I started writing to him the first night we came home from the hospital without him, when there was nowhere else to put everything I was feeling. I wanted to talk to Isaiah, and I oddly thought that putting the letters out online was my best chance at him getting to see them. I wasn't sure I would ever go back and read them. I thought it would hurt too much, that going back to that time would break something in me all over again. When I finally did, I was surprised. The person who wrote those first letters is still me. Grief doesn't turn you into someone unrecognizable, it turns out. It just changes what you carry and how you carry it.

I have wondered more than once if I am doing this right. If I should still be writing. If I should be further along by now. There is no instruction manual for losing a child. There is no map for what comes after one of the worst possible things becomes your reality.

What I have learned is that whatever brings me closer to him, whatever brings me joy, whatever gets me through each day, I am allowed to do it. I don't need to explain celebrating him. I don't need to feel strange about talking about him. I don't need to justify any of it to anyone.

So, I write.

My hope is that one day his brothers and sister can come back and read these letters. That they can find him here, find their memories here, and maybe find a little bit of peace here, too. These letters are for Isaiah. And they are for them.

And honestly, they are for anyone else who has ever loved someone so much that silence simply wasn't an option.