Advertise on podcast: Losing a Child: Always Andy's Mom

This was meant to be. Allison was Martha's second of three daughters. Smart, compassionate, and funny, a friend to everyone she had not yet met. She moved to Boston, became an underwriter, and excelled in her career in ways that surprised even her mother, who still laughs about the girl who used to disappear to her bed when chores came around. She was about to be promoted and move to Chicago. She had told her mother she never wanted attention brought to herself. She would have been mortified, Martha says with a smile, by how much attention she is getting now. On April 30th, 2016, the first beautiful day of spring in Boston, Allison was on her motor scooter heading to brunch with a friend. She stopped at a light. A duck boat stopped safely behind her. But the driver was also giving the tour, looking back at his passengers, entertaining them. As he talked, he crept forward. When the light turned green, he gunned it. Allison had nowhere to go. Her friend survived. Allison did not. The morning after the accident, while standing in a parking lot, Martha and her husband were introduced to Kathy, a certified grief counselor who specialized in the loss of a child. Martha had always told herself she would never go to a grief counselor, but now she looked at this woman and thought: if all grief counselors are like Kathy, maybe there is something to this after all. She says now that this meeting was no accident. Their daughter's death was a surprise to them. It was not a surprise to God. From that morning forward, God kept placing people and moments exactly where they needed to be. A senator who walked into a library meeting at the exact right time. A City Council that said yes when they say no to nearly everyone. A bill signed by the governor just seven months after Allison died, requiring duck boats in Massachusetts to have dedicated tour guides separate from the driver, sensors, and cameras. People told them it was nearly impossible. It happened anyway. At the funeral, a close friend leaned in and said something to Martha that confirmed everything she had already begun to feel in her heart. Mighty movements are started by mothers in mourning. Martha will tell you that she and her husband did not know what they were doing. They just felt, as she puts it, like little children holding onto God's finger and tottering along, and He was showing them what to do. Who to see. Where to go next. They are still going. Martha is now involved with Families for Safe Streets, a national organization working to make roads safer for everyone. On November 15th, she is leading the World Day of Remembrance for traffic victims in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, honoring those who were hit and killed in crashes. The work that began in a parking lot the morning after Allison died is still moving. The Lord is close to the brokenhearted. That is the verse Martha carries. And everything in this conversation is proof of it.

Holly was on this podcast 120 episodes ago, in Episode 251, just over two years into her grief. She said herself that she was still living in the land of complete oblivion back then. Still running on the fumes of shock and adrenaline. Still not fully understanding what she was carrying. She is back now, five years in. And what she has to say is something I have never heard anyone say quite this way before. Brit was Holly's daughter, a barrel racer and a brilliant young woman with high-functioning autism who was never healthy enough to ride that horse without being accessed through her port first, without oxygen and tubes and a daily routine that would exhaust most people just to read about. Holly fought for her for twenty years. She went to college with her. She slept on the floor of her room every night to catch the alarms. She never left her side for more than twenty-four hours at a time. And when Brit decided at twenty years old that it was time to go on hospice, Holly let her make that call, because Brit had always been the one who understood her own life best. Brit died on September 4th, 2021. She was twenty years old. And her book, written during her illness, is now selling in shops across Scotland, in a country she always dreamed of visiting but was never strong enough to reach. This episode is full of honest, unguarded moments. Holly went to Scotland this past summer and walked seven miles a morning crying while looking down to avoid the people coming toward her. She describes burying Brit's ashes just this week, in an old pecan orchard at the head of her grandmother's grave, lined with alfalfa because that was Brit's favorite smell, covered by hand while fire ants bit because the fire ants hurt less than what was happening on the inside. She talks about the fifth year being the hardest of all, and the way grief stacks without warning when you are just living moment to moment like a normal person. In the first year, you get all this grace, she says. Everyone marks the firsts. But nobody tells you that randomly, two years and seven months in, you are going to wake up and struggle for a week and not know why. And through all of it, Holly has arrived at something. She says she used to pray every morning asking God to tell Brit she was sorry. Sorry for where she had failed. Sorry she could not make it better. And then one day it hit her: Brit does not know any of that anymore. She does not know she was in pain. She does not know about the needles and the tubes and the held-down screaming. She has been released from all of it. And so Holly stopped apologizing. And started saying thank you. And then she said the thing that I want every grieving parent to carry with them. The only thing left that I can do for her as her mother is carry this pain. It is a privilege to carry this pain. It is the last thing we get to do as their mom. It will not get less, she says. But you will learn to carry it differently. And when you are deep in a wave of it, in the racking sobs and the lament, somehow you meet your child there. And when it passes, you feel just a little lighter. It will not go away. But it will get better. And it is a privilege to carry it.

