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If you’re looking for hope after loss, especially after child loss, you are not alone. In this episode, Josh and I talk honestly about what hope looks like when you can barely get out of bed, and how that hope can grow over years, even when the empty seat at the table never stops being real. We share what helped us in the earliest days after our son Jack died, what changed over time, and what hope looks like a whole decade later.

This is part of our Q&A series where we’re answering your questions about grief, faith, anger, and the long road forward. If you haven’t read from the beginning, start with Part 1 (Podcast Episode 11) here.

What Hope Looks Like After Child Loss Over Time

Josh: So what does hope look like in a decade? What does it look like at the beginning, when you’re first in the middle of loss? How does that transition, and what does it look like a decade later? How is it different?

Hope After Loss in the Early Days: “Help Me Through the Next Few Minutes”

Kathy: In the beginning, hope looked like actively leaning hard on God.

That looked like waking up in the morning, lying in bed, not feeling like I could do anything because grief was overtaking me, and saying, “God, I don’t know how to get through today. I don’t even know how to get through the next hour. Please help me get through the next few minutes.”

So I talked to God constantly: “Help me get through the next few minutes. What’s the next thing I can do?”

Practically, that looked like: get up, wash my face. That’s a win. That’s what hope looked like in those very early days.

Hope also looked like being honest when someone asked, “How are you?” Honest about the pain I was still feeling, and honest about how God was meeting me there. Did it always make me feel happy? No, it didn’t.

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Over time, hope started to look more like: keep going to God and His Word. Keep praying. It grew. It started very small, with the only thing I could do being going to Him each minute, asking for help to get through it.

Then those minutes turned to days, and those days turned to weeks.

Over months and years, I felt like I couldn’t get out of bed sometimes. For over a year, every time I went to church, I would cry. I couldn’t smile.

Josh: You couldn’t smile, you couldn’t sing.

Kathy: Yeah. I didn’t sing for like eight years, which is a big deal for me because I loved singing. I did several voice classes in college. I was in choirs and different singing groups. I did everything. I loved singing. I always had a song in my heart, and it was completely gone after Jack passed.

Music has always been incredibly important to me, but it was gone.

When Worship Feels Impossible

Kathy: Hope looked like singing through my pain.

There are a couple of songs I listened to, and I actually created a playlist. If you check out the blog, there’s a playlist somewhere. It’s called “Resonating Resilience,” I think. It’s Bible-based songs that help point the aching heart to God.

One of them is “Miracle or Not,” a Worship Initiative song. It’s incredibly powerful. It talks about seeing other people and it seems like things are going well for them, like they have their miracle. And you’re sitting there thinking, “I’m not getting a miracle. Can I still have faith in you?” It talks about crying out in the darkness.

Listening to music that meets you in that pain can be helpful in pointing your heart to God in that pain.

That can be what hope after loss looks like: forming a habit of going to God with your pain, going to God with your life. Hope grows as you do this over time.

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Hope After Loss Grows Like a Muscle

Josh: Yeah, it’s like exercising a muscle. It feels really brittle in the beginning. You have this huge weight dropped on you. But as you turn to the Lord over and over and over again for the next moment of grace, it builds trust.

One of the questions was, “Is there a future?” Yes, God does have a future for you, and He’s going to use this. He’s not going to waste it.

It’s not what we envisioned our future would look like. We might be staring into the future saying, “I don’t have my child. I have a family I don’t have what I hoped to have.”

But I think God has a different future for us than we thought, and He’s going to use these situations. He’s going to grow trust in Him.

Honestly, in the middle of it, you probably don’t want to hear that. I know we didn’t.

But He’s good in the middle of that. He has a beautiful future, and you don’t know until you get down the road and see what He’s done through your greatest difficulty and pain. You just don’t know what that looks like.

All we can do is trust Him with that. On the other side, you begin to see, “Man, He used this, He used that.”

I never want to go through that again, but God was good, and He was right. He loved me. He was with me in the middle of that.

How did you survive, Kathy? Day to day.

“I Can’t Live the Rest of My Life Without My Child”

Kathy: I want to share one moment I had with God. It was about a month after our son passed. I was so angry. It was during the holidays.

We decided last minute to go see family. I was not happy to be there. I just wanted to be alone. You guys were very understanding, and I’m thankful, but it was hard.

I had this conversation with God: “God, I cannot live the rest of my life without my kid. I can’t do it. If I’m supposed to live till 70, if I have 70 more years, I can’t do it.”

It reminded me of the conversation Abraham has with God about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, where he starts with 50 and goes down and down to five. But for me, it was different.

I cannot live 70 more years without my son.

And it was like God said, “Well, if I had you live to 60, could you do it?”

And I was like, “God, no.”

And then 50. And down.

Over this conversation, maybe half an hour, an hour, it went down from 70 to five years.

“Okay, God, maybe I could do five years, but you would have to be with me every step of the way. I could not do this on my own. It is so incredibly painful. I cannot even live five years without You.

But maybe if Your grace was enough, I could live five more years without my son.

Because I would have to take it day by day, then week by week, month by month, and year by year. Maybe somehow we would make it five years.”

This is not a testament to my own strength, no matter what some of my dear friends want to say.

