The Firsts You Never Got to Have
This week, something is happening all across social media. Photos are flooding feeds — backpacks and new shoes, nervous smiles on front porches, children holding signs that say First Day of Kindergarten or Senior Year or 8th Grade, Here We Go.
The world is full of firsts this week.
And for some parents, this week is full of firsts they will never get to have.
Maybe it's the first day of kindergarten your daughter never got to have. The tiny backpack you never got to buy. The photo you never got to take on the front porch.
Maybe it's the first homecoming your son will never go to. The corsage, the awkward photos in the living room, the curfew lecture.
Maybe it's the first cross country race. The first school play. The first time on the bus. The first locker combination, the first lunch period with new friends, the first report card, the first teacher who really saw them.
The first back to school shopping trip — wandering the aisles together, arguing about which folders, letting them pick the ridiculous pencil case because none of it actually matters.
The first time they walked out the door and didn't need you to walk with them.
These are the moments filling everyone else's week.And they are reminders — sharp and uninvited — of everything that has been taken from you.
For some parents, this is the first September. The wound is still raw and this week is almost unbearable — every backpack you see, every school bus that passes, every cheerful back to school display in every store window.
For others, this is the fifth September. Or the tenth. And people around you have long since moved on, assumed you have too, stopped understanding why this week still undoes you.
This is what those of us who work in grief call compounded loss. It doesn't arrive once. It arrives again — every September, every holiday, every milestone season — layered on top of itself, year after year. The loss of your child does not happen once. It happens every time the world moves forward without them.
There is a framework in grief work, developed by researcher and counselor Lois Tonkin, that we return to again and again in this practice. It goes something like this:
Most people imagine that grief shrinks over time. That in the beginning it fills everything — every room, every thought, every breath — and that slowly, with time, it gets smaller. Takes up less space. Allows life to flow back in around the edges.
But that isn't how grief actually works. Not for most people. Not for the loss of a child.
The grief doesn't shrink. What grows is the jar.
In the early days, the grief fills the entirety of your world. There is no space around it. It is everything. And over time — not because the pain diminishes, not because the love lessens, not because you have healed or moved on — the jar gets bigger. Life slowly expands around the grief. New moments, new relationships, new reasons to be present begin to take up space alongside it. The grief remains exactly the same size. The missing doesn't shrink. The love doesn't shrink. But the jar gets bigger, and eventually life begins to fit around it rather than being consumed by it.
This is not moving on. This is not getting over it. This is simply what surviving looks like.
But for the parents whose jar still feels very small this September — the ones for whom the grief still fills everything, the ones for whom this week is simply unbearable — we want to say this:
We see you.
We see the first day of school photo you didn't get to take. The backpack sitting somewhere in a closet. The chair at the breakfast table that was supposed to be theirs.
We see the years of Septembers you have already survived and the ones still ahead of you.
We see the way you love a child the world has stopped talking about.
You do not have to be further along than you are. You do not have to have a bigger jar yet. The grief is allowed to fill the whole space for as long as it needs to.
And when you are ready — not to move on, but simply to not be alone in it — we are here.
Katie Llewellyn, MS, LPC specializes in supporting parents navigating grief, pregnancy and infant loss, and the complex emotional weight of parenting — including parenting a child who is no longer here. She holds space for all of it, without rushing any of it. Katie is currently accepting new clients at Balanced Collective in Wauwatosa, WI, with telehealth available across Wisconsin.
