Chapter one
Momma
I had just walked back into the room when the nurse turned toward me.
I could see it before she said anything. There was something different in her face. A sadness. A heaviness that seemed to enter the room before her words did.
“Her vitals are dropping. It’s happening.”
My entire body froze.
I looked at the monitors, then at Momma, then back at the monitors. I didn’t know where I was supposed to look when the person who gave me life was losing hers right in front of me.
Her breathing became slower. Her pulse became slower. And somehow, time seemed to slow with her.
For those few moments, the entire world narrowed down to that hospital room. The sounds of the machines. The numbers on the screen. Her body lying there. My body standing there.
Helpless. Watching. Waiting for something I knew was coming but still wasn’t prepared to witness.
Then the lines on the monitors flattened.
The nurse looked at me and, in a voice I will never forget, said, “She’s gone.”
And everything stopped.
There are moments in life when pain doesn't immediately feel like pain. Sometimes it feels like nothing.
No screaming. No crying. No thoughts.
Just emptiness.
I couldn't move. I couldn't even understand what I was supposed to feel. It was as though my soul had separated itself from my body because what had just happened was too much for both of them to experience at the same time.
I was there.
But I wasn't.
I had never understood what it meant to feel disembodied until that moment.
Momma was gone, but my mind hadn't caught up to what my eyes had just witnessed.
So I walked.
I left the room and made my way down the hospital hallway until I reached the large glass window overlooking the river. I had noticed that river when Momma and I first arrived at the hospital. I remember asking the nurse how she managed to look at something so beautiful every day.
She told me it was a blessing.
She loved it.
And now I was standing in front of that same river, except it didn't feel like the same river anymore.
Nothing felt the same anymore.
Outside that window, life had the audacity to continue being beautiful. The water still moved. The sky was still there. The world hadn't stopped.
But mine had.
I stared at the river, and suddenly everything started coming back.
Memories. Conversations. Her voice. Her laugh. Things she told me. Things I told her. Things I wish I had said.
Ordinary moments that I never knew would one day become sacred simply because there would never be another one.
And then the truth finally reached the place inside of me that had been refusing to receive it.
**She was gone.**
Not gone for a few days. Not somewhere I could drive to. Not someone I could call tomorrow.
There would be no next conversation. No next hug. No next “Momma.”
She wasn't coming back.
I leaned forward slightly and felt something inside of me break open.
It wasn't just sadness. It was deeper than sadness. It felt like a pain coming from somewhere beneath language—from a place inside of me that words had never needed to reach before.
Inside, I screamed.
Not from my throat. From somewhere deeper. From my soul. From my core. From the little boy who still existed somewhere inside the grown man standing at that window.
Everything in me was screaming for my momma.
But outside, there was almost nothing.
I caught my breath. My eyes became lost in the movement of the river.
Wave after wave.
Water continuing forward while I stood there shattered.
And after everything happening inside of me, all my body could release was one tear. It rolled slowly down my left cheek.
Then, barely loud enough for anyone else to hear, I whispered the only word that could carry everything I was feeling.
“Momma.”
That was it.
One tear. One word. An entire lifetime of love.
And a pain I didn't yet know how to carry.
There was nothing to fix in that moment. Nothing anyone could say. No lesson I needed to find. No strength I needed to demonstrate. No reason I needed to understand.
I just needed to stand there.
At that window. In front of that river.
Broken.
Because sometimes healing doesn't begin with understanding. Sometimes healing begins when you stop asking yourself to be strong long enough to admit:
**This hurts.**
And you let it hurt.
You don't run from it. You don't rush it. You don't turn it into a testimony before you've allowed yourself to grieve it. You don't force meaning onto something your heart is still trying to comprehend.
You simply acknowledge what is true.
I loved her.
She was my momma.
And losing her hurt me in a place I didn't know could hurt.
So I stood there and watched the river move.
Maybe there was something in that moment I wouldn't understand until later. The river didn't stop because my world did. It kept moving.
Not disrespectfully. Not impatiently.
It simply kept moving.
And eventually, somehow, I would have to learn to do the same.
Not by leaving Momma behind, but by learning how to carry her with me.
That day, though, I wasn't ready for moving forward. I wasn't ready for lessons. I wasn't ready for healing.
I was just a son standing at a window wishing he could have his mother back.
And that was enough.
Some pain shouldn't be rushed into purpose. Some pain deserves to be felt before it is explained.
Some moments don't need fixing.
They need witnessing. They need honesty. They need tears. They need silence. They need time.
Sometimes, you just have to...
Sit with it.
The Life Lesson: Grief Is Not the Absence of Faith
When I stood at that window looking at the river, there was nothing I could do to change what had happened. No amount of strength could bring my Momma back. There wasn't a prayer that could rewind the moment or an explanation that could make the loss immediately understandable.
There was only grief.
And sometimes the most faithful thing you can do with grief is sit with it in the presence of God.
Jesus demonstrated this Himself.
When Lazarus died, Jesus knew resurrection was coming. He knew what He was about to do. Yet when He encountered the grief surrounding Lazarus' death, Scripture gives us one of the shortest and most powerful verses in the Bible:
“Jesus wept.” — John 11:35
Jesus didn't rush past sorrow simply because He knew the ending.
He entered it.
That matters.
It means tears aren't evidence that your faith is weak. Heartbreak doesn't mean you've stopped trusting God. Missing someone doesn't mean you haven't accepted God's will.
Sometimes faith looks like worship.
Sometimes faith looks like prayer.
And sometimes faith looks like standing at a hospital window with one tear running down your face and only having enough strength to whisper, “Momma.”
Ecclesiastes 3:4 tells us there is “a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.”
Notice that Scripture doesn't tell us to skip mourning so we can get back to dancing.
There is a time for it.
Grief has a place.
And Psalm 34:18 gives another promise:
“The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart.”
God doesn't only meet us after we've put ourselves back together.
He comes near while we're broken.
That changes the meaning of the river in your story.
The river kept moving while you stood still. At first, that almost felt offensive. How could something remain so beautiful when something so devastating had just happened?
But perhaps there was a lesson hidden in that water.
Isaiah 43:2 says:
“When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee.”
God never promised that we wouldn't encounter waters we didn't want to cross.
He promised we wouldn't cross them alone.
You didn't have to understand your mother's death that day.
You didn't have to immediately find purpose in it.
You didn't have to turn your grief into a testimony before your heart had even processed the loss.
You simply had to survive that moment with God.
And eventually, like that river, you would move again.
Not because you stopped loving her.
Not because you stopped missing her.
Not because the loss stopped mattering.
But because grief teaches us something difficult about moving forward:
Moving forward does not mean leaving someone behind.
You carry the love.
You carry the lessons.
You carry the memories.
And you allow God to teach you how to carry the absence.
Psalm 30:5 says, “weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.” Morning doesn't erase what happened during the night. It simply reminds us that darkness doesn't get the final word.
Maybe that's one of the deepest lessons from that hospital window:
God does not always deliver us from the moment that breaks us. Sometimes He sits with us in it, carries us through it, and slowly teaches us how to live again.
And perhaps that is biblical Sit With It:
Grieve it.
Feel it.
Give it to God.
Don't rush it.
Don't worship the pain—but don't pretend it isn't there.
Because sometimes healing begins when you realize you don't have to choose between being brokenhearted and believing God.
You can be both.
And God will meet you there.