It’s Been Six Years…
You know, grief is really weird. Like really, really weird. And what we’re learning is that it doesn’t get any less weird the longer you live with it. I’ve had a lot of thoughts swirling for the last two months and have spent a good bit of mental capacity trying to streamline them into words that fit together to make sentences that make even an ounce of sense. Not just for the sake of writing them down for anyone else to read, but also to better understand them myself.
(If you’re looking for the full story of Kamri’s life and medical journey, you can find it here. Since she passed away, I’ve been chronicling our walk through grief and you can find all of those reflections here.)
It’s been a trickier year for that than usual, as our season of “heightened” difficult emotions happens to be colliding headfirst with a season of heightened joy. This go around, we’ll have encountered Kamri’s 6th birthday (Dec. 28), the day she died (Jan. 20), and the birth of our last baby and second girl (Feb. 1) all within the span of just over a month… 35 days to be exact. I counted. 🙂 It’s A LOT. And yes, it feels like as much of “a lot” as it sounds like, but I also think that this little microcosm of seasonal experience is an unexpectedly accurate depiction of what grief looks like (for us), six years later… it’s a whole big mess of all of the life experiences; both the joyful and sorrowful ones. It’s everything all wrapped up together.
While that can be beautiful, sometimes it can also make it tricky to process, to untangle one thing from another. We see and feel it in the moments where we’re doing something we always dreamed of, like taking our family to Disney World last February in honor of her 5th birthday, while remembering standing in the same places after escaping to “the happiest place we could think of” after she died. Or when we’re celebrating the milestones we experience with other kids (ours included), while still painfully dreaming of what it would have been like to get to see them also happen for Kamri. Or, like over the last few months, trying to separate the grief of losing one child from the joy of welcoming another. Or even, to separate the realistic fears of an upcoming delivery from the past trauma-laden fears that just come from having been down this road before and having it not turn out like we thought or dreamed it would. Those moments.
There is some compartmentalizing that has to happen with this wild mix of life and to some extent, we can do that. Other times, it can feel near impossible. But I’m going to try, for the sake of my own ability to grasp it all… I’m going to try to separate some of the “here is what grief looks like now” from the “also, we’re about to enter into one of those (very layered) joyful life chapters and here’s the low down”. It’ll be two posts- worth and probably back to back because we are now T-minus TWO DAYS until it’s go time. And we all know that once that baby comes, there’s no telling when I’ll have the time or mental space to circle back and timestamp what life feels like TODAY, January 30, 2023… six years out and two days out, all at the same time. Six and two, a bizarre mix of reflection on the past and anticipation of the future. What a wild place to be. Today, I’ll work through the six. Tomorrow, the two.
So here it goes… what grief looks like in our world after six years.
We’ve learned that if grief is not something our culture talks about very often (we get it, they are uncomfortable waters to wade into), it certainly gets less talked about the longer the span of time someone experiences it. If we want to take it one step further, I think we could say that grief gets more challenging to wrap our minds around once we (intentionally or unintentionally) lean into the idea that “time heals all wounds” or, “we’re/they’re learning to live with it, so it seems less prevalent”. While there’s definitely truth to some of those sentiments (yes, time can be helpful in taming the ferocity and frequency of the initial grief waves and the “learning to live with it” is a healthy, natural adaptation to something that will be around for good), at the end of the day, it really doesn’t matter how much time has passed. Grief is grief and it’s weird. And painful. And present.
This is what I (re)learned this year. Year six. Six years of missing Kamri and mourning the loss of a life we thought we’d get to spend the rest of our days with. This was the year that I learned what it felt like to be reminded of the fact that it still really hurts. I should say, before we go down that road, I think the fact that, in some ways, the reason I had to be “reminded” is because, despite the ongoing hurt of loss, life has simultaneously been really beautiful, joyful, and full of hope these last six years.
We’ve grown so much in who we are and how we relate to the pain of losing Kamri. We talk about her and can talk about her pretty effortlessly, often without the presence of tough emotions or visual tears. We’ve learned how to answer (some of) our boys’ questions about her and where she is and when will she be coming back and when will we go and see her. We’ve worked so hard to hold her bedroom loosely enough that there are pieces that are there that will always be hers, while also allowing the room to flex and evolve so that each of our kids have been able to use and call it their own in some way. We’ve spent a lot (I mean, A LOT) of hours investing in our mental and emotional health in the counseling space and have put in so much effort to being the healthiest versions of ourselves as possible. We’ve gotten used to and sincerely welcome the messages we tend to get along the lines of “my co-worker is going through a miscarriage, what can I do to support her” or “our good friends just lost their baby, where do we even start in how to be there and care for them?”. It’s a unique place to be to be able to offer truth and insight into the pain that other’s may be experiencing and the types of support they may appreciate. We’ve been asked and said ‘yes’ to publicly sharing Kamri’s story, our walk with grieving her loss, and doing our best to represent the Lord, our faith, and our girl as best we can in those ways. We’ve learned the beautiful and heartbreaking role of being present for people in our own circles who are experiencing loss, their own versions of grief, or walking the painful road of having a child who is facing a medical condition that knocks you right off your feet as a parent and launches you into a dark, dark reality of “what will the end of this story look like?”. Six years brings a lot of roads travelled on this grief journey and a lot of growth because of it.
