To You, My Son: A Memoir of Infant Loss, Grief, and the Love That Remains

There are five people in my family now. But every night, I still reach for the sixth plate.He left before I ever saw the color of his eyes. Before I ever heard his first cry. Before I could teach him how to throw a ball, or hold his hand the day he became a man. His name was JR, and his absence is the heaviest thing I have ever carried. To You, My Son is not a book about the day a son died. It is about the ten thousand days that came after. It is about the haunting, beautiful, and unbearable reality of outliving your own child. It is about the quiet ways grief infiltrates a house-in the space at the dinner table no one sits in, in the grocery store aisle where a mother's laughter over a box of cereal brings a grown man to his knees. It is about the unanswerable questions that echo in the dark: Why him and not me? What would his voice sound like? How do I bury a son without burying myself alongside him? But above all, it is a story about love that refuses to die. Through the eyes of a heartbroken father, we meet the three sisters who grew up knowing the shape of a brother they never met. Alida, who speaks his name like a prayer. Hannah, who searches for his eyes in the crashing ocean waves. And wild, sweet Hayley, who cups her hands to the wind and shouts into the void, certain he is listening. And we meet a mother and father who stand together at the edge of the water, holding onto each other when the grief threatens to pull them under. Raw, unflinching, and devastatingly intimate, this is a father's letter to the boy who is waiting for him. It is a testament to the truth that grief does not leave-it softens, it shifts, but it stays, breathing like a scar. For anyone who has ever loved something they could not keep, To You, My Son will break your heart open. And in the broken pieces, it will remind you that love does not end. It only changes shape. It becomes everything.