This is a testament to the goodness of God that we’ve made it 10 years. The Lord has been with us every day, every step of the way.

It’s not my faithfulness. I’ve tried to be faithless. I’ve tried to be unfaithful to God.

It is His faithfulness to us.

He who has begun a good work in you will complete it. It’s not that He began a good work in you and expects you to complete it. He is going to complete the good work He began in you.

Just keep looking to Him. That’s it. Look and live.

Josh
Because it was pretty dark for you in that time.

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When It Gets Dark: Please Reach Out for Help

Kathy: Yeah. Very, very dark. Very despairing of life.

I was hallucinating ways to die, and it was horrible. I felt so troubled by it. I didn’t want that. It was miserable.

So I definitely couldn’t keep that to myself.

I talked to counselors. I talked to people who could help me. I went to a group for people who were despairing of life.

I sought help, and I would encourage you: if you’re deeply discouraged, depressed, despairing of life, please reach out to someone who can help you. A counselor, a therapist, a doctor, a group, someone, even a friend. They can help point you in the right direction if you’re not sure where to go.

“Will I Ever Get Over Wishing I Could Have My Child Again?”

Josh: One more question in this section: “Can I ever get over wishing I could have my child again?”

Kathy: I would say you never get over it.

For me, I still wish I had my child again. I am never like, “Well, that was a good thing.” I don’t think death is a good thing. I don’t think God thinks so either. That’s why He came to defeat it.

Can God bring good from the worst thing ever? Yes. And that shows His genius and His love and His sacrifice.

Death is not the way it’s supposed to be. I don’t think we have to be okay with that or accept that.

Hope After Loss and the Defeat of Death

Josh: I was thinking about this this morning. He allows death, and His good purposes are worked through death, but death is out of place in His world. That’s not how He originally created this world. One day death will be gone.

Jesus is the one who will do it It says in Corinthians, the last enemy to be destroyed is death. He’ll take care of death one day.

On one hand, I can accept that my child did die. God was in control. It says in Hebrews 1 that He upholds the universe by the word of His power and nothing is outside of His control. He let this happen.

But on the other hand, one day He will fix it. He will conquer death forever. It will be destroyed and it will no longer be. We long for that day.

So we don’t have to get over wishing we could have our child again. I think you’ll always desire that.

But I can trust in a God who will one day bring life. He says, “I am the resurrection and the life.” He calls us to Himself. Jesus is the ultimate answer.

woman praying in hospital after child loss.

The Empty Seat at the Table

Kathy: That reminds me of how, maybe a few years ago, I came to the realization that nobody is going to fill your child’s shoes. Nobody can fill their spot and make it the same. You can’t replace a child. Each life is incredibly precious, whether it was a pregnancy loss, infant loss, or an older child loss. Nobody can fill that spot when they’re gone because every life is unique and special.

Sometimes we try though. For years, I subconsciously had this void I was trying to fill.

Then it dawned on me: the reason there’s this empty seat at the table—why it feels like there’s always an empty seat at the table—is because there is an empty seat at the table.

And there will always be an empty seat at the table because of this loss.

I can stop striving to fill that void.

We tried to adopt for several years. We had some matches, but they kept falling through, and it was very hard. It felt like loss all over again.

I wanted to keep trying to adopt. Then God blessed us with two more children, and it was a lot. We didn’t feel like we had a lot of support where we lived raising kids, and it was overwhelming to have two small children.

I was really struggling. I thought, “I want to adopt one day.” Maybe God will allow us to adopt or foster someday. But it was a personal thing God was working on in me.

There will always feel like there’s an empty seat at the table. It’s not okay, but God is doing something about it. One day all wrongs will be made right, whether it was sickness, brokenness, someone wronged you, an accident, or even our own wrongs.

A lot of mothers have written to me about guilt. I’ve struggled with guilt over the loss of my child. “There should have been something I could have done.”

But the heart of man plans his way, and the Lord establishes his steps. God is sovereign even over my poor choices.

My poor choices cannot thwart God’s ultimate sovereign plan. That’s a hard truth to realize.

Waiting for the Lord With Open Hands

Josh: Some verses along these lines: one day He will wipe away every tear from our eyes and death shall be no more. (Revelation 21:4)

Another verse: though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. (2 Corinthians 4:16)

“I believe that I shall look upon the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord.” (Psalm 27:13)

Kathy: Something I want to say about that verse: when I read it, I think, “Oh great, is the land of the living heaven?” Like I won’t see the goodness of the Lord until heaven.

I think that’s true in part. Living really starts in heaven, where we really have life. But this is the land of the living too. We have it here, in this life.

I think you can see the goodness of the Lord in this life too, not just when life really begins in eternity.

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That exhortation at the end, “Wait for the Lord, be strong,” what does it mean to wait for the Lord?

It’s what I said before: going to Him every moment. Being able not to strive, but to rest, and know that He is at work even in deep, deep pain.

Josh: It’s like going from a clenched fist on life to an open hand for what God is going to do.

What’s Coming Next

Next up, we’ll talk about how grief affects a marriage. We’ll share honestly about what child loss has done to our relationship, where it stretched us, where it hurt, and how God has met us there over time.

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You don’t have to walk this road alone.

Soli Deo Gloria,
Kathy Clum