Content warning: This blog posts contains references to miscarriage.

A year ago, we received the news we feared more than anything: The child we’d been expecting wasn’t going to arrive.

It hadn’t been long since we found out we were pregnant, but it had been long enough for us to dream of what our child could be. To excitedly anticipate their arrival, to calculate when their major milestones would come, to imagine what life would be like with them in our family.

Suddenly, all of that hope vanished into thin air.

In its place was a void, a hole in our hearts the precise size and shape of our love for our child. There were moments when it felt like everything we had could be swallowed by that void at any moment. We’d staked our future on this tiny person in the making, and then they were gone.

A year changes a lot of things. We are unendingly grateful for the life we have now with our son Noah. He’s the greatest blessing we could ever ask for. But we’ll never forget our little one we didn’t get to meet. They were—and always will be—bigger than the whole sky in our eyes.

Life is full of so much joy and so much pain, often at the same time. Learning to hold both is an endless endeavor, but I like to think we’ve gotten better at it over this past year. God’s faithfulness and the support of our loved ones carried us through.

To those mourning a future they thought they could depend on, to our past selves and those who find themselves in a similar place, we say this: There is life after loss. The heartache will never fully go away. It’s a part of you now, like the one you love is a part of you. You will carry them with you into tomorrow, but there will be a tomorrow. And there is always, always hope for beautiful things yet to come.

In loving memory of our unborn child. We will hold you in our hearts forever, and we will never be the same because of the time we had with you, brief as it may have been.

I've got a lot to pine about
I've got a lot to live without
I'm never gonna meet
What could've been, would've been
What should've been you