Losing a Child: Always Andy's Mom

Broken isn't bad. That is what Joann told me, plainly and without apology. She said she is broken, that she is part of a group she never asked to join, and that broken isn't bad. I told her I am eight years out from losing Andy and that the same is true for me. I am broken. My whole family is broken. It does not look the way it did in those first days, but I would be lying if I said it has gone away. We spend so much energy hiding it, apologizing for it, or waiting for the day we can say we are fine. Joann just says it out loud, and she is not ashamed of it. Recently, someone who had just lost his son sent me a text that said, I feel so broken. I did not know what he wanted me to say. I could not promise him he would not always feel that way. What I can tell him is what Joann told me: it is not a flaw. It is just the way we are now. Joann lost her twenty-nine-year-old son Philippe in Brooklyn in August of 2024. In the two years since, she has gotten a dangerous street closed, cared for her husband through a serious illness, and started doing stand-up comedy, where she says the words my son was killed out loud and then gets a room full of strangers laughing at the things people say at funerals. God needed another angel? What, is heaven understaffed? That is what broken looks like when it is honest. She cries in the supermarket and does not care who sees. She laughs on stage at five o'clock, the early bird slot. She hates the word heal. What she believes in is being comfortable feeling uncomfortable, and giving ourselves a break. If you have ever been made to feel that you should be fixed by now, or that something is wrong with you because you are still broken, this conversation is for you. Bring a tissue, and be ready to laugh.

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.