The Grandchild You Are Not Allowed to See

The room is at the back of the house and it gets the afternoon light, and she keeps the bed made.

Not made up fresh. Made. There is a blanket folded at the foot of it that she bought in the third week, before any of it happened, when she was still walking round shops picking things up and putting them down and grinning at nobody. The blanket has never been on a child. There is a cot mattress standing on its side against the wardrobe, still in the plastic it came in, and a plastic that is old enough now to have gone slightly yellow along the fold.

She is sitting on the edge of the bed with a card in her hand. It is the fourth one.

She writes one every year in the second week of June. She writes it properly, sitting at the kitchen table with the good pen, and she thinks about it for two days first, and she never mentions any of the rest of it, not one word, because the card is not for that. The card just says the things you say. She hopes he is well. She hopes he likes school. She tells him the cat is enormous now.

Then she puts it in the drawer of the bedside table in this room, with the other three.

She does not send them. She was asked not to make contact and she has honored that, every single day, for four years, which is a thing nobody has ever thanked her for and nobody knows she does.

And this is the sentence she cannot get past, the one that arrives at about four in the morning: she does not know whether he knows she exists.

Now let me stop describing her, because you are already ahead of me.

Yours might be two grandchildren, or five, or one. Yours might be a fortnight of silence that turned into a year without anybody deciding it. Yours might be a court thing, or a partner, or an old argument that got out of its cage, or a version of events that got told about you that you have never been allowed to answer.

You have gone over it. Do not pretend you have not. You have gone over the hospital day, and the thing you said in the kitchen, and the Christmas, and the message you sent at eleven at night that you would give a year of your life to unsend.

And meanwhile there is a birthday in the second week of June. There is a school photograph you have seen once, on somebody else's phone, held at arm's length. There is the question, at a table, from someone lovely, who says: and do you have grandchildren?

And you have about half a second to decide what kind of person you are going to be in that moment.

Nobody has to give you permission to remember a child

I want to name this properly before we go anywhere near comfort, because this grief has no ceremony attached to it and that is half of what makes it unbearable.

Nobody brings a casserole. There is no service, no card, no fortnight of people ringing. There is not even a word for it that you can say out loud without watching somebody's face change. Your loss is alive, and it is walking around somewhere with your jaw and your mother's hands, and every year it gets taller without you.

And you carry it beside the ordinary hours. That is the part that nearly finishes people. You do the shopping. You keep it pleasant with the man at the desk. And somewhere behind your face there is a room at the back of the house with a folded blanket in it.

I am not going to tell you whose fault this is. I do not know, and neither does anybody who has offered you their opinion on it, and it is not the work of this hour anyway.

What I will do is show you what God said to somebody who was absolutely certain they had been forgotten.

Zion had said it out loud. She said, the LORD has forsaken me, my Lord has forgotten me. And God did not scold her for saying it. He answered it, and He reached for the strongest picture of not forgetting that exists in the world.

Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she should have no tender compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you.Isaiah 49:15

Sit in that with me, because there are two people in this room and He is speaking to both of them. That sentence was written down once. His Spirit has never stopped saying it, and this afternoon He is saying it in a back bedroom that gets the light.

He is speaking to you. You are the one who feels forgotten. Forgotten by the family that redrew its lines without you, forgotten at the birthdays, forgotten in the version of the story that gets told. And God takes the deepest natural loyalty there is, a nursing mother and the child at her body, and He says: even that can fail. Even that. And then He says I will not.

And He is speaking about that child.

Because here is what a closed door cannot do. It cannot make a child unremembered by God. Your grandchild's name is not held in heaven on the strength of anybody telling Him. He does not need an address, a photograph, an invitation, or anyone's consent to know exactly where that boy is this afternoon and exactly what kind of week he has had. Isaiah 49:15 makes no exception for a child behind a closed door. His Spirit is in that house tonight whether or not you are welcome in it.

You are not the only one who has that name. You never were.

And there is one thing nobody can close a door on, and I want you to hear this from someone whose whole life is the prayer room. Intercession goes where you are not permitted. It goes through the letterbox you may not use. You cannot cross a doorstep you have been asked not to cross, and you should not, and your honoring of that is not weakness, it is a kind of love that costs more than anyone will ever know. But you can stand before God for a child every morning of your life, and no one on this earth has the authority to stop you. That is not my encouragement; it is what is promised to whoever comes. A letterbox you are not allowed to use is no obstacle to the Spirit, who takes a name through it every morning one is said.

Now hear the hard half, because I will not buy your hope cheaply.

I am not going to tell you that they are coming back. I do not know that. Nobody knows that, and the people who say it with confidence are being careless with the most tender thing you own. I keep a book of prayers and answers, and there is a line in it that has been blank for years, and I have never once let anyone fill it in to make the page look better.

I stand for them is a true sentence. I have decided for them is not. That is not a small distinction and it is not a defeat. It is the only ground you can stand on that will hold your weight for twenty years, and it happens to be the ground God Himself stands on with every one of us.