I think that’s why sometimes I forget. At the end of the day, even with all of the growth and “how far we’ve come”, grief is still grief. And it’s painful. And it’s present.
This is where grief is weird… sometimes it’s predictable and sometimes you just don’t see it coming until it’s a full-blown storm and you’re right in the middle of it. Predictably, year five was tough… for both of us. Five years old is a milestone birthday, one of the ones that sticks out as a benchmark year of your life. The milestones are hard. Another mile marker that stung a little extra happened about nine months after Kamri turned five… in September, Kamri would have started Kindergarten. The night before our school district had their first day of the 2022/2023 school year was a really sad one. It’s those moments when we remember what we lost and what we will never get to experience with our daughter. I started writing a post about what it felt like back then and never ended up finishing it, but here is some of what that moment of “milestone grief” felt like:
written on: Monday, August 29, 2022
Today was a first. For a lot of families, it was their child’s first day of school, some their very first day of Kindergarten. For us, it was one of the first significant milestones that hurt. You know, beyond the yearly birthdays… those days are tough, but they come once a year and we’ve learned how to navigate them, how to lean in when it feels sad and smile in genuine joy when it feels genuinely celebratory. But the life milestones? We haven’t hit too many of those yet… and I underestimated the feeling of the wave of grief that came rolling in last night when it hit me:
Our school district starts school tomorrow. Kamri is five, would be five if she were here. Tomorrow would be her first day of Kindergarten.
Some milestones are grayer in nature… kids start pre-school at different ages, lose teeth at unexpected times, learn how to ride a bike at some point in their childhood. I think maybe that’s why none of those felt like much of a loss comparatively. Sure, we would have loved to have walked her into pre-school for the first time, would have looked forward to playing tooth fairy, and would give a lot of things to watch our girl have enough breath in her lungs to pedal her first bike. Of course. But since all of those life moments don’t have a set date and time, there’s also not a set date and time to mourn them. Kindergarten, though? Dang. She’s five and school started today. This is it. This would have been it. I guess this is what losing Kamri feels like at year five. It still sucks. In some ways, more than ever.
And I guess that this… this is what grief looks like five years later.
I struggled a lot these last two months missing Kamri. I’ll write on behalf of myself, as although there are things Mitch and I share in how we experience grief, it’s not fair to him to speak on his behalf, as there are also things we experience quite differently. This past season was one of them. I think it was the perfect storm leading up to her birthday on December 28th that made this year, year six, particularly difficult. Without going too far into specifics, there were things I was personally involved with leading up to this season that left me feeling a bit more raw, having spent more time thinking about her by the time her actual birthday came around. For one, I had agreed to speak in a few different public settings on the topic of loss and how to navigate grief around the holiday season. Inevitably, in those moments, I will also share parts of Kamri’s story and, in turn, have to go to some pretty hard spaces and back to some dark moments in our story in order to do that. But it’s been six years and I am more equipped to be able to do so now, right? Yes. This is true, but as I learned this year, there is still personal cost and I underestimated the emotional toll it takes. By the time her birthday came around, I had already spent a month wading into some of the most painful places and memories and I was raw because of it. I found myself struggling in all of the quiet moments of December, feeling just so, so sad; tears so much more “at the ready” at any given moment. Her birthday wasn’t much different- while we did all of the fun, celebratory (and usual) traditions together, it was a hard day for me. In some ways, it felt like the kind of grief I felt in some of those initial days after she died, and made me wonder if really anything had changed from six years ago to now. I had underestimated the fact that even though it had been six years, I wasn’t immune to the ripple effects of being vulnerable and available with Kamri’s story and our journey of grief. They still, and will always, have personal impact and come at a personal cost. While that’s ok, it’s something I had to learn and something I’ll need to keep in mind, no matter “how long it’s been”.