For six years, Deborah carried this alone. Not entirely by choice. Just by circumstance, by distance, by the particular kind of grief that comes when your child dies as an adult with his own family, his own home, his own life four hundred miles away. The grief that sometimes gets treated as secondary. The grief that nobody quite knows what to do with. Matthew was Deborah's only son, born with powder blue eyes so big and beautiful that the year E.T. came out, people started calling him that. He grew up on a dairy farm in upstate New York, became a tractor man through and through, and opened his own business, Cotton Tractor Repair, servicing three counties. He married Erin, had two boys, and was the kind of dad who made their breakfast, took them to school, and had them at the shop every day playing with toy tools. He waved to absolutely everyone when he drove through town. He called his mother Mommy well into adulthood and signed every card that way. He died on July 26th, 2020, three days before his 38th birthday, in an ATV accident on a country road. As he was being loaded into a helicopter, he said a few words. They were these: tell mom and dad I love them. What followed were six years of complicated grief. She was never told the full details of what happened to Matthew — people wanted to protect her, and she understood that, even as she ached to know. She was largely left out of his funeral arrangements, the particular pain of a mother who lived far away. She buried her ex-husband six months later. She flew back a year after Matthew's death to help care for her grandsons when Erin was seriously injured in a car accident. Through all of it, she put herself in the backseat. Through all of it, she kept going. And through all of it, she carried Bear. A stuffed Rottweiler dressed in Matthew's t-shirt and bandana, named for the big gentle dog Matthew kept at his shop. Bear has been to Ireland and Scotland. Wherever Deborah goes, Bear goes. Six years in, her grandsons are doing well. And for the first time, Deborah says she is giving herself permission to do her own grief work. She found this podcast two months ago, listened to over a hundred episodes, and found people who understood what she was carrying. She found her tribe. And she is finally ready to be in it.

Erin starts every conversation about her son the same way. He was the most interesting person I have ever known. And she means it. Max was quirky and eccentric and tender-hearted in equal measure. He spoke in full sentences at fifteen months. He memorized a thirty-page picture book and read it to his preschool class. He loved people deeply, inspired friendships that were somehow different from other friendships, and at three years old, walking into a restaurant holding his grandmother's hand, he picked up her hand and kissed it. She talked about that moment until the day she died. He was also a stand-up comic. An introvert who struggled with self-worth and depression, who somehow found the courage to walk onto a stage in front of strangers and make them laugh. His parents sat in the back of that bar, convinced they were going to have to fight somebody if anyone heckled him. Nobody heckled him. Max was diagnosed with major depressive disorder at eighteen and struggled with it for the next six or seven years. When things got bad, he always did one of two things — he would check himself into the hospital, or he would call and ask to come home. And so, when his parents got the call that he had taken his life on June 3rd, 2020, right in the early months of COVID when every single one of his coping strategies had been taken from him at once, they were absolutely blindsided. Because he always came home. He always asked for help. In this conversation, Erin speaks with remarkable honesty about what she did not understand when Max was alive. When he was in the depths of a depressive episode, she would drag him out of bed and take him to Target, thinking if he just got up and got moving he would feel better. She did these things because she was so afraid of his darkness that she could not sit in it with him. After Max died, she fell into a depression herself. And for the first time, she got a glimpse of the darkness he had been living with. That is when she understood what he had needed from her. Not to be pulled out of the pit. Just for her to get in beside him. It is one of the most honest and heartbreaking things any parent has said on this podcast. And it is also one of the most useful, because it is the same thing every grieving parent needs from the people who love them. Not someone to fix it. Not someone to cheer them up. Someone willing to climb down into the darkness and just sit there. Erin also talks about the marriage therapist who told her and her husband not to judge each other for the way they grieved, advice she credits with saving their marriage. The journal that became a book. The bird that appeared again and again after Max died and became the thread that runs through her memoir, My Unexpected Journey: Reflections After Losing My Son to Suicide. And she talks about what she has built from all of it — grief groups, webinars, experiential sessions where bereaved parents engage in hands-on creative work together. All of it born from the same hard-won knowledge: grief cannot be fixed. It can only be witnessed. You can find Erin and all of her resources at erinblechman.com.

