How do I grieve someone my kids never knew?

You carry someone your family never met. You bring their name into a room, and it lands soft, like a word in a language no one else speaks. That is a lonely kind of grief — not because no one loves you, but because no one else carries this particular weight. Here is the honest part: your children cannot grieve what they never touched. That is not a failure in them, or in you. But they can still know the person existed, and mattered, and shaped the air you all breathe now. That knowing can be built, slowly, on purpose. The reed is cut from the reed bed and cries ever after for what it lost. But it does not cry alone in a field — it cries in a song others gather to hear. Your grief wants the same: not company that remembers, but company that listens.