After Eliza died I didn’t realize how many people would immediately want to know “what’s next?” Would we try to have another child? Would we get a surrogate or adopt a baby? WHAT would we do now? The questions were endless and I was surprised. I was surprised that anyone cared what would come next for us. It’s such a hard question to answer especially when you’re just trying to breathe. There is so much failure associated with losing your child. Around every corner is this terrible feeling that somehow I could have kept her from dying; but I didn’t. I failed at the one thing you’re supposed to be able to do; keep your child safe. Then on top of all that you feel like you’re failing everyone else too, failing to give everyone a happy ending. 

These last 5 years have been hard. Learning to live without Eliza, learning to be married in the middle of grieving, losing friends making new ones and building our little grassroots foundation into something more meaningful than I could have ever expected. And still there has been something missing. 

A few months after we lost Eliza we went to Nicaragua with our friends and volunteered at an orphanage. We loved the kids so much and we wished we could have brought them all home with us. since then it has been on our hearts to somehow make a difference in a child’s life. After watching our dear friends in Los Angeles begin their fostering journey I started to pay a little more attention. I started to read statistics about this countries foster care system. Their are 424K children in foster care in the US 24% of those children have special needs. The average age of a child in foster care is 8 1/2 and in 2019 – 71K children were waiting to be adopted. It didn’t take long for Aaron and me to be on the same page on becoming foster parents.

So a few months ago we started classes and this week we will be certified in the state of Virginia as foster parents. This means that at anytime we can receive a call that there is a child that needs a safe home. We know that they will come to us scared, angry and grieving having been taken from their home, their school and their friends. Our job will be to walk through it with them so they don’t feel so alone. To give them a loving place to land and remind them that no matter what the circumstances are they are loved and they are enough. 

I have no idea what the future will bring, none of us do, so we will pray our way through it. And along the way we will honor our sweet Eliza’s life and everything she taught us about being kind and being brave and loving others right where they are.

“The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.” – Mark Twain