Additionally, as you may or may not have heard… we’re expecting the final addition to our family, coming February 1st. A sweet baby girl. We are over the moon excited to welcome this little love, but as you can probably imagine, it has been a complex, unbelievably layered pregnancy experience. For all of us. I’ll save those musings (along with all the “we’re about to deliver our final baby in just a few days from writing this and we are ALL the emotions” thoughts) for another post. 🙂 What I will say here, though, is that this pregnancy, the timing of it, the fact that it’s a girl, the additional hormones… all of it, has added extra dimensions to this sixth year of our journey of grief.
And then, finally, I (maybe ‘we’) realized something about grief that wasn’t as apparent in the first few years and reminded us of what I’ve been saying since the beginning of this post: grief is painful and it is present, no matter how long it’s been. The thing about year six is that it’s taking on new facets that only come with the passing of time. And that is something I didn’t see coming.
I think what hit me hardest this year, this past season, was the fact that when you lose someone, there are no new developments. While the rest of the world continues to turn and progress, the story of loss doesn’t change. Sure, we evolve and the walk through that grief evolves with us if we allow it to, but the story stays the same. It doesn’t matter how much growth has happened, how many bridges we’ve crossed in the last six years- our story is still the same. This was perhaps the most painful realization for me over the last two months and something I am still feeling hurt by.
I am still the mom… I will always be the mom… that didn’t get to bring Kamri home. Mitch is still the dad that lost his daughter. No amount of time or growth or work we’ve done to heal will ever change that fact. That still is and will always be the story. And that really hurts. Even, and especially, six years later.
Along those same lines, there will never be anything more of Kamri available to us. The pictures and videos we have won’t increase year after year. There won’t be new memories to make with her, apart from whatever effort we put in to continue to include her in family moments. The stories of her life are the same and won’t be added to. What we have is what we’ll have forever and now that we’re six years out, we’re finding that this is new grief territory to us. This terrain feels foreign and will probably be what we need to learn to navigate next. What does it look like to be Kamri’s parents, walking this road of grief, now that the initial first five years have passed and we’re entering into what feels like the next chapter of time, but without anything new of her to engage with?
I don’t know the answer to that, but this is where we find ourselves six years later. Grief might not look like it did in year one, three, or even five. Some days do, certainly (for me, her birthday this year). But most don’t. Even January 20th, the day she died, felt like an “older, well-travelled path” this year. A day of the usual mild disorientation and pointless wandering about, not doing much of importance, until 7pm when we sit on the couch and just spend time being quiet with Kamri for the 25 minutes of her life. Waves of sadness, sure, but not as debilitating this particular year as maybe in days or years past.
Grief looks and feels different- in some triumphant, “look how far we’ve come” ways, but also in some defeating, “and there is so much left of this road to cover” ways too. And that’s ok, but it’s also good to know, helpful to keep in mind. We’ll always be learning new things about this and what we’ve learned about year six is that it’s that wild mix of the joy of continuing to live and the pain of continuing to hold. A mix of triumph at how far we’ve walked and weariness at thought of the “forever path” here on earth. And that, at year six, grief is still weird. And painful. And present.
And that’s ok.
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You know, grief is really weird. Like really, really weird. And what we’re learning is that it doesn’t get any less weird the longer you live with it. I’ve had a lot of thoughts swirling for the last two months and have spent a good bit of mental capacity trying to streamline them into words that fit together to make sentences that make even an ounce of sense. Not just for the sake of writing them down for anyone else to read, but also to better understand them myself.
(If you’re looking for the full story of Kamri’s life and medical journey, you can find it here. Since she passed away, I’ve been chronicling our walk through grief and you can find all of those reflections here.)
It’s been a trickier year for that than usual, as our season of “heightened” difficult emotions happens to be colliding headfirst with a season of heightened joy. This go around, we’ll have encountered Kamri’s 6th birthday (Dec. 28), the day she died (Jan. 20), and the birth of our last baby and second girl (Feb. 1) all within the span of just over a month… 35 days to be exact. I counted. 🙂 It’s A LOT. And yes, it feels like as much of “a lot” as it sounds like, but I also think that this little microcosm of seasonal experience is an unexpectedly accurate depiction of what grief looks like (for us), six years later… it’s a whole big mess of all of the life experiences; both the joyful and sorrowful ones. It’s everything all wrapped up together.
