I want to tell you about a night I've only ever told in pieces before, because the whole thing is what closes the book, and I've never known how to say it anywhere smaller than that.
We lost our son Isaac to trisomy 18, a chromosomal condition that is almost always fatal. There was an ambulance. There was snow falling outside a hospital in South Korea, in a country that wasn't mine, in a system I didn't fully understand, in a language I could barely hold onto on a good day, let alone that one. There was a diagnosis I wasn't ready for, and a son I would only get to hold for a little while.
I stood outside that hospital at midnight and felt about six things at once, none of which made sense together. Fear. Relief, somehow, in the same breath as the fear. A loneliness I didn't have words for, standing in falling snow that didn't care what kind of night it was landing on. And underneath all of it, something close to joy, because his heart was still beating in that moment. And so was mine. I keep coming back to that part.
I didn't know that night that I would one day write a book about what I learned in it. I just knew, in whatever quiet way a person knows anything at 2am outside a hospital, that I wasn't alone in it. Not because I could feel God particularly close. Honestly, I could not. He showed up anyway, in the reason a woman with absolutely nothing left to give can still take the next breath and the one after that. Not because she found more strength somewhere. I checked. There was none left. Because she stopped trying to be her own foundation and let Him be it instead.
He did not leave me alone that night. He has not left you alone either.
I wrote most of this book from a place of having figured pieces of this out in advance, chapter by chapter, the way I always try to do it. This part I didn't have figured out. I still don't, entirely. Grief doesn't resolve into a tidy thesis just because you've had years with it. It just becomes something you carry differently than you used to.
What I know now that I didn't know standing in that snow: you can search for God's presence or you can search for His absence in the middle of the worst night of your life, and both are honestly available to you. I have done both, more than once. But that specific night, with a son I was already losing and a version of myself I barely recognized, I chose to believe He was there even though I couldn't feel it yet. Not because the evidence was overwhelming, it really wasn't. Because I needed it to be true. And because, I've come to believe since, it actually was.
Whatever storm brought you to this page, or whatever silence came after it, I'm not going to pretend to know exactly what you're carrying. I'll just tell you what I now know all the way down: you are not alone in it either. Not because it feels that way tonight. Because it's true, the same way it was true in the snow, before I could feel it, before I had any language for what was happening to me at all.
With so much love, Sara Jane.
This is the very last page of the book. Everything before it is on its way. Or leave your email below and I'll tell you the moment you can hold the whole thing, start to finish.