Grief needs tending. That is one of the truest things Gwen said in this conversation, and it is also one of the hardest things about being a grieving parent. Because your children need tending too. And you cannot always do both at once. This episode is the audio version of our most recent livestream, and it is one of the most honest conversations Gwen and I have had. We asked our community how losing a child has changed their parenting, both positively and negatively, and the responses poured in. What emerged was a portrait of parents doing the impossible, every single day, and feeling like they are failing at it. The fear that arrived with grief and never quite left. The panic when a text goes unanswered for too long, when a phone rings at an odd hour, when a child does not come home when they said they would. One listener described it beautifully: her nerves were on the outside of her body. She knew, in a way she never did before, that if one child could die, anyone could. The critical thinking that used to come easily had been replaced by something rawer and more urgent. The short temper that lives alongside the patience. So many of our listeners named the same contradiction: they no longer sweat the small stuff, and yet they are more short-tempered than they ever were before. Grief stews in us. It sits just under the surface, and sometimes it spills out sideways, onto the people closest to us, the ones we love the most. The guilt of not being the parent you used to be. One listener said simply: before my son died, I knew I was a good mom. Afterwards, I doubted myself for several years. That doubt is real. That doubt is common. And it is not the whole truth. Because here is what Gwen reminded us near the end of this conversation, and what I want every grieving parent who listens to carry with them. Your children are watching you get up every day knowing the day has sadness in it. They are watching you make the lunches and get them dressed and take them to their places. They are watching you love them in the middle of the hardest thing you have ever been through. And that is not nothing. That is extraordinary. You are doing a great job. Even when it does not feel like it. Especially then.

Her name is Magnolia Song. Her father had always loved the name Maggie. Her mother Erin, a botanist, found the perfect origin for it, the magnolia tree, the oldest flowering species on earth, known for resilience and beauty. It felt exactly right for the little girl who arrived as the best surprise of their lives. And what a girl she was. Maggie loved water in every form, puddles, bath time, the surf at the beach. She was mesmerized by the redwood trees that swayed above her backyard. She had dark curly hair and a smile that could pull the biggest belly laughs out of her oldest brother like nobody else could. She played a delightful game of slowly moving a Lego toward her mouth while watching her mama out of the corner of her eye, just to see the reaction. And the week before she died, at just 15 months old, she walked herself an entire mile through the snow at Lake Tahoe - just a small, determined person moving through the world entirely on her own terms. Maggie was 15 months old when she died suddenly and unexpectedly on February 21st of this year. She had been perfectly healthy. She was smiling over her shoulder at Erin at 3:30 in the afternoon. By 1:00 in the morning she was gone, from an intestinal volvulus that twisted so quickly and so tightly that even the doctor who fought to save her looked Erin in the eyes three months later and said, I can say with 100% certainty that we did everything possible. There was no way to save her. On the evening of that first terrible day, the family gathered on the front porch, and a great horned owl landed on the telephone wire right in front of them. A bird Erin had never seen at that house before. It sat there for ten, fifteen minutes, hooing, looking right at them. They called the boys out. They all just listened. Erin has not seen that owl again. She is not sure what she believes about signs. She is a scientist by nature, and grief has cracked open questions in her she never expected to be asking. But she has come to a quiet conclusion about it: whether or not signs are real does not actually matter. If it comforts you, it is enough. That spirit of open, honest questioning is at the heart of everything Erin shares in this conversation. Six months into the most devastating loss of her life, she is not pretending to have answers. But she has made choices. She decided very early that she was going to lean in. She was not going to push Maggie aside. She was not going to avoid the grief or dress it up or rush through it. She drew a distinction that has helped her enormously, between grief, which is natural and healthy and necessary, and suffering, which lives in the guilt and the unanswerable whys. She could not choose whether Maggie lived. But she could choose how she was going to grieve. And she holds onto something she heard on this podcast in those first desperate weeks of searching for guidance. It is the love that connects. Not the grief. Maggie is still woven into the fabric of their daily life. The magnolia trees Erin planted in March are blooming. The boys still make her laugh. And the love is still the thread.