While that can be beautiful, sometimes it can also make it tricky to process, to untangle one thing from another. We see and feel it in the moments where we’re doing something we always dreamed of, like taking our family to Disney World last February in honor of her 5th birthday, while remembering standing in the same places after escaping to “the happiest place we could think of” after she died. Or when we’re celebrating the milestones we experience with other kids (ours included), while still painfully dreaming of what it would have been like to get to see them also happen for Kamri. Or, like over the last few months, trying to separate the grief of losing one child from the joy of welcoming another. Or even, to separate the realistic fears of an upcoming delivery from the past trauma-laden fears that just come from having been down this road before and having it not turn out like we thought or dreamed it would. Those moments.
There is some compartmentalizing that has to happen with this wild mix of life and to some extent, we can do that. Other times, it can feel near impossible. But I’m going to try, for the sake of my own ability to grasp it all… I’m going to try to separate some of the “here is what grief looks like now” from the “also, we’re about to enter into one of those (very layered) joyful life chapters and here’s the low down”. It’ll be two posts- worth and probably back to back because we are now T-minus TWO DAYS until it’s go time. And we all know that once that baby comes, there’s no telling when I’ll have the time or mental space to circle back and timestamp what life feels like TODAY, January 30, 2023… six years out and two days out, all at the same time. Six and two, a bizarre mix of reflection on the past and anticipation of the future. What a wild place to be. Today, I’ll work through the six. Tomorrow, the two.
So here it goes… what grief looks like in our world after six years.
We’ve learned that if grief is not something our culture talks about very often (we get it, they are uncomfortable waters to wade into), it certainly gets less talked about the longer the span of time someone experiences it. If we want to take it one step further, I think we could say that grief gets more challenging to wrap our minds around once we (intentionally or unintentionally) lean into the idea that “time heals all wounds” or, “we’re/they’re learning to live with it, so it seems less prevalent”. While there’s definitely truth to some of those sentiments (yes, time can be helpful in taming the ferocity and frequency of the initial grief waves and the “learning to live with it” is a healthy, natural adaptation to something that will be around for good), at the end of the day, it really doesn’t matter how much time has passed. Grief is grief and it’s weird. And painful. And present.
This is what I (re)learned this year. Year six. Six years of missing Kamri and mourning the loss of a life we thought we’d get to spend the rest of our days with. This was the year that I learned what it felt like to be reminded of the fact that it still really hurts. I should say, before we go down that road, I think the fact that, in some ways, the reason I had to be “reminded” is because, despite the ongoing hurt of loss, life has simultaneously been really beautiful, joyful, and full of hope these last six years.
We’ve grown so much in who we are and how we relate to the pain of losing Kamri. We talk about her and can talk about her pretty effortlessly, often without the presence of tough emotions or visual tears. We’ve learned how to answer (some of) our boys’ questions about her and where she is and when will she be coming back and when will we go and see her. We’ve worked so hard to hold her bedroom loosely enough that there are pieces that are there that will always be hers, while also allowing the room to flex and evolve so that each of our kids have been able to use and call it their own in some way. We’ve spent a lot (I mean, A LOT) of hours investing in our mental and emotional health in the counseling space and have put in so much effort to being the healthiest versions of ourselves as possible. We’ve gotten used to and sincerely welcome the messages we tend to get along the lines of “my co-worker is going through a miscarriage, what can I do to support her” or “our good friends just lost their baby, where do we even start in how to be there and care for them?”. It’s a unique place to be to be able to offer truth and insight into the pain that other’s may be experiencing and the types of support they may appreciate. We’ve been asked and said ‘yes’ to publicly sharing Kamri’s story, our walk with grieving her loss, and doing our best to represent the Lord, our faith, and our girl as best we can in those ways. We’ve learned the beautiful and heartbreaking role of being present for people in our own circles who are experiencing loss, their own versions of grief, or walking the painful road of having a child who is facing a medical condition that knocks you right off your feet as a parent and launches you into a dark, dark reality of “what will the end of this story look like?”. Six years brings a lot of roads travelled on this grief journey and a lot of growth because of it.
I think that’s why sometimes I forget. At the end of the day, even with all of the growth and “how far we’ve come”, grief is still grief. And it’s painful. And it’s present.
This is where grief is weird… sometimes it’s predictable and sometimes you just don’t see it coming until it’s a full-blown storm and you’re right in the middle of it. Predictably, year five was tough… for both of us. Five years old is a milestone birthday, one of the ones that sticks out as a benchmark year of your life. The milestones are hard. Another mile marker that stung a little extra happened about nine months after Kamri turned five… in September, Kamri would have started Kindergarten. The night before our school district had their first day of the 2022/2023 school year was a really sad one. It’s those moments when we remember what we lost and what we will never get to experience with our daughter. I started writing a post about what it felt like back then and never ended up finishing it, but here is some of what that moment of “milestone grief” felt like:
written on: Monday, August 29, 2022
Today was a first. For a lot of families, it was their child’s first day of school, some their very first day of Kindergarten. For us, it was one of the first significant milestones that hurt. You know, beyond the yearly birthdays… those days are tough, but they come once a year and we’ve learned how to navigate them, how to lean in when it feels sad and smile in genuine joy when it feels genuinely celebratory. But the life milestones? We haven’t hit too many of those yet… and I underestimated the feeling of the wave of grief that came rolling in last night when it hit me:
Our school district starts school tomorrow. Kamri is five, would be five if she were here. Tomorrow would be her first day of Kindergarten.
