Some dates just carry weight.

April 23rd. The anniversary of Taylor's death. Two days after what would have been Andy's 22nd birthday.

When Jam reached out and asked to come back on, I looked at the calendar and knew immediately. There was no one else I wanted in this space this week.

If you haven't yet listened to Episode 157, I'd encourage you to start there. Jam first came on just four months after losing Taylor, her 13-year-old daughter, a girl who rode the special needs bus by choice every single day so she could sit beside her twin sister Morgan, who saved her lunch seat without fail, who never met a stranger and never stopped looking for someone to love. In that first episode, the word that kept coming to me as I listened was compassion. It still does.

Now, nearly four years later, Jam is back.

And what strikes me most about this conversation is simply that she is here. That she is still standing. That she is still showing up - for Morgan, for her husband, for the families her foundation has served, for the women in her Starlight support group who have become some of her closest friends in the world.

She didn't think she would survive this.

She is surviving it.

We talk about what these four years have looked like from the fog of the first year, the harder truths of years two and three, and now, the slow, uneven work of figuring out who you are on the other side of the worst thing you have ever lived through. We talk about the May Flowers Taylor George Foundation, which has helped ten families navigate burial expenses, sibling travel, and the crushing practical weight of sudden loss. We talk about Morgan and the particular heartbreak of watching a child grieve in a language she cannot fully speak. We talk about finding your people, even when they live a thousand miles away.

And we talk about what it means to still be figuring it out at year four. To not yet know exactly what God is asking of you next. To be healing without yet being whole.

Jam says it simply and beautifully near the end of our conversation: I honestly thought I would not survive it. And I am. It may not be pretty every day. But I'm surviving.

I want to say to every single one of you what my friend Michele used to say to me, again and again, when I told her I couldn't do this:

You are doing it.

It may not be pretty. It may not look the way you thought surviving was supposed to look. But every single day that you get up and live your life without your child, that is the work. That is surviving. And you are doing it.

Abnormalities.

That is the word that changed Matthew and his wife Hannah's lives forever. They went in for a routine ultrasound, their almost two-year-old son Walker playing happily beside them in the waiting room, and left knowing that their lives would never be the same, and that their son Noah was unlikely to live.

What followed was six months of hurrying up and waiting. Six months of grieving a diagnosis before they ever had to grieve a death. Six months of doctor's appointments and phone calls and learning, in real time, what it means to carry an impossible weight while the rest of the world keeps moving.

Noah was born with Trisomy 13, a genetic condition that is almost always fatal. He lived for 57 and a half hours. And Matthew will tell you, that was 57 and a half hours more than they ever expected to get.

In this conversation, Matthew shares what those hours looked like, what those six months looked like, and what the six years since have looked like. He talks honestly about the fog of grief, about learning to let people in, about the two questions he and Hannah developed that he believes saved their marriage. He talks about the moment a mentor told him it was okay to have a good day, and how he wept on the phone, because he couldn't imagine it. And he talks about how, five years after Noah's death, he sat down to journal on Noah's birthday and realized something that took his breath away.

Noah is the only son he never let down.

He was fully present for every moment of his son's entire life.

Out of that realization, and out of six years of quietly sending care packages to families navigating terminal diagnoses, came the Even Though We Will Foundation, and a book by the same name, released this week. The title is their family's mantra, rooted in Psalm 23. Even though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we will fear no evil. Not because Andy died, this happened. Not because Noah died, this came to be. But even though — and in that even though, something beautiful still can.

Matthew also writes about something rarely heard from a grieving father, what it looks like to watch your favorite person in the world suffer, and feel utterly powerless to fix it. What it means to be a doer, a leader, a fixer, and suddenly not be able to do any of those things. And what it means to fall back on a faith that, in the end, held them both.

Even Though We Will is available now at EvenThoughWeWill.com and on Amazon.

We are not meant to do this alone.

That is the thread that runs through every moment of this conversation, and these are the words Gwen chose to close with, because they are simply true.

This episode is a replay of our recent live Q&A, a chance to follow up on the four-week educational series Gwen so graciously offered in February while I took a much-needed step back. We talk openly about what that break was like for me, why I needed it, and what I learned from it, including the hard-won lesson that even sacred work can wear you down if you never put it down, even for a little while.

From there the conversation opens up into something larger. We talk about the value of support groups, of finding someone a few miles ahead of you on this road and letting them show you that it is possible to keep going. We talk about the difference between the raw, gut-wrenching suffering of early grief and the longing that comes later — the stone in your pocket that never goes away but changes shape over time. And we talk about why hearing someone else's story, knowing someone else feels exactly what you feel, can be the one small thing that makes a grieving parent feel just a little less alone.

Gwen also shares a story from her recent vacation that stopped me in my tracks, the story of a ten-year-old girl on a beach, a grieving mama watching from a distance, and a moment that could only have been arranged by God.

If you missed the educational series from February, those episodes are available in the feed — Episodes 334 through 337. And if you would like a discount code for private sessions with Gwen, simply reach out to either of us at marcy@andysmom.com or gwen@grief-guide.com and we will get that to you.

Because we are not meant to do this alone.

And we never have to.