When Ben was in treatment, he had a signature move. He would flip on some music, put on his headphones, and check out. Not in a sad way. In the way of a boy who had discovered, long before anyone taught him the term music therapy, that sound could carry him somewhere the chemo could not reach. He was five years old when he was diagnosed with neuroblastoma. He was eight when he died. And in between, he wore a Michael Jackson curly wig and a sparkly glove to the grocery store, demanded Olive Garden in Times Square after immunotherapy, and once stood up on a procedure table before a bone marrow biopsy and told his doctor, show me all your supplies first. He was never defined by his illness. He was just doing cancer, as his mother Wendy puts it. Because that was what was there. The rest of the time, he was dancing through the city. When the news ran their memorial piece after Ben died, they described him as having lost his battle with cancer. Wendy wanted to scream. He didn't lose anything. He got dealt a crappy hand in this life. And then he inspired a community, countless people, people she will never meet. How do you call that losing? In the years since, Wendy has channeled everything she learned in those three and a half years of treatment into the Benjamin Goldberg Foundation, which advocates for what she calls the healing arts in healthcare. At Sloan Kettering, a dance therapist had walked into Ben's treatment room one day and changed everything. His blood pressure dropped. He needed less medication than the other kids. The nurses came in and danced. And Wendy thought, I want to bring this home. She did. Today, every child who walks into their local children's hospital in Virginia has access to music therapy, art therapy, dance therapy, yoga, and Reiki, because of Ben. Because of one little boy with headphones and a heart full of music. The foundation has since expanded into social prescribing, partnering with a regional health system to explore the formal prescription of music and art to reduce anxiety, depression, and hospital visits. And Wendy has written it all down in her book, Mom's Book: It Was Never About the Grief, just published last month, because that is the whole truth of it. It was never about the grief. It was about Ben. And Ben is still in every room. You can find Mom's Book wherever books are sold. Learn more about the Benjamin Goldberg Foundation and the BGF Podcast at benjamingoldbergfoundation.org.

