You still pray the way you always have. Every night, sometimes throughout the day. But somewhere along the way, it started to feel different. Quieter. You're still talking. It just doesn't always feel like anyone's talking back the way they used to.
Mothers who've lost a child describe this almost identically, and almost none of them say it out loud. Not to their pastor. Not to their husband. Not even to themselves, most days.
It isn't a loss of faith. It's a faith that's asking for more than it used to need, and not finding it yet.
"I thought something was wrong with me because prayer felt different after I lost her. This book was the first thing that made me feel like that was normal, not a failure of my faith."
Before, trusting that she was safe, that she was with God, was enough to get you through most days. Now you find yourself wanting more than trust. You want to know. Not poetically. Actually know, the way you know the sun will rise tomorrow.
That shift, from believing to needing to know, is one of the most common things grieving mothers describe, and one of the least talked about.
"I had believed in heaven my whole life. This book was the first time I felt like I actually understood what was waiting for her there."
You still go. You still sing the songs and say the responses. But some Sundays, you're going through the motions while somewhere else entirely inside, wondering if anyone around you has any idea what you're actually carrying.
Managing your face in a pew is its own quiet, exhausting skill. No one teaches it to you. You just learn it, because you have to.
"Reading this felt like someone had been sitting next to me in church the whole time, seeing exactly what I was hiding."
Most of us grew up picturing a certain kind of Jesus. Gentle. Soft-spoken. Comforting in a general sense. But when you're the one at 3am needing specific answers, about where she is, whether she's okay, whether Jesus himself was there with her when she went, that general comfort can start to feel thin.
Gabe Poirot spent 18 days face to face with Jesus after a near-fatal accident, and what he came back describing wasn't the soft, distant version most of us were taught. It was something far more specific. For many grieving mothers, far more answering.
"This wasn't the sanitized Sunday school version I grew up with. It was so much more real, and somehow that made it easier to believe, not harder."
Here's the part almost no one admits. Underneath all of this is a quiet guilt, the sense that if your faith were strong enough, none of this would feel so hard.
That guilt is common, and almost entirely unearned. Grief and faith aren't opposites. Wanting more than "just believe" doesn't mean your faith is broken. It might mean it's growing into something more honest.
18 Days in Heaven is a #1 New York Times Bestseller, and researchers who study near-death experiences, along with pastors and theologians, have called it one of the most biblically confirming accounts they've encountered.