love without parting

the deepest bonds are never severed

Jul 31, 2025

For most of my young life, I was an avid, detailed journaler. This is both fortunate and unfortunate.

It is fortunate because some things are fun to remember. Some entries are heartwarming. Some make me cackle with laughter at the audacity of my past self, like this one:

June 16, 2012 (age 16):
We ordered pizza and I told Dad we needed 3 and so basically I got my own and realized Dad was right and we only needed 2 but I decided to be spiteful and eat way more than I needed in order to show that 3 was the right choice but now I just feel fat.

(One day down the road, I hope that it will be easier to find grace and patience when I am raising teenagers thanks to this embarrassingly clear look into my own teenage mind.)

Flipping through the pages of memories can also be unfortunate, though, because they thrust me back to many moments I would rather forget.

In my journal entry for September 11, 2013, I chronicled a day so heavy it was almost comical. We were over a year into my mom’s cancer battle and four months away from her eventual passing. I wrote about driving my mom home from dinner in a rush, speeding to the point that it made her queasy (which wasn’t hard to do). In a two-minute span she threw up, began bleeding out her nose, and then as she tried to wipe her hair out of her face, it began falling out in strands in her hand.

I wrote that I went into my parents’ room later that evening to see how she was feeling and to say goodnight. What came next was a long, sad conversation where she shared her fears that she was getting worse. I recorded her saying these words:

“I’m just not ready to be done being your mom.”

The words stand stark in my journal, nearly twelve years later. I don’t want to remember nights like that. But I do remember—standing there in the dark, tears filling my eyes as I told her the simple truth: she’ll never stop being my mom.

I could talk about the biology or psychology of it all—how my DNA tells the story that she gave me life, my neurotransmitters tell the story that she always made me feel safe. But it’s more than that. My heart tells the deepest story of all: that she is always, always with me.

Yes, I can and do talk about my mom in the past tense. I could tell you that Sandy Heidtke was a woman with a loud laugh. She was a more knowledgeable and passionate sports fan than anyone I’ve ever met. She was known to ask the waiter if they could turn up the thermostat in restaurants because she got cold easily, and maybe thought she was the main character a tiny bit.

But I will never say, never feel, never write the words that she was my mom.

She is my mom.

While death has parted us, in the words of John Donne, our parting is “not yet a breach, but an expansion, like gold to airy thinness beat.”1

We are not forever severed. There is a golden thread of love that ties us to each other, even now. She continues to be my mother. I continue to be her daughter.

Through Christ, and in Christ, love has no end.

Tim Keller wrote that “we were made for love without parting.” We never want to say goodbye. We aren’t meant to. And yet, to quote another great, bald thinker: as Kermit the Frog/Bob Cratchit in The Muppets Christmas Carol said upon the death of Robin the Frog/Tiny Tim, “Life is made up of meetings and partings. That is the way of it.”

We meet. We love. We part. And somehow, love continues to bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, endure all things. Love never ends.

My mom’s fear—that she would be done being my mom, that the beloved role was coming too quickly to a close—reminds me of another quote I heard, a decade later.

I was sitting on a couch tucked away in the corner of a church. It was my first foray into the local foster mom support group, a few months after saying goodbye to our first placement. Tears fell from my eyes as I shared the sorrow of parting with my little girl.

Across the circle, one of the moms looked me in the eyes, affirmed all my feelings, and honored my foster daughter by name. “She was the one who made you a mom. It should be hard to say goodbye. We were never meant to un-become a mother.”

We were made for love without parting. We’re never meant to un-become a mother.

The deepest bonds of love were never meant to end.

God seems intent on strengthening, growing, training my heart to hold multiple truths. We are in the gym, and he puts one plate on the barbell: the truth that my mother is gone. It is horrible. He walks to the other side and loads another: the truth that she will always be my mother. It is beautiful.

Both deeply heavy, both deeply true. I grab on to the bar and he helps me lift.

Then, another round: it is true and it is heartbreaking that my foster daughters, that the baby I lost in the womb, are not here in my arms. And it is true that all my babies—whether they grew inside me or I welcomed them at the front door—will always be with me. Again, he helps me hold it all.

Today, the weight of loss and the weight of love feel equal. But only one will truly last.

“For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is going to be revealed to us,” Paul says in Romans 8:18.

Pain is real, but it has an expiration date.

It is gloriously true that love never ends.

Tommy Dixon

’s beautiful essay shared this weekend titled “Why I am a Christian again,” he writes that the Christian story offers something that no other worldview can. The alternate options, including ideas like death leads to “becoming fertilizer for a plant in the circle of life, or a dewdrop that melts back into an ocean of consciousness,” are “almost insulting. Because what we want is not life after death, but love after death. Love can only exist if we retain a personal self.”2

In Christ, we have something extraordinary: a Savior who knows suffering and death, who faced both in order to save us. A Rescuer who rose again—walking around in a real body, eating meals with his friends. What does this mean? Back to Keller:

The resurrection goes beyond the promise of an ethereal, disembodied afterlife. We get our bodies back, in a state of beauty and power that we cannot today imagine...Resurrection is not just consolation—it is restoration. We get it all back—the love, the loved ones, the goods, the beauties of this life—but to new, unimaginable degrees of glory and joy and strength. It is a reversal of the seeming irreversibility of loss.”3

The bodily resurrection from the dead is a reality for those who trust in Christ. Because he lives, love never ends. How can I help but rejoice?

In this broken world, we are forced into goodbyes. Some partings seem to rend us in two. But one day I will wake up in my true home, where there are only the most joyful meetings, the most beautiful reunions.

We were made for love without parting. And thank God, we have it.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44131/a-valediction-forbidding-mourning