Losing a Child: Always Andy's Mom

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 wa...

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 powd...

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 oth...

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 los...

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 s...

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...

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...

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...

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 s...

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 h...

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...

    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 yea...

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-...

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 schoo...

There is a line from Samuel Beckett that a friend whispered to Stephen outside the hospital room where his wife Kate was dying. I can't go on. I'll go on. It became, as Stephen says in his memoir, a pretty accurate summary of his life after Kate and Anna. Anna came home from China at seven months old, a charming, sweet, luminously happy little girl who had a gift for drawing people to her. Childre...

Bryan carried the sadness. That was his decision. Not the devastation, not the incapacitation, but the sadness. A conscious, daily choice to let his broken heart stay open rather than rebuild the walls around it. And in doing so, he discovered something he did not expect. The broken heart made him better. Noah was Bryan's son, born in 1987, a boy of rare and tender empathy who greeted his father e...

This week's episode didn't happen the way we planned. It was supposed to be a livestream. And then, within the same week, both Gwen and I found ourselves facing something neither of us expected. My mother-in-law, who had been like a mother to me for nearly 30 years, was suddenly placed on hospice. Gwen's own mother was in hospice as well. We looked at each other and simply said, we cannot do a liv...

We are all born into a house of stories. That is something Dan, Jacob's dad, believes deeply, and it shapes everything about how he has carried his grief. Dan is a professional storyteller by trade, and when his son Jacob was born fragile and uncertain in the NICU, not expected to survive, Dan did the only thing he knew how to do. He sat by his side and talked. He told stories, sang songs, even re...

There is a fear that lives quietly inside almost every grieving parent. It rarely gets said out loud, but it shapes so much of how we carry our grief. If I let go of the pain, will I lose them too? Caryn, Josh's mom, spent years living inside that fear before she finally understood something that changed everything for her. Josh was Caryn's oldest son, a champion wrestler who came within reach of...

After losing Isaiah, Mona did what so many grieving parents do. She disappeared. Not all at once. But slowly, quietly, she started skipping the family gatherings where she would feel his absence most sharply, surrounded by all his cousins growing up without him. She got good at wearing a mask, at being on for other people, at performing a version of herself that did not make anyone uncomfortable....

Becky has spent her entire life adapting to a world that was not built for her. As a woman with dwarfism who stands four feet tall, she has learned to problem solve, improvise, and push forward in spaces that were never designed with her in mind. She has built the confidence and strength to ignore the stares and the laughs. She has figured out children's recliners and gaming chairs and car beds an...

Darius made Kelly a mama at eighteen years old. Then he made her a nurse. And years later, after he was gone, he made her something else entirely, a certified grief counselor, an entrepreneur, and the founder of something beautiful that would not exist without him. That is the thread running through this entire conversation. Our children become our purpose. And when we find that purpose, they are...

The flowers are blooming. The days are getting longer. The world looks like it is coming back to life. So why do so many of us feel so heavy? In this episode, Gwen Kapcia, social worker and thanatologist, and I sit down to talk about something grieving parents experience but rarely hear discussed directly - the way the changing seasons can shift something deep inside us, often before we even reali...

Say my child's name. It sounds like such a simple thing. And yet for so many grieving parents, it is the thing people around them are least willing to do. They look at you with that familiar expression, the one you can see right through, and they stay quiet, thinking their silence is a kindness. Cindy knows that look well. And it is exactly where everything began. Abbie was Cindy's youngest, born...

Parent. Sister. Friend. That was the order Andrea established with her little sister Adrienne when Adrienne was just nine years old, fresh into a new life in Los Angeles after their mother signed over custody on the day after Christmas. Andrea was twenty-two. She had not planned any of this. But she looked at her little sister and she knew. And so she laid it out simply: I have to be your parent f...