11/20/2025
This is the last known photo captured of Caleb, taken just 13 days before…
The breath between life and death leaves an agonizing ache that lingers.
Love is the only thing that truly matters, but it’s not a cure; it’s the gift.
Nothing is as agonizing to me as the absence of Caleb's presence.
The emptiness is so disorienting and heavy.
No matter how much time passes after the death of a child, the body remembers— even when the heart and mind can't accept or comprehend it.
Caleb’s death wasn’t just a loss; it was a harrowing fracture, a tearing open of something sacred. A piece of my own heart ripped from my chest. The moment everything split into before and after. Regardless of the years that lurk over my shoulders, the hollow ache which permeates my chest remains —not always loudly, but always there. Quietly screaming.
Some things simply cannot be made right, fixed, or wholly healed.
Not everything happens for a reason.
Death may have taken my firstborn son, but it will never separate Caleb from our family and friends’ love for him.
It has been 4 years, and it continues to take my breath away when I think of that night, and every.single.day we have somehow survived since then. The days following our ultimate loss when we had to make unimaginable decisions. The week we moved and lived and breathed only by the grace of God and the love of those surrounding us.
I was always aware of the notion: the more you have, the more you lose. And yet I feel like nothing prepares you for the death of a child.
It is the unthinkable.
It isn’t supposed to be this way...
Flesh of my own flesh. Firstborn son. Love of my life. Woven into the fabric of my being —losing a child doesn't just hurt, it undoes you. It shatters every version of who you were with them, alongside all the hopes and dreams for their future.
Unquestionably, I’m grateful for the 17 years we had Caleb here with us. I would never trade being Caleb and Jacks’ mom; being their mom is my life’s greatest privilege. But this has also been the hardest thing myself and my family have ever had to survive.
Despite this, we persist in believing that Earth’s sorrows are beyond Heaven’s healing power, that death has been vanquished by Love, and that each passing day brings us closer to reuniting with Caleb, the day when our souls will revel in pure joy.
While waiting.
My beloved, Caleb, my eternal SONshine, the moment you took your last breath, it felt like the air left the world. I've been gasping ever since —trying to live in a world that no longer feels whole without you.
Sometimes I wonder how we have managed to walk through the world with invisible weights on our shoulders and gaping holes in our hearts, a void only you could fill, yet still find ways to laugh, to love, to hope.
I cry for the life you lived
and the one you didn’t.
In many ways, on many different days, I have cried for myself because I’ve felt hopelessly incapable of living without you.
Today, I cry for you, for all that you have missed in life. It hurts in ways that feel beyond mere words, to contemplate all that you will never experience. Your genetic lineage abruptly extinguished.
I so desperately wish you would have stayed. Not to bring you back into your suffering, but because you were so much more.
Caleb,
You are missed.
So, so much.
You are not a burden.
You are loved and worthy.
You are not to blame for your illness.
I am thankful for the 17 years we had with you, but it goes without saying that I wanted a lifetime more…
My mind still talks to you.
My heart still looks for you.
I feel your absence on the pulse of my heartbreak.
My soul pines to know you are at peace and free.
I would give up my freedom
To release your chains
But I would never trade loving you.
Caleb Tyler Anderson
Sunrise: 6-8-2004
Sunset: 11-20-2021
Remembered always.