Celeste had a perfect pregnancy. She felt great. She stayed active all the way to term. Every appointment, every ultrasound, every check was textbook. The nursery was painted pink, because Hannes had opened the can by himself two days after their appointment, on camera, finding out the gender before Celeste so he could have something special just for him. The bassinet was next to the bed. The car seat was in the car. The postpartum cart was stocked with diapers and snacks. Ellory was 40 weeks and one day old when Celeste woke up feeling a little crampy and tired. She decided to rest, and fell asleep with her hands on her belly, feeling Ellory kick. And then something shifted. Just a feeling. Something telling her she needed to get Ellory to move. She ate spoonfuls of Nutella. She tried different positions. She called Hannes and said, something's wrong. It had only been two hours since she had last felt her move when she arrived at the ER. A nurse put a monitor on her belly and couldn't find the heartbeat, and Celeste already knew. There was no heartbeat. Ellory had grown to 7 pounds and 3 ounces. A big, healthy, beautiful baby girl who made it all the way to the finish line. She just couldn't cross it. In the weeks and months after losing her, Celeste used her medical background to research. She was not going to accept unexplained as an answer. She found a Yale researcher named Dr. Kleiman who studies stillbirth and small placentas. She looked back at Ellory's placental pathology report and discovered the placenta was in the .02 percentile. Ellory's placenta was simply too small to sustain her life. No one had measured it. It is not standard of care to measure a placenta during prenatal ultrasounds — even though the capability is built into the machines, even though the measurement takes 30 seconds and 3 numbers, even though a small placenta is the most common cause of stillbirth, and even though 50% of term stillbirths are preventable. Out of that discovery came the Racing Awareness for Ellory campaign. Hannes is running 12 marathons in 12 months, in cities across the country and beyond. At each race, he carries a pair of Ellory's shoes. And right before the finish line, he drops them. Because she got all the way there. She just couldn't cross. At a race in Asheville, a stranger who had read their flyer approached Hannes after the finish and asked, are you Ellory's dad? Hannes had to have him repeat it. He had never been called that by a stranger before. He said yes. Yeah, I am. That is everything, right there. To learn more about Celeste and Hannes's campaign and the work of the nonprofit Measure the Placenta, visit measuretheplacenta.org. You can find their podcast, The Leisure Room, and follow their journey on social media at The Kiddos Diaries.

Danielle was standing in a NICU holding her newborn daughter Hope when a stranger approached her asking, "Are you Angelina's Mom?" Danielle's quiet response was, "I used to be." The woman was a pediatric oncologist from a hospital in Westchester. She had never met Angelina. But she knew exactly who she was. Parents of sick children had been bringing in pictures. Angelina ziplining. Angelina indoor skydiving. Angelina feeding dolphins. Angelina snorkeling with sharks. What do I need to do, they kept asking their doctors, so my child can live like Angelina? And when Angelina died, grief counselors had to be brought in for those parents, because if there was no hope for a kid like her, what hope was there for any of them? Those parents decided their children wouldn't just survive. They would thrive. Like Angelina. And then the doctor said something Danielle has never forgotten. There will be thousands of children who are sick, who will live and be inspired to live, and to live well, who will never know her name. Angelina was diagnosed with stage 4 neuroblastoma at three and a half years old. The tumor ran from her adrenal gland down into her pelvis, climbed her lymph channel up her stomach, wrapped itself around her aorta, and spread to her bones. On a scale of zero to fifteen, she scored a fourteen. She was given a twenty percent chance of survival. She fought for seven and a half years. And the whole time, she lived. She indoor skydived. She ziplined across Las Vegas Boulevard. She snorkeled with exotic fish, swam with sharks, and ziplined down a volcano in Hawaii. She wanted to bungee jump into the Grand Canyon. She served her mother a legal cease-and-desist letter, drafted by a friend's attorney parent, claiming trademark rights over her own facial expressions and catchphrases. She had big plans, better ideas, and absolutely no interest in being told what she could not do. The clinical trial Angelina participated in changed its criteria because of how she responded. Future treatments for BRCA2-positive neuroblastomas are being developed from her genome sequencing. Sick children across the country were inspired to fight because their parents carried her pictures into hospitals. A grandmother's quiet words to fight traveled to Danielle, who carried them to Angelina, who carried them to children she never knew existed. The lessons keep traveling. The love keeps traveling. And most of them will never know her name. Danielle's podcast, They Were Here: Lessons from Their Lives, is her answer to that truth. You can find it wherever you listen to podcasts.

