A month after burying our eight-year-old son, I thought I understood grief—until my five-year-old daughter pointed to the pale-yellow house across the street and said her brother was smiling at her from the window. Her certainty shattered the fragile order I’d built.
Our home carried Lucas everywhere: half-finished toys, echoes of laughter, and endless silence. My husband coped by working; I coped by answering gentle bedtime questions. But my daughter’s insistence never wavered. Soon her drawings included a boy in the window.
Curious and anxious, I rang the doorbell. The truth was simple: the boy wasn’t a ghost, but a nephew staying with neighbors while his mother recovered in the hospital. He’d noticed our daughter waving and joined in play.
For the first time since Lucas’s death, laughter returned. Joy hadn’t erased grief—it had gently softened its edges.
