There’s a phrase people who have lost a child use quietly, almost instinctively. The club nobody wants to be in. The one that doesn’t want new members. The one you don’t apply for and can’t leave.
I didn’t learn the language from a book. I learned it the way most parents do. By crossing a line you can’t uncross.
Recently, I found myself in a conversation with someone who belongs to that same club. It happened unexpectedly, through my daughter Kayla. A man she had known briefly, kindly, through music and touring. Someone outside my world in every obvious way, yet suddenly inside it in the only way that mattered.
We didn’t trade platitudes. There was no explaining. No awkward searching for the right words. Just recognition.
Oh. You’re here too.
What people mean when they say “I understand”
After a child dies, people are generous with their sympathy. They tell you they understand. They tell you they can’t imagine. They tell you your child is at peace.
I don’t doubt their kindness. But I’ve learned that understanding has limits.
There is a difference between empathy and recognition. Empathy tries to bridge the distance. Recognition removes it entirely.
When a parent who has lost a child says, “No, they don’t understand,” and you find yourself nodding before the sentence ends, that’s recognition. It’s not superiority. It’s not bitterness. It’s simply accuracy.
Losing a child breaks time. It fractures before and after into incompatible realities. You carry both at once. Forever.
People outside the club can stand near that truth, but they can’t stand inside it.
The bond no one wants
When people in the club talk about being “forever bonded,” it doesn’t mean constant contact or emotional dependence. It doesn’t mean a new relationship replacing old ones.
It means this:
Once you know this loss, you recognize it in others. Instantly. Without effort.
You don’t need their whole story. The shape of the grief tells you enough.
The bond exists whether you speak again or not. It’s not maintained. It doesn’t deepen or fade. It simply is.
And because it’s irreversible, it carries an unspoken rule: we don’t want new members. We would take the pain ourselves a hundred times over if it meant sparing someone else.
Kindness without hierarchy
What struck me most about this encounter wasn’t proximity to music or people I admire. It was the absence of hierarchy.
My daughter wasn’t part of that world. Neither am I. For her, he was simply a kind man. And yet she was met with the same kindness as anyone else.
That kind of kindness doesn’t perform. It doesn’t ask for anything. It doesn’t keep score.
In grief, that matters.
It reminds you that your child existed fully in the world. That they were seen. That threads of their life still touch yours in unexpected ways.
Why moments like this feel surreal
Grief thins reality. It makes coincidence feel amplified. It collapses distance between strangers.
When something gentle and human breaks through, it can feel unreal. As if it shouldn’t be happening in a world that allowed this much loss.
But maybe that’s the point.
The world didn’t stop. And somehow, decency still exists inside it.
What the club gives back
The club nobody wants to be in takes almost everything.
But occasionally, it gives something back. Not relief. Not answers. Not closure.
Recognition.
The quiet knowledge that you are not imagining the depth of what you carry. That someone else speaks the same language, even if you never say another word.
That bond isn’t comforting in the way people expect comfort to be.
But it is real.
And sometimes, on an ordinary day when you weren’t looking for meaning, that reality steadies you just enough to keep going.
If you’re here too, I wish you weren’t. And I see you.
