The Sorrow That Holds Two Children

There are griefs that defy clean language. Some sorrows sit in the chest like a stone — too heavy to lift, too sacred to ignore. I think of the families who carry the impossible truth that one child’s heart stopped, and in that stopping, another child’s life was extended. It is a grief braided with mercy, a mercy braided with grief. There is no way to hold one strand without touching the other.

As a chaplain, I have learned that this kind of sorrow doesn’t ask for explanations. It asks for presence. It asks for someone willing to stand in the doorway between loss and life, honoring the child who is gone and blessing the child who now breathes because of that final gift. It is holy ground — the kind where you take your shoes off not out of ritual, but because the weight of love demands it.

In these moments, we do not offer answers. We offer witness. We hold space for the parents who mourn and the parents who rejoice, sometimes in the same room, sometimes in the same breath. And we trust that God is somehow present in the tangle — not to tidy it, but to sit with us in it.