Infants Remembered In Silence (IRIS) - Poems

Candles in the Night

By Jim Lowery

A heart broken by the death of a child can never be healed.
As parents we try every way that can be thought of to cope with the loss,
but the void will always be there.
At first that emptiness seems to take your breath away
and most times we wish it would.

This becomes different with the passage of time.
It never goes away, but at some point we learn to
live with it, and in fact this horrible feeling
becomes a lifeline of sorts.
One of our biggest fears is to forget our children.
Forget how they looked or how their voices sounded.
The smiles and tears that blur together to make a child.
This emptiness in effect becomes a constant yearning
to remember our children.

Our hearts force us to find ways to fill that void to
maintain our role as parents.
Some are as simple as visiting the cemetery
and some are as complex as changing our entire lives,
dedicated to the memory of our child.
In between are the many rituals we create or borrow from
others to honor the memories and to keep our child’s name alive.

Lighting a candle and saying a child’s name
keeps their memory burning bright.
It means we are struggling to cope with this
unwanted role of bereaved parent in the only
positive manner we can.
We will most certainly shed tears every time
and we will still miss our child,
but we are doing something that allows
the world to hear our child’s name and for
that one moment the candle means so much
more than anyone else could ever understand.

For a fleeting second that is our universe
and every memory we have comes
flooding back to us as we see the flame through tears,
distorting it into something magical.
It’s the only gift we can give our children.
This is as close as we can get to our child now.
A tiny, flickering flame that can warm
the heart and it’s nice to think that perhaps they can see it also.
It’s a beacon, our light in the window, our shining star in the darkness.
It’s an opening of our hearts and a way to share our grief.

We gather to honor the memories of our children and to share this bond of
lighting a candle for the children all over the world.
We miss them so much.

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