Saturday morning, and the house is quiet. I’ve got a guy sleeping on either side of me, one in the bed and one in the monitor. I don’t want to move, just want to lie here and enjoy the quiet, the sounds of rhythmic breathing.

That lasts for a minute, then I grab my phone. In another minute, I’m reading the blog of a mom who just lost her boy to cancer. My tears hit the ground before my feet do, and I’m crying at intervals throughout the day: on The Husband’s shoulder, behind sunglasses in the car, over dishes at the sink. This loss is unimaginable, and yet I venture into the imagining for an instant before I shrink back from the shadows and the fear that plague this world, that leave us each without guarantee. I send a message without knowing what to say, even after I’ve said something, because there are no words. There is no sufficient answer.

Not yet.

We have walked a rough road with The Kid, but at no point have we been given that kind of prognosis, a timeline of how much life is left, and I’ve never been so thankful for the path we’ve covered, for the struggles that played out in frustration and uncertainty but, still, life. But we have walked halls with all sorts of sufferers, have sat in waiting rooms next to them, and there is a new community that you are born into–unwillingly–when that door has been opened and you are ushered through it. A community of worn faces and tired eyes, but also more than that. There is a depth to the lines in skin, to the eyes, that speaks of a capacity for both profound sadness and matchless joy, the kind of joy that comes from an unexpected trip to Disney World or the first time she hears a sound or a head held upright, moments you never knew could matter so much but in their purity, in their simplicity, are more beautiful than a thousand sunsets. The eyes of this community tell stories like that, and they are beautiful too.

But the pain. The pain of not knowing why, of the unfairness and uneven distribution, it is haunting and threatens to keep us right where we are, never knowing more or moving past it. The mysteries of diagnoses and setbacks can feel cruel and targeted and can make you forget goodness, can make you even stop believing it’s real, or that anything is more real than what hurts. There are no pat answers or Hallmark cards that drive deeper than that pain that makes you feel alone and adrift.

But there is something. There are some things.

There are the smiles that come from nowhere, the laughter in the backseat. There is the singing, the unbridled joy at being swung. There’s the night he decides he wants to be read to again and the three of you sitting there, leaning on each other in the quiet magic of the moment that makes you forget the day’s tantrums and fits, and it makes you wonder, also, if this moment can happen–if there are good mysteries, too–then what if there is something–something unexpected, something also mysterious–that is so good it can swallow up all the sad? That is deeper than the deepest loss and higher than the highest joy? That sees what the world calls “imperfect” and calls it “exactly as it should be” because we just don’t know the whole story yet?

Yesterday afternoon, TK gets up from his nap and looks beneath our bed, starts crying for something. He grabs my hand, pushes it toward the object, and I see a ball smack in the middle of the floor, beyond my reach. He cries in words I don’t understand, and my frustration with and for him reaches a peak: Why can’t we speak the same language?! I shake my head but he keeps pushing. Finally, I find a way, and with my new prop and a contorted position, I push the ball out and hand it to him. He stares at it, then tosses it aside, crying. Well f— you too, I think, but don’t say–a mild victory–and go to his room to cool off as he screams. I sit in the glider where I rocked him through sleepless nights and it’s so much easier to be angry, but that’s beginning to feel more and more like a choice. So, as the screams continue, I think. Help, I pray, my favorite request, and in the calming chaos images flood my mind of how faithless I have been in my life, how much understanding I lacked as I collected idols and made gods in my own image when grace was there the whole time, faithful through my faithlessness, waiting for me to learn its language.

I take a deep breath–nothing is fixed, I’m still me, but I’m further from the edge–and head back into the room where TK sits, holding the ball in his hand. Finally accepting what he’s been given as his, even when it didn’t look like he imagined it would. He looks up to me and says something, and though we don’t speak the same language yet, I know that one day…we will.