What a Broken Plaque Taught Me About New Year's Eve

Most of the plaques I make travel well — they're small, deliberately sturdy, built to survive a suitcase and a wall. But right before New Year's Eve 2025, near the end of a year that in total saw sixteen of them placed around the world, one of the plaques I'd been carrying broke. Not dramatically, not in a way that ruined it completely, but enough that it was no longer the clean, whole shape it had started as.

I could have set it aside and made another one. Instead, I looked at the cracked piece and thought: this is closer to the truth than a perfect plaque ever was.

This plaque feels like us: broken after the loss of a child we never got to meet. In the New Year, I wish us the strength to hold on to our broken pieces and to let ourselves live, feel, change, and believe.

That's the thought I carried into the new year, and it's stayed with me since. A loss like this doesn't leave you the same shape you were before — there's no version of healing that puts every piece back exactly where it was. What's left is something that still holds together, still does its job, still says what it needs to say, even with the cracks visible if you look closely.

I think that's true of most of what actually helps, too. It's rarely the polished, uncracked version of anything — a plaque, a sentence, a friendship — that ends up carrying the weight. It's the one that's been through something and still stands. What actually helps after a loss like this is rarely tidy, and the friends I'd trust to sit with me in the cracked version of a year are the same ones I'd point anyone toward if they asked how to support a friend who's grieving. That broken plaque was just the clearest reminder I'd had of it in a while.

Thank you to everyone who helped me feel less alone carrying that particular piece, broken as it was, into a new year. Big hugs to all of you, wherever your own broken pieces are right now — may you find the strength to keep holding them anyway.