As she continued to pen her piece, Jeana Keough‘s daughter explained how “people say the wrong things and people say right things that feel wrong.”
“Some days the right thing is a friend pulling you out of bed and handing you a cup of coffee,” Kara later added. “Other days, the right thing is just staying in bed and feeling it all. Texts become so dismissible, phone calls intrusive and FaceTime may as well be a teacher calling on us in class when we didn’t do the reading. Those who show up and ask nothing are the best kinds of friends. The friends that can sit quietly with us without feeling the need to fill the silence with the ‘I’m sorry’s that don’t bring our babies back but instead make us feel like we need to respond with, ‘It’s OK,’ when it isn’t.”
She then reflected on how the “space where our babies should be somehow starts feeling less like a gaping hole and more like an invisible fullness as time goes on.”
“We want to hear their names, we want to think about them and smile, we want to see them in the world around us,” Kara continued for GMA. “Milestones hit us like bricks and time feels jumbled. How has it already been so long? And who would they be today?”
And while she noted that “every day, every minute, another mother joins us in this club”—a club “no one wants to be a part of”—she also shared that the bond between these members is “unlike any other.”
“Most people don’t get the pleasure of realizing how treasured they are until their dying day,” she continued. “And in a way, we do die a little bit the day we lose a child; the old us is gone. But the new us can be better. The new us can leave pettiness where it belongs. The new us can see beauty where others might pass it by. The new us can love again, despite knowing the risk. That kind of bravery didn’t exist in us before. But alas, here we are. Never moving on but moving with.”
To read her full letter, visit GoodMorningAmerica.com.