The Author
“I am blessed to have always had you.”
Natashia is a mother first, a writer second, and — by her own admission — a reluctant poet. She never planned to publish anything. What began in a year of grief became a record of a girl growing into a woman of faith.
Faith was something Natashia grew up near rather than inside of. These poems follow that becoming — a young girl growing into an adult woman in her faith — especially in the year she had nothing left to hold. What began as desperate late-night sentences slowly became conversation, and conversation became trust.
A year of grief and hardship was the inspiration, but the poems reach across a whole life. Loss pushed her closer to God — the people who left too soon, the memories she now carries into every chapter that follows. Her children became the reason to keep going; she calls them God's greatest blessings.
She writes plainly, without theology or polish. Her poems ask questions out loud, admit doubt, and confess failure — and then find, again and again, that the presence she doubted had never actually left the room.
Because someone else is holding a smile while dying inside, and needs to read a page that says it first. She shares these poems so that no one has to walk their own grief believing they are the only one.
Author’s Reflection
“If I could sit with the girl I was at the beginning of that year, I would not tell her how it ends. I would only tell her that she is not alone in the room — that the quiet she mistook for absence was patience.
I did not find God that year. He was never lost. I was simply, finally, still enough to notice Him.”
— Natashia Larsen