Here’s where my 13-year-old son should have stood this morning for his obligatory back-to-school picture. Today he should have started 8th grade. Instead he never will. Instead I have an aching heart, an empty porch, and one less "normal" back-to-school picture.

Today I should have taken three back-to-school pictures, not just two.

To every grieving parent with an aching heart, and an empty porch...
To every parent with ONE LESS child...
To every parent who should have sent off ONE MORE to school...
To every parent aching today, and trying to act as normal as possible...

We see you. We feel you. And our hearts ache with yours.

Milestones like back-to-school can feel like a swift punch in the gut. Milestones like these require the art of holding infinite space for BOTH/AND. We need to give ourselves permission and space to honor *ALL* that is true for us today. Even if it feels like we're the only ones feeling this way.

After I dropped off my other two boys at school today I realized I could take the third picture, even though it wasn't how I wanted it to be. So I came home and took this picture. Noah's back-to-school picture. An empty porch, an empty space where he should be. I needed to give myself permission to honor him and hold space for what should have/could have been his first day of school, too. I needed to let myself feel the ache, feel the empty space the size and shape of him.

After I took the picture, I sobbed. I sobbed because I don't want to be a grieving mom. A mom eternally missing one. A mom with a hole in her heart. A mom that feels so vastly unlike all the *other* school moms. I sobbed for all the what-ifs. All the could have/should have beens. I sobbed for everything I'm missing and everything I will miss. I sobbed for my precious firstborn son who never even got one first day of school. I sobbed for every first day of school Noah was robbed of experiencing— an entire childhood of 1st Days of School— gone. I sobbed for every milestone I've missed with him so far, and every milestone I will miss for the rest of my life. An entire lifetime of milestones.

This is grief. This is love. This is parenting after loss.

Read more:
A Bed For My Heart

This month on CNN, Anderson Cooper and Stephen Colbert engaged in a candid conversation about the long-term effects of childhood grief. Mr. Cooper was 10 years old when his father died from a heart attack. Mr. Colbert also was 10 when his father died in a plane crash that also took two of his brothers’ lives. Their early losses, both men agreed, shaped their priorities, their worldviews and the adults they ultimately became.

“I was personally shattered,” Mr. Colbert recalled. “And then you kind of re-form yourself in this quiet, grieving world that was created in the house.”

This story I know well. My mother died of breast cancer in 1981, when she was 42 and I was 17. At the time, I thought grieving was a five-stage process that could be rushed through and aced, like an easy pop quiz. When I still painfully missed my mother three and five and even 10 years later, my conclusion was that I must have gotten grieving wrong.

It took me quite a few years of therapy, interviews with hundreds of other motherless daughters, and several books written on the subject to finally let go of the cultural message that grief is something to be “gotten over” in the service of “moving on.” I’m hoping the Cooper-Colbert interview will help save others that kind of time.

What their conversation brings to light is how tenacious and recurrent childhood grief can be. It often flares up around anniversary events, such as birthdays and holidays; makes appearances at life milestones, like graduations and weddings; and sneaks up at age-correspondence events, such as reaching the age a parent was when he or she died. That’s a big one.

It also appears in regular, everyday moments. Mr. Colbert spoke about still being undone by the song “Band on the Run,” which was playing in heavy rotation the month his father and brothers died. Similarly, every time I hear “Love Will Keep Us Together” by Captain and Tennille I’m transported back into a wood-paneled basement circa 1978 where I’m teaching my mother how to dance the Continental, and missing her feels raw and fresh again. Then it passes.

Read more:
I Couldn't Say "My Mother" Without Crying

In 2010, photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher published a book of remarkable images that captured the honeybee in an entirely new light. By using powerful scanning electron microscopes, she magnified a bee’s microscopic structures by hundreds or even thousands of times in size, revealing startling, abstract forms that are far too small to see with the naked eye.

Now, as part of a new project called “Topography of Tears,” she’s using microscopes to give us an unexpected view of another familiar subject: dried human tears.

“I started the project about five years ago, during a period of copious tears, amid lots of change and loss—so I had a surplus of raw material,” Fisher says. After the bee project and one in which she’d looked at a fragment of her own hip bone removed during surgery, she’d come to the realization that “everything we see in our lives is just the tip of the iceberg, visually,” she explains. “So I had this moment where I suddenly thought, ‘I wonder what a tear looks like up close?’”

Read more: 
Tears of Grief, Joy, Laughter, and Irritation