Easter used to feel like a sunrise—brilliant, bursting with life. A celebration of victory over death. The culmination of every promise we cling to. But this year, it felt different. The music still played, the lilies still bloomed, and the churches filled with color and hope—but my heart ached beneath it all.
And now, as the sun has set and the day winds down, I find myself sitting in the quiet, reflecting on all of it. The beauty. The sorrow. The heaviness I carried with me through every moment.
Grief doesn’t respect sacred days. It doesn’t take Sundays off. If anything, these are the days it presses in harder—because you should be here.
This world is fallen. I’ve long understood that—but now, I see it through a different lens. I see it in the spaces where someone should be but isn’t. In the quiet corners of the day that were once filled with laughter and life, now hushed and hollow.
And this loss—this most recent, most excruciating loss—has done more than just carve a new wound. It has torn at the fragile stitching of every sorrow I’ve tried to hold together. Grief doesn’t arrive neatly; it crashes in like a tide, pulling with it the debris of all the losses that came before. It’s cumulative. Crushing. And sometimes, it feels like I can’t breathe beneath the weight of it all.
Still—today, on Easter—we tried to choose life in the middle of it.
The kids and I drove to the cemetery with praise and worship music playing in the car. We sang. We cried. We told stories about you. And then we laid out a simple Easter picnic beside your grave. We sat in the grass, under the wide-open sky, and remembered. It was beautiful. And heartbreaking. Sacred. And so incredibly wrong that we have to do this without you.
But I keep circling back to the empty tomb.
Easter doesn’t make the pain go away. It doesn’t tie it up in a bow or offer some easy answer. But it tells me this isn’t the end of the story. That even when death feels like it has won—it hasn’t. Jesus still walked out of the grave. Alive. Wounded, yes, but whole. And because of that, I believe in restoration. I believe in reunion. I believe that death is real, but it is not final.
Still, here I am. Left to walk out this life without my child. Left to make sense of joy and suffering existing in the same breath. Left to carry on with this ache in my chest that never fully goes away.
There is no shortcut through this. No bypass around the pain. Just the invitation to feel it, to sit in it, to trust that even here—especially here—God is not absent. That resurrection doesn’t erase grief. It just promises that grief won’t last for eternity.
So tonight, as this Easter Sunday comes to a close, I let the sorrow and the hope exist side by side. I weep, and I worship. I mourn, and I believe. I grieve, and I wait.
Because the tomb is still empty.
And one day—one day that still feels so far away—every tear will be wiped away, and I will hold you again.
But until then, I carry the ache in my soul and cling to the promise of that empty grave, walking forward with trembling faith and a heart that remembers.
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