It was a regular Tuesday evening—the kind where dinner was a little too late, homework was a little too hard, and bedtime felt like a finish line. My daughter Lily, just six years old, sat at the kitchen table, humming to herself while coloring with a concentration only kids seem to muster.
“Look, Mommy!” she said proudly, holding up her drawing with two hands.
I turned from the sink, wiping my hands on a towel. “What did you make, sweetie?”
“It’s us!” she beamed. “Our family at the park!”
I took the paper gently, expecting the usual swirl of stick figures and bright colors. And at first glance, that’s exactly what I saw. A sunny sky, green grass, blue birds, and a rainbow that didn’t quite touch the ends of the page. There was a tall figure labeled Mommy with long brown hair (much more glamorous than mine), a smaller girl with pigtails labeled Me, and next to her, our dog Max with floppy ears.
But then I noticed something.
Someone was missing.
There was no Daddy.
I blinked, my throat tightening as I smiled back at her. “This is beautiful, Lily. I love it.”
She smiled proudly and went back to her crayons, blissfully unaware of the ache blooming in my chest.
You see, Lily’s dad—my husband, Adam—passed away nearly two years ago. A car accident on his way home from work. One phone call, and the world shattered like glass.
Lily was four then. Too young to fully understand. Too young to remember the way his voice filled a room or the way he’d scoop her up in one arm like she was made of feathers. But old enough to miss him. Old enough to ask where he went, why he wasn’t coming back, and whether he could see her drawings “from the sky.”
Since then, we’ve kept his memory alive in little ways. We say goodnight to the stars, we keep his baseball cap hanging on the coat rack, and on her birthday, we light a candle for Daddy. She doesn’t cry as much anymore, but sometimes I hear her talking to him softly in her room. I never interrupt.
But this drawing—this was the first time she hadn’t included him.
It hit me in a way I hadn’t expected.
I stared at the page, heart heavy. Part of me felt sadness—like she was forgetting. Letting go. And yet another part, deeper and quieter, wondered… was this healing?
That night, after she went to bed, I sat alone on the couch, the drawing still in my hands. I traced the crayon lines, remembering all the times Adam used to sit just like this, looking at Lily’s pictures with the same warmth I now tried to imitate. Would he have cried too?
The next morning, as we packed her backpack for school, I asked gently, “Hey Lil, I loved your picture from last night. Can I ask you something?”
She nodded, adjusting her pink headband.
“I noticed Daddy wasn’t in it. How come?”
She looked up at me, thoughtful. Then she shrugged in that simple, six-year-old way. “Because it was the picnic we did last weekend. Just you and me and Max. Remember? The one with the red blanket and the juice that spilled?”
I blinked.
Of course.
She wasn’t forgetting him. She was just drawing what happened.
“Ohhh,” I said, smiling with a tear creeping into my eye. “That makes sense.”
“But,” she added quickly, “I made another one at school. It’s in my folder.”
She handed it to me.
Inside was another drawing—this one of the three of us. Me, Lily, and Adam. He had big ears and a huge smile and was holding her hand. A wobbly rainbow stretched across the top, and above it, in her careful block letters, she’d written:
“DADDY WATCHES US FROM HERE”
I nearly dropped the page.
In that moment, I realized something: our kids don’t forget. They carry love in places we can’t always see—in drawings, in whispers, in the spaces between the stars. Just because they stop including someone in one picture doesn’t mean they’re gone from the gallery of their hearts.
Final Thought:
Grief doesn’t come in a straight line. It loops and lingers, hides and returns. But so does love. Especially the love our children carry—quietly, beautifully, and in ways that catch us by surprise. That night, my daughter’s drawing made me cry. Not because someone was missing, but because it reminded me just how present love can be, even when it’s no longer visible on the page.
