Grief does not discriminate.

I would even go so far as to say grief reaches every. single. person at some point in their lives. Rich, poor, every racial and religious background, every level of education, every age.

But there's something especially painful about grief that goes outside the normal cycle of life. We expect to bury our grandparents someday. That isn't to say that it won't be painful and heartwrenching and sorrowful, but it is generally expected sooner or later. We even expect that, someday, down the road and still too soon, we'll outlive our own parents, maybe even siblings. It may not be a conscious thought but it's within the normal realms of expectations.

And then a child dies. Maybe not even our own child. Maybe not even a child we knew well. But a child dying is out of the ordinary, even against what feels like a natural order of events and it shakes us to our human core. It isn't supposed to happen.

And then the unthinkable, the unimaginable, the kind of event that years down the road, you have to remind yourself is reality. YOUR child dies. In 3 years of posts here, 5 years of thoughts and a lifetime of vocabulary, I have yet to find the words to describe what happens when a very part of your body, part of your heart and soul beats you to Heaven.

"I don't think of him every day; I think of him every hour of every day."
~ Gregory Peck, in an interview many years after the death of his son