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.