Today, 1 December 2025, was the due date for my Ambrose. On July 1, I fully expected to reach this day and be holding my baby boy. Instead, on July 31, the Lord called Ambrose to himself, and Ambrose went. I held Ambrose on that July day, but he wasn’t there, not truly.
Not a day has gone by since that miserable day that I haven’t wept. Not a night has passed that I haven’t woken suddenly with thoughts of him. Many nights I identified with the psalmist who called his tears his bed. Many nights I identified with Augustine who said that he let the tears flow and his heart rested upon them. And though I know many have gone through similar loss, and worse, I find myself asking with the poet of Lamentations, “Is there any sorrow like my sorrow?”
I’ve found some solace in the words of others who have experienced a similar grief; perhaps that’s why I feel the need to write myself? Not only in their words of hope, but in their articulating well what I feel. And how do I feel? A lot of things, but I feel acutely that I will never recover; I’ll never be the same. The old me is gone, died the day my beautiful son did. That’s ok, though, isn’t it?
One told me that this was a “sore providence” and “You will never be the same again, but God will be the same to you, again and again.” Isn’t that what matters?
Nicolas Wolterstorff wrote a book that has been my favorite, “Lament for a Son.” He said at the beginning, “Grief is existential testimony to the worth of the one loved. That worth abides.
So I own my grief. I do not try to put it behind me, to get over it, to forget it. I do not try to dis-own it. If someone asks, ‘Who are you, tell me about yourself,’ I say – not immediately, but shortly – ‘I am one who lost a son.’ That loss determines my identity; not all of my identity, but much of it. It belongs within my story. I struggle indeed to go beyond merely owning my grief toward owning it redemptively. But I will not and cannot disown it.”[1]
Recently I stumbled upon a work by Yiyun Li who lost two of her sons to suicide (six years apart from one another) and wrote a little book called “Things in Nature Merely Grow.” She said, “Some consolations are strictly and purely for the consolers themselves. Please hold on to your silver linings, as I must decline.” And “Sometimes people ask me where I am in the grieving process and I wonder whether they understand anything at all about losing someone.”
Li said in an interview, “I don’t ever want to be free from the pain of missing my children…This pain is in my life for ever and ever, and I don’t want to do anything to mitigate the pain, because to mitigate it means that’s something bad, it’s an illness or affliction.”[2]
“To live with pain is possible, you do things in everyday life, you garden, you listen to music, but you’re thinking about,’ she said, trailing off, leaving the unspeakable unsaid.”[3]
Wolterstorff lost his son to a climbing accident; Li, two sons to suicide, but there is similarity and solidarity in their grief, as in mine. To know that it is not abnormal to refuse to ever move on.
And I don’t want to.
Many things I once enjoyed have lost their color. Again, I resemble the words of Wolterstorff, “I remember delighting in them–trees, art, house, music, pink morning sky, work well done, flowers, books. I still delight in them. I’m still grateful. But the zest is gone. The passion is cooled, the striving quieted, the longing stilled. My attachment is loosened. No longer do I set my heart on them. I can do without them. They don’t matter. Instead of rowing, I float. The joy that comes my way I savor. But the seeking, the clutching, the aiming, is gone. I don’t suppose anyone on the outside notices. I go through my paces. What the world gives, I still accept. But what it promises, I no longer reach for. I’ve become an alien in the world, shyly touching it as if it’s not mine. I don’t belong any more. When someone loved leaves home, home becomes mere house.”
I’m not sure what Christian expectations are for grief, but if what Carl Trueman has said is true, that Christians find cries of sorrow like we find in the lament Psalms a “little short of embarrassing” due to the fact that we have “drunk so deeply at the well of modern Western materialism that it simply does not know what to do with such cries,” then we likely do not know what to do with grief, especially how to handle the grief of others.[4] Is the Christian response to “return” to a pre-loss mood? Does the fact of the resurrection mean that the grieving process has a temporal expiration date at which point we “move on” and act like the people “we were,” in some sense? I don’t think so, and that’s not what I’m going to do.
I’ll never be the same. I don’t want to be the same. I refuse to move on, and I will forever be marked by the death of my Ambrose. I see his face when I close my eyes, and I never want to forget him.
Nor will I forget what it’s like to fill out a death certificate for your child. Or to pick up an urn that contains what remains on earth of a son you’ll never hear laugh, or play catch with, or kiss again.
It is a sore providence indeed that I will, for however long the Lord allows me to continue living on this celestial ball of horrors, be a father who lost a son and choose now to be identified as such. My children will hence have a sibling they cannot see, or hold, or play with. But they too, own that he is their brother still.
Absence and silence.
When we gather now there’s always someone missing, his absence as present as our presence, his silence as loud as our speech. Still [six] children, but one always gone.
When we’re all together, we’re not all together.
July 31 was the worst day of my life, December 1 comes in a close second. Instead of holding a healthy baby boy, I’m typing. Instead of preparing a crib, I’ll be going to, and from, my office like any old Monday. But it’s not any old Monday. It’s the day Ambrose was to be born, but God had another plan, didn’t He? Why? I don’t suppose I’ll know this side of eternity, will I? I’ll just have to trust Him. “We can trust his hand even in those moments when we cannot see his face.”[5]
I do know that in a truly Christian worldview, one can hold in tension hope and sorrow at the same time. Christian joy and sorrow over sorrowful things. Jesus was a “man of sorrows,” after all. Wasn’t He the ideal man?
Ambrose is gone, I can’t get him back, I’ll see him at the resurrection, but to sorrow over sorrowful things is to be like Christ. Isn’t that what love is, too? I know the resurrection is coming, but in the meantime, I still live in a broken age. I’ll never not be a father who lost his son. It marks me. I’m not embarrassed by that. I say with Nicolas, “That loss determines my identity; not all of my identity, but much of it. It belongs within my story.”
I’d give a million worlds and die a million deaths to reverse time if it meant Ambrose could live. Alas, I cannot. There is, though, a resurrection where Ambrose will be made whole, and I will see him, I just wish Jesus would get on with it already.
“Though I shall indeed recall that death is being overcome, my grief is that death still stalks this world and one day knifed down my [son].
Nothing fills the void of his absence. He’s not replaceable. We can’t go out and get another just like him.
There’s a hole in the world now. In the place where he was, there’s now just nothing….Only a gap remains. Only a void is left…The world is emptier. My son is gone. Only a hole remains, a void, a gap, never to be filled.”[6]
[1] Nicolas Wolterstorff, Lament for A Son (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1987), 5-6.
[2] Alexandra Alter, “I Don’t Ever Want to Be Free From the Pain of Missing My Children,’” New York Times, May 16, 2025.
[3] Ibid.
[4] https://www.9marks.org/article/what-can-miserable-christians-sing/
[5] https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/trust-hand/
[6] Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son.
The Bearded Ecclesiologian 