Heather has always loved out loud. She has always talked about her boys to anyone who will listen, shown pictures to strangers, shared memories on social media without a second thought. It never dawned on her not to. And when she lost her youngest son Owen, whom everyone called O, it never dawned on her to stop. O was funny, mischievous, and big-hearted in equal measure. The kind of boy who once spent $40 of his own money on meat sticks at thirteen years old just to hand them out to classmates and leave one on his teacher's desk because she was having a bad day. The kind of boy who left notes on his desk at home that said, you mean my heart to me. So when she lost him, she did not go quiet. She started collecting "O signs" almost immediately, writing every one of them down in a notebook because she was so afraid of missing a single one. She built the chaos garden she and O had planned together, grew hundreds of flowers, preserved every bloom, and turned them into art that now goes out into the world carrying a little bit of his love in each piece. She created a journal for others to record their own signs from the loved ones they have lost. She organized a second line, a Louisiana-style brass band parade through the streets of her town, on what would have been O's first birthday after his death, inviting everyone who had lost someone to suicide to come celebrate how their person lived, not how they died. She carries O's photo everywhere her family travels, because she promised him they would see the world together, and she intends to keep that promise. None of it was planned. None of it was strategic. It was just love, looking for somewhere to go, and finding it. Near the end of our conversation, Heather shares a poem she found on one of her hardest days, written by Sharon Marsh. She reads it at the second line every year. I think it is the most beautiful summary of everything she has done since losing O. I'll live for you. Your life was cut short, but there is still so much living for you to do. I will live for you. I will take you with me everywhere I go. Drink coffee in dimly lit cafes, travel to foreign places, put my toes in the sand, create memories. So that whenever I see you again, I can tell you all about it. And she will. She already is. At the end of this conversation, she shares one more story. A man she met in Antigua, who never knew O, sent her a message months later to say his daughter had been born. And then he said, "Don't worry, Heather. I'm going to teach her to love like O." A stranger who never met O. Teaching his newborn daughter to love like him. That is what grieving out loud does. It lets the people who loved your child keep loving them. And it lets the people who never knew them love them too.

Kayla called her God's baby from the very beginning. She had been through six or seven miscarriages before Ellie arrived, and from the moment Ellie was born eight weeks early with a heart condition so severe the doctors were not sure she would make it, Kayla understood something in her bones: this child may not be hers to keep. She was only hers to love. And love her she did. For 574 days in the hospital. Through intestinal surgery and open-heart surgery and ECMO twice and sepsis and a tracheostomy and every obstacle that life and medicine could throw at a tiny, premature little girl who had no idea she was supposed to be defeated. That is the thing about Ellie. She did not get the memo. She gave wicked side-eyes to the nurses who dared take her temperature. She pretended to be asleep when the physical therapist walked in, then opened her eyes the moment she left. She played with her balloon with her oxygen saturation in the thirties. She said mama for the first and only time right before her tracheostomy, as if she knew exactly what her mama needed to hear. When her surgeon came in with the clamp trial running and the whole room holding its breath, Ellie was kicking. She was always kicking. And in her final months at home, through all of it, she was happy. Kayla says near the end of this conversation something that I have not been able to stop thinking about. She says she has joy and she has grief, and one is her right foot and one is her left foot, and you cannot walk without both. She will walk like that for the rest of her life. And I think that is Ellie's greatest gift to her mama. Not just the side-eye and the balloons and the rattle toy and the one perfect "mama" - but the living proof that joy and suffering are not opposites. That a person can be in both at the same time, fully and completely, and still choose joy. Ellie did it every single day of her life, with her oxygen in the thirties and her chest full of tubes and the whole medical world bracing for the worst. Now, her mama, Kayla, tries to follow in her daughter's footsteps as she navigates this new life without her. Kayla also says this: there is an Ellie-shaped hole in her heart, and she will die with it. Not as a wound, but as a shape. The exact outline of a little girl who proved that even in the hardest, most impossible life, joy finds a way through. Not because Ellie's life was too small. But because it was so very full.

