NASHVILLE (BP) — Sam Green, then a 2-year-old healthy toddler, longed to play with his younger brother, perhaps on the playground, perhaps riding bikes. Perhaps he could read to him and maybe they could go to the zoo.

Sam had watched his mama’s belly swell and waited months for his brother Timothy Jacob Green — TJ — to be born.

In Utero, TJ was diagnosed with Trisomy 18. He lived 56 days, much of it in home hospice.

“Where did TJ go?” the family pediatrician advised the family, would weigh heavily on Sam’s young mind.

Sam’s maternal aunt Annie Downs, a Nashville bestselling author, speaker and podcaster, sought to answer the question for Sam alone, first writing a book for him by the same title, “Where Did TJ Go?”

She typed it, laminated copies to give to her sister and brother-in-law, Tatum and Jacob Green, and her parents.

“And as my sister started reading it to Sam, she would call me and say, ‘Hey, this page is too long. He’s getting bored.’ It was a couple of months after TJ passed away,” Downs told Baptist Press. “And I would be like, ‘OK. Well tell me what to do to fix it. And so we actually ended up working on it.”

The book helped the Greens and Downs deal with the joy and pain of loving TJ and, Downs reasoned, perhaps the book could help others.

“Will you call the publisher and just see if there’s a chance that they would want to publish this and help other families?” she asked her agent. “And they did. And so that’s why my sister’s the co-author, is because she was reading it to Sam. She was editing and fixing it.”

TJ was born and went to heaven in the summer of 2022. While most children with Trisomy 18 live only a few hours, TJ lived longer.

“We were prepared for TJ to never come home. And that’s just not the story God had for us,” she said. “I mean, between the Lord and medical interventions that my sister and her husband chose, TJ lived 56 days.

“Sam got almost two months, well he got a full month with TJ in the house because TJ was on hospice care in my sister and brother-in-law’s house for five weeks.”

Downs wanted to present heaven in a biblically truthful way that a child could grasp, and present TJ in a position of triumph inherent in the salvation heaven holds, she told Baptist Press.

“For example, the Bible actually says the roads in heaven are paved with gold. But we decided not to do that in the book because that’s a really complicated thing to understand when you’re trying to grieve that someone you love has not vanished or evaporated,” Downs said. “They are somewhere else. They’re just in heaven with God.”

For Sam, heaven needed to be seen as fun.

“In fact, one of the first things Sam asked my sister when they read it is, ‘Are there playgrounds in heaven?’” Downs told Baptist Press. “One of the things the scenes in the book do for kids is give them the opportunity to dream about heaven and imagine about heaven, and picture what it might be like.”

The book, from Baker Publishing, also includes advice from Nashville family therapist David Thomas to guide parents as they read the book to their children.

Downs sees value in reading the book to children in advance of loss, to help them understand the concept before they have to process grief. She wrote the book before TJ’s birth.

“We hope that TJ’s little life will produce fruit through (the book) for a lot of years,” Downs said. “In the long run, every child is going to experience loss, whether it’s a parent or a grandparent or a sibling or a pet.

“None of us are protected from grief and none of us are protected from grief at young ages. And so I think to read it before a child has experienced grief will help really set up how a family walks through grief.”

More than that, Downs wants children to understand that life entails both joy and pain, and that both are necessary.

“There’s a line in the book that says, ‘There is good news even in sad stories,’” Downs said. “And I think that is a reality. The ability to hold joy and suffering together is a gift to children to grab hold (of) early, because I still wrestle with that.

“How do we hold joy and suffering at the same time and how do we find the good news in the middle of really sad stories?” she asked. “It doesn’t mean the story is less sad. It just means in addition, there is good news.”

The book is a reminder for adults as well as children, she said, that good news is found in sad stories.

(EDITOR’S NOTE — Diana Chandler is Baptist Press’ senior writer.)