Why My Child?

“Nobody should experience the loss of a child.”

“Why did this happen?”

“Why did God take my child away?”

These questions rise from a place of unbearable longing. We ask them into empty rooms, through tears, in the quiet hours when the world is sleeping and we are remembering. Sometimes they are prayers. Sometimes they are cries of anger. Sometimes there are no words at all. We expected to watch our children grow. We imagined birthdays, ordinary conversations, futures unfolding. We would have given anything for more time.

Nothing will ever take away the ache of wanting to hold our children again. But there is an understanding I hold close, one that helps me live with these questions: our earthly lives are part of a much greater existence, and our children’s lives continue beyond what we can see. This is a spiritual understanding, held through faith and personal meaning. I offer it gently, knowing that every grieving parent must have room to find their own beliefs.

At the heart there is the understanding that we are more than our physical bodies. Each of us has an enduring spiritual essence — a soul. Our bodies allow us to experience this world through touch, sight, sound, and all the ordinary things that make a human life. Yet, within this belief, our existence begins before birth and continues after the body dies. Earth is a temporary home where our souls encounter experiences that are different from those of the spiritual world. Here, we discover what it means to love through a human heart, to care for someone vulnerable, to make choices without knowing their outcomes, and to live within the limits of time. Through these experiences, our souls deepen their understanding of love, compassion, courage, and connection.

Within this understanding, souls may choose aspects of a lifetime before entering it, including the relationships through which they will experience and grow. These connections are bonds between souls who choose to share part of their earthly journeys. I find comfort in imagining that, before we met here, our children already knew us. That there was recognition before we first saw their faces. That we chose one another because of a love whose history reaches further back than we can remember.

From our earthly perspective, we meet as parent and child. From a spiritual perspective, we may be souls who have known and loved one another beyond this single lifetime.

The idea of choosing a lifetime needs great tenderness. We do not know whether every event is planned, or how spiritual choice might relate to the circumstances of a death. It must never become another reason for a parent to feel responsible. None of us, holding our child in our arms, was wishing for this separation. None of us deserves this pain. For me, the comfort lies in believing that we chose our connection, and that this connection survives everything we cannot understand.

My own belief is that God does not take our children as punishment, or demand their lives to teach us a lesson. I believe the divine holds them in love, just as it holds us through the devastation of missing them. There is room within that love for our anger, our doubt, and every unanswered question.

I also believe that some children are old souls: the age of a body tells us very little about the experience of the soul within it. A child may carry a soul that has already travelled through many lifetimes, gathering understanding through different relationships and experiences. A young life can hold a spiritual history far beyond the years we shared together. A soul may come into this lifetime for a particular experience, and its earthly stay may be brief because that was all it needed in this incarnation. They may have come to experience belonging to a particular family, to give and receive a certain love, or to share a connection whose full meaning we cannot yet understand. We cannot know the purpose of an individual child’s life with certainty. But this belief offers the possibility that a brief life can be complete from the soul’s perspective, even when it feels heartbreakingly unfinished to everyone who loves them.

Our human hearts measure time in birthdays, milestones, and the years we expected to have together. We needed more mornings, more embraces, more ordinary days. We wanted to watch our children become who they might have been. We can believe their souls experienced what they came for and still mourn everything we hoped to share. Spiritual comfort does not require us to feel that the time was enough. The length of a life cannot tell us the depth of its meaning. Our children belong to our families forever. Their place does not become smaller because their years were few.

And I believe they remain close. When I speak of the veil, I mean the boundary between our physical awareness and the spiritual existence tat continues beyond death. It is a way of describing why someone can feel so deeply present in our love while remaining beyond our sight and touch. Within this belief, our children have moved beyond the limits of the body. We cannot see them as we once did, but I believe they can see us and remain aware of our lives. They know our love, even when grief leaves us struggling to express it. This is why I believe we are gently invited to lift our eyes and our hearts—to look beyond the here and now, beyond material things, and beyond what our physical senses can tell us. So much of earthly life asks us to focus on what we can acquire, measure, or hold. Grief can open a painful but profound question: what remains when we can no longer hold the person we love? For me, the answer is the love, and the relationship that continues between us.

Looking beyond the veil means allowing space for that greater possibility. It means remembering that physical absence may not be the whole truth of our separation. We can attend to our lives here while opening our hearts to a connection that reaches beyond them. Some parents find comfort in a dream, a familiar song, or an unexpected feeling of closeness. They may understand these moments as signs of their child’s presence. Others feel nothing they can recognise, or remain unsure what such experiences mean. Neither experience measures the strength of the bond. You do not have to receive a sign, maintain perfect faith, or achieve a certain state of peace to remain connected to your child.

You are still their parent. You can speak their name, tell their stories, and love them in the present tense.

Believing they are near does not mean we stop grieving. There will still be days when faith feels distant and the empty chair is all we can see. We are allowed those days. We do not have to turn our sorrow into wisdom or discover a purpose for it before we are ready. Within my spiritual understanding, growth can emerge through the way we continue living: accepting care, offering compassion, finding the courage to face another day. That growth is something that may unfold as we carry our love through an experience we would never have wished for.

I believe that when our own lives reach their natural end, we will be reunited with our children. I imagine a recognition deeper than words, where the distance we have felt is finally understood within the greater story of our lives together. Until then, our lives here still deserve care. There are people to love, experiences still to encounter, and moments of warmth that we are allowed to welcome. Joy can gradually return alongside the longing. We can carry our children into those years.

I cannot answer every “why”. But this is the hope I hold: our souls belong to something larger than this brief earthly life. Our children remain part of that existence, and part of us.

Beyond the veil, I believe our connection continues. And when our time here is complete, we will know one another again.