Let Him Sleep

By: Laura H.

Date: November 5, 2025

Eight weeks since my third trimester loss. Eight weeks since my fourth c-section. Eight weeks

since I held my precious youngest daughter, Rose.

Eight weeks postpartum, with empty arms, I found myself at the Beloved Daughter’s Catholic

Women’s Retreat, “Come and Stay”. Adoration was taking place in the sanctuary, music was

rising and sins were being confessed. It was holy ground...yet I was struggling to sense God’s

nearness. Even as the priest processed directly toward me, carrying the luminous monstrance though the humeral veil, the darkness in my heart still begged the question: Where are You?

Emptiness. Grief. A deep sense of abandonment. They hovered around me like shadows. I had come on this retreat hoping...no, aching for answers. A word. A sign. A moment of healing. Some sense of clarity or hope. But on day two of the retreat, like the eight weeks that had preceded it, God had remained very, very, very quiet.

The priest continued to move through the aisles, bringing Jesus to the many women on retreat. As I looked around the sanctuary, my eyes kept drifting back to a grandmother sitting quietly with a baby in her arms. He looked to be around six months old, fast asleep against her chest.This kind of image, since losing Rose, was normally a source of pain for me, but in this moment, I felt compelled to keep looking. Thankfully, the grandmother was slightly angled away from me, so she wasn’t aware or made uncomfortable by my gaze.

I was drawn to the peace radiating from them. The complete surrender in the baby’s body: cheeks perfectly squished and lips gently parted, eyelids lightly shut, arms loosely draped at his side, fingers softly hanging open. Zero tension. Zero worries. He was completely and utterly at rest.

“What a gift for that woman”, I thought. Being a mother myself, I knew that feeling—the feeling of holding a peaceful sleeping child. All of life’s to-do list seems to stand still in that sacred place where you are called to be your child’s place of rest. Those peaceful sleeping moments, uncluttered by all of the necessary but continual needs a baby brings, are deeply deeply precious. It's why the age-old rule, “never wake a sleeping baby”, has been passed down generations through our very bones.

In the days and weeks after losing Rose, I physically ached to hold her. A woman’s body is

literally hardwired to have her baby close to her in the postpartum period, and when I wasn’t able to have that my body retaliated with heart palpitations, chest pain, headaches, longing arms, and continual jaw tension and pain. I had to restrain myself, more than once, from wanting to hold even a stranger’s baby. That’s how desperate I felt to fill the search for Rose that was pulsing through my body.

With Jesus in the Eucharist before me, music filling the church, and mercy flowing through

confession, something in me softened as I watched the woman with her grandson. (And as I write this, I realize the very fact she was a grandmother was likely a grace in and of itself. Perhaps, if it had been a mother with her sleeping child, I likely would have looked away to avoid feeling my own loss. But since it was a grandmother, I didn’t feel as raw witnessing this moment unfold.)

In that moment, my longing to hold a baby, my longing to hold Rose, shifted into something else —contemplation.

My eyes gently narrowed upon on the sleeping child and everything around me faded into the background. The tension in my chest slightly gave way as I felt a new possibility arise within me: perhaps, all this time, I have been longing for something I already held...

The infant Jesus was here, with me, asleep upon my chest.

At peace.

Relaxed.

At home, sleeping against a heart that now beats like His own mother’s—a heart that has been pierced by child loss.

As the thought washed over me I closed my eyes and held my chest, embracing the tiny King

who had been so very very very quiet, and thought, “who am I to wake a sleeping child?”

Yet, up until this point, I had continually been shaking the sweet Child awake, crying out, “Prove You are here! Give me a sign! Where are You? Be louder!” I realized I had been disrupting Peace Himself in an attempt to find Him.

If Christ truly is close to the brokenhearted, then is it so outlandish to believe He sleeps upon my chest? Maybe the ache I’ve felt is not the absence of life, but the stretching open to welcome the Source of all Life. Maybe the pain, the palpitations, the emptiness were all just little flowers, little signs, that the One who carries Rose, the One who carries the Cross, has come close.

So close that He now rests upon my heart, weary from a world that offers Him “nowhere to rest His head”.

Jesus answered him, “Foxes have dens and birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to rest his head.” (Luke 9:58)

So in that moment, I resolved:

If He is quiet—good.

Let Him sleep.

Let Him sleep.

Let Him sleep.

To the mothers who walk around this world carrying the invisible cross of child loss,

To the mothers with hearts pierced with sorrow,

To the mothers who cry to God for answers to fill their emptiness—

I reverently encourage you to look inward and embrace the Divine Child: with cheeks perfectly squished and lips gently parted, eyelids lightly shut, arms loosely draped at His side, fingers softly hanging open. Embrace the Divine Child who sleeps upon your chest, at home close to the sound of your Marian heart.

You are not abandoned.

No.

You are chosen—the chosen resting place to the Son of Man.