God,

I don’t have the words for this kind of loss, and it hurts. It hurts in a way I have never experienced before, in a way that I feel deep in my soul.

I am coming to terms with the fact that I didn’t just lose a pregnancy — I lost a future. I lost a life that I had already started imagining, and planning for. I had already started envisioning the milestones, the birthdays, and the laughter within it. I had already started dreaming about who they would become, what their voice might have sounded like, what it would have felt like to hold them in my arms. Now, all of that is simply gone, my world went dark; and yet, everything around me moves forward, like nothing happened, like nothing was displaced at all.

But something was lost, God. Someone was lost.

And I don’t know what to do with this grief inside of me. I feel like it has no place to go. It has become this quiet ache that sits in my chest, it has become a sadness that catches me off guard in the middle of the day. I am mourning a name I never got to say, I am mourning a love I never got to fully give or receive.

God, sometimes I wonder if they knew I was their mother. Did they feel my love, even for the short time they were here? Did they hear my heartbeat and know they were safe? Did they sense how wanted and hoped for they were? I pray that somehow, in ways I may never understand, they did. I pray that even in the smallest moments of their existence, they knew that they belonged, that they were chosen.

I feel so alone in this, God. No one understands why I get quiet when I see an ultrasound picture, or why my heart clenches when I hear a baby’s laughter, or why I still count the weeks in my head, knowing exactly how far along I would have been if this hadn’t happened. It feels like a silent battle. It feels like a journey only I am walking. 

So I bring all of this pain to you, God, because I don’t know where else to place it. Hold this grief with me. Let me rest in the truth that you knew this life, even if no one else did. Let me find hope in the fact that you saw them, that they mattered, and that I am not weak for mourning something so unseen.

And God, help me as I carry this grief forward. I don’t know how to heal from a goodbye I never got to say. I don’t know how to move on when a part of me wants to stay frozen in what could have been. Help me to trust that you are still good, even when this hurts more than I can handle; help me to trust that you hold both me and the life I lost in hands that are gentler and stronger than my own.

Help me to be patient with myself, God. Help me to not rush my grief just because the world expects me to heal within a certain timeline. Help me to find ways to honour this little life, even if it was brief. And if I ever doubt whether this child mattered, whether they were real — remind me that you don’t measure life the way we do, that even the smallest existence is known and loved by you.

Most of all, God, remind me that I am not alone in this. Even in the silence, even when no one else knows what I carry — you do. And you are here.

Amen.