Your candle is lit and it gives us comfort and let’s us feel close to you. But you are gone forever, at least in this life, in the world here on earth as we know it. We sat and cried together as we often do, longing for you, wondering if and when we’ll ever see you again.  I said to your dad, that in my version of Heaven, I am holding you and the three of us are together once again, and you’re breathing and your heart is beating. That is really all I want. He believes this will happen for us one day, and I pray to G-d every single day that it does.

I wish I knew where you were right now and what kind of existence your spirit has, in what form? I just long for you, Noa. My pain is so big and I don’t understand the purpose of going through this. None of it makes sense. Your dad and I, we were brutally robbed. I’d give anything and everything up to see you, hold you, feel you, kiss you, smell you, cuddle you again. What pain is bigger than this? What hole is deeper? And what love is stronger?

You carved a space in my heart greater than anything I’ve known. Now that I’ve lost you, that space just sits empty and I’m broken. It’s too big to fill with the trivial aspects of my former life as I knew it. I come up with ways to waste time and pass the minutes of the days. My hope is that the days turn into weeks, the weeks into years, and then we are old and tired, and we can finally enter your world, be with you, have peace, and be whole once again, the three of us together, that is my Heaven.