My grief has reached adulthood. 18 years old. I don’t know how we got here, but just like child-rearing, the days have been long and the years have been short. 18 years without my boy!

Watching videos of my Jud Bud today, I was struck by how familiar those moments feel while simultaneously experiencing them as incredibly foreign. I can recall my lived emotions in each documented moment, encountering them all over again, but now with the perspective of loss. Yet, my life with Jud also feels concurrently foreign—strange, unknown, distant—so alien to my life now. It’s remote. It’s a life never fully explored. It stunted. It’s not accessible. It’s obscure.

I feel the intimacy of the familiarity of my life with Jud along with the vastness of its foreignness all at once. It wrecks me.

Instead of raising my boy into adulthood, I’ve raised my grief into adulthood.

Yet as I watched his videos, I also kept imagining all of this brokenness fully redeemed, where hindsight will deem it light and momentary, where all that’s been lost is fully restored. I imagine myself bowed before the King of kings as Jud comes running to me. And whether he’s 18 years old, 36 years old, or still just about to turn 3, oh what joy it will be!