There are many terms I have heard when talking about the anniversary of your child's death - Heaven Day. Angelversary. Going Home Day. But today, Gwen gave us a new one that she found in the book, Rare Bird - Crappiversary. It made us laugh. And then it made us cry. Because it is exactly right. Some days deserve to be named accurately. Some days do not need to be dressed up or softened or reframed into something more palatable. Some days just need to be what they are. This week, two of those days fall within three days of each other. August 12th and August 15th - the anniversaries of Caleb's death and Andy's death. And this episode releases on August 13th, right between them. Gwen asked Chrisy and me what we would write on a t-shirt for the anniversary. Chrisy said: I'm sad. I can't fix it. So let me be sad. I said: Today sucks and I need a hug. We mean it. Not as defeat. Not as a loss of hope. But as a radical act of honesty that this community understands better than anyone. Because one of the hardest things about the anniversary is the pressure, the pressure to act ok for the people around you, to reassure others that you are fine, to receive platitudes graciously when what you actually need is for someone to just sit with you in it. What helps is not the person who tries to fix it. What helps is the friend who texts to say, I hear Imagine Dragons and I think of your son. What helps is someone who says, today sucks, and I love you. What helps is not being alone in the weight of it. Grief requires work. Hard, daily, unglamorous work. And it does get more manageable over time, lighter, less sharp. The darkness is not as overwhelming as it once was, and it is easier and easier to find the next small bit of light to walk toward. But the anniversary is still the crappiversary. And it is okay to say so. Let me be sad. Just for today. Just for this.

div]:bg-bg-000/50 [&_pre>div]:border-0.5 [&_pre>div]:border-border-400 [&_.ignore-pre-bg>div]:bg-transparent [&_.standard-markdown_:is(p,blockquote,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)]:pl-2 [&_.standard-markdown_:is(p,blockquote,ul,ol,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)]:pr-8 [&_.progressive-markdown_:is(p,blockquote,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)]:pl-2 [&_.progressive-markdown_:is(p,blockquote,ul,ol,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)]:pr-8">     div]:bg-bg-000/50 [&_pre>div]:border-0.5 [&_pre>div]:border-border-400 [&_.ignore-pre-bg>div]:bg-transparent [&_.standard-markdown_:is(p,blockquote,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)]:pl-2 [&_.standard-markdown_:is(p,blockquote,ul,ol,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)]:pr-8 [&_.progressive-markdown_:is(p,blockquote,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)]:pl-2 [&_.progressive-markdown_:is(p,blockquote,ul,ol,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)]:pr-8"> Jamie's mother gave her a gift years before she knew she would need it. Her mother would say, "During times of darkness, find a little bit of light. Stand in it. Be still and wait for the next bit. Then walk to that light." It sounds simple. And then you lose your child, and you understand what it actually costs to do it. Jamie lost her daughter Lily in September of 2025. Lily was eighteen years old, a lionheart, a girl who was fierce and loyal and creative and strong, who was studying to be a primary school teacher, who loved animals and made Christmas crafts for the whole family every year, whose last tattoo was her grandmother's birth flower in her grandmother's own handwriting. She died suddenly on a Saturday night after finishing a double shift at work, from a previously undiagnosed cardiac condition, and Jamie's world was split in two - a before, and an after, and a rupture so complete that nothing on the other side of it looked the same. And yet she has kept walking. One small bit of light at a time. The best friend who happened to have become a funeral director just five years earlier, and who was called to Lily's body that very night, and who knew immediately to take her fingerprints. The podcast that found Jamie at exactly the right moment, even though she had been searching for months. The counselor who drew a circle and said grief never gets smaller, but your world grows bigger around it, and the people who stay help you carry it. The TikTok reel Lily had made of everything that mattered to her, shown to her by a friend at the exact moment Jamie was paralyzed in her daughter's room, not knowing what to keep. Lily's friends, still coming over, still sitting in her room, all wearing lily tattoos on their wrists. Light. And then another. And then another. Jamie says it plainly near the end of this conversation, quoting something she had heard on this very podcast: God protects us from nothing. But he sustains us through all things. She believes that. And the ten months since Lily died are her proof. Find the light. Walk to it. Be still.

