that it feels impossible to separate them.

So I sit here, in the quiet of the midnight room, letting the rain sounds fill the space where my answers can’t reach.