Jackie knew it was coming. That is one of the hardest things about this kind of grief. For years, she had watched her son Sebastian struggle with mental health and addiction, and there came a point, as she puts it, where it was no longer an if but a when. She braced herself. She prepared. She thought maybe that would soften the blow. It did not. Sebastian was Jackie's firstborn, a towheaded, blue-eyed dynamo who walked at ten months old and never really stopped moving. He was curious about everything, passionate about soccer, and a national chess champion not once but twice before he decided it was no longer cool. He played D2 college soccer, loved the outdoors, and could make a room come alive. He and Jackie were so much alike that they butted heads constantly, but they always knew they loved each other. His last words to her were I love you, Mom. He died by suicide in 2017 at the age of 23. He was in a rehab program. He was supposed to be safe. Jackie says she never found herself angry at God, but she was angry at Sebastian for a long time. She clung to Jesus anyway. She went to church and hid in the front corner of the earliest service where nobody knew her, and she cried for two years. She went walking every day and listened to her Bible, unable to read it, barely retaining any of it, but letting it wash over her. She could only get through the Psalms, underlining every lament. She told people simply: I cannot see God in the midst of this, but I know He is there. Where else am I going to go? She calls those first years her season of tears. And she allowed herself to be in it. What she has built on the other side of it is remarkable. After thirteen writing classes, years of anonymous essays on Substack, and the steady encouragement of a writing coach and a grief counselor she would read her writing aloud to, Jackie has written a book. It is called Messy Mourning: Hope for Mothers Grieving the Loss of a Child by Suicide, and it is written specifically for the mothers who know this particular grief, the grief that comes wrapped in silence, the grief no one quite knows what to say about. Jackie is clear: suicide loss is different. Not harder or easier than other losses, but different. The world does not know how to respond to it. People go quiet. Well-meaning things get said that land like stones. And beneath it all, there is still an unspoken stigma that Jackie is determined to push back against with every word she writes. Her son was more than how he died. Her season of tears was not the end of her story. And no mother who has lost a child this way should have to carry it alone. Messy Mourning is available on Amazon and at JackieMBaker.com, where you can also find companion resources including a journal, a 30-day lament guide, and a playlist her daughter made in Sebastian's memory.

Payton loved rainbows. She knew all the colors, knew them in order, and would paint them perfectly every time. But she always added a pink line at the bottom, because she simply could not understand why pink was not already there. Every single rainbow she ever painted had that extra pink line. The Friday before she died, she painted one more. It was still drying on the easel at her Christian school when her class came in on Monday morning. Payton was five years old, a ray of sunshine with bright blue eyes and blonde hair, the kind of little girl who would run up to someone she had never met, say hi, give them a hug, and be ready to go be best friends. She cheered for her little brother Blake when he struggled to hit milestones. She gave her toys away to neighbors because that was just who she was. She asked endless questions about heaven, about the colors no one on earth has ever seen yet. On the Sunday before Thanksgiving, she was struck and killed by a neighbor's car while walking her little brother around their quiet neighborhood circle. Holly is an ER nurse and a paramedic. She ran CPR on her own daughter in the entryway of their home, called her hospital to get the trauma team ready, and walked through the trauma bay knowing exactly where she was going. She was usually the calm during someone else's storm. That day, she could not be that for her own child. Payton was gone that afternoon. In this conversation, Holly speaks with remarkable honesty about the six months since, about navigating grief alongside a new baby, about walking away from a career she has loved since she was eighteen, about the foundation (Payton's Pink Rainbow Project) she and her husband started in Payton's name, and about a faith that has been shaken to its core, but has not let go. She tells God every single day: I am so mad at you. But I am going to remain faithful. Some days she does not believe the words when she says them. She says them anyway. And her friend asked her something that stopped her cold. When you are doubting God, who are you actually talking to? If you did not believe He was real, you would not be in conversation at all. I shared something I carried early in my own grief. As long as I was angry at God, that meant I believed He existed. And as long as I believe He exists, I am okay. The conversations may be cruddy. But as long as we are still having them, we are okay. That is the conversation that keeps us.