Some milestones are grayer in nature… kids start pre-school at different ages, lose teeth at unexpected times, learn how to ride a bike at some point in their childhood. I think maybe that’s why none of those felt like much of a loss comparatively. Sure, we would have loved to have walked her into pre-school for the first time, would have looked forward to playing tooth fairy, and would give a lot of things to watch our girl have enough breath in her lungs to pedal her first bike. Of course. But since all of those life moments don’t have a set date and time, there’s also not a set date and time to mourn them. Kindergarten, though? Dang. She’s five and school started today. This is it. This would have been it. I guess this is what losing Kamri feels like at year five. It still sucks. In some ways, more than ever.
And I guess that this… this is what grief looks like five years later.
I struggled a lot these last two months missing Kamri. I’ll write on behalf of myself, as although there are things Mitch and I share in how we experience grief, it’s not fair to him to speak on his behalf, as there are also things we experience quite differently. This past season was one of them. I think it was the perfect storm leading up to her birthday on December 28th that made this year, year six, particularly difficult. Without going too far into specifics, there were things I was personally involved with leading up to this season that left me feeling a bit more raw, having spent more time thinking about her by the time her actual birthday came around. For one, I had agreed to speak in a few different public settings on the topic of loss and how to navigate grief around the holiday season. Inevitably, in those moments, I will also share parts of Kamri’s story and, in turn, have to go to some pretty hard spaces and back to some dark moments in our story in order to do that. But it’s been six years and I am more equipped to be able to do so now, right? Yes. This is true, but as I learned this year, there is still personal cost and I underestimated the emotional toll it takes. By the time her birthday came around, I had already spent a month wading into some of the most painful places and memories and I was raw because of it. I found myself struggling in all of the quiet moments of December, feeling just so, so sad; tears so much more “at the ready” at any given moment. Her birthday wasn’t much different- while we did all of the fun, celebratory (and usual) traditions together, it was a hard day for me. In some ways, it felt like the kind of grief I felt in some of those initial days after she died, and made me wonder if really anything had changed from six years ago to now. I had underestimated the fact that even though it had been six years, I wasn’t immune to the ripple effects of being vulnerable and available with Kamri’s story and our journey of grief. They still, and will always, have personal impact and come at a personal cost. While that’s ok, it’s something I had to learn and something I’ll need to keep in mind, no matter “how long it’s been”.
Additionally, as you may or may not have heard… we’re expecting the final addition to our family, coming February 1st. A sweet baby girl. We are over the moon excited to welcome this little love, but as you can probably imagine, it has been a complex, unbelievably layered pregnancy experience. For all of us. I’ll save those musings (along with all the “we’re about to deliver our final baby in just a few days from writing this and we are ALL the emotions” thoughts) for another post. 🙂 What I will say here, though, is that this pregnancy, the timing of it, the fact that it’s a girl, the additional hormones… all of it, has added extra dimensions to this sixth year of our journey of grief.
And then, finally, I (maybe ‘we’) realized something about grief that wasn’t as apparent in the first few years and reminded us of what I’ve been saying since the beginning of this post: grief is painful and it is present, no matter how long it’s been. The thing about year six is that it’s taking on new facets that only come with the passing of time. And that is something I didn’t see coming.
I think what hit me hardest this year, this past season, was the fact that when you lose someone, there are no new developments. While the rest of the world continues to turn and progress, the story of loss doesn’t change. Sure, we evolve and the walk through that grief evolves with us if we allow it to, but the story stays the same. It doesn’t matter how much growth has happened, how many bridges we’ve crossed in the last six years- our story is still the same. This was perhaps the most painful realization for me over the last two months and something I am still feeling hurt by.
I am still the mom… I will always be the mom… that didn’t get to bring Kamri home. Mitch is still the dad that lost his daughter. No amount of time or growth or work we’ve done to heal will ever change that fact. That still is and will always be the story. And that really hurts. Even, and especially, six years later.
Along those same lines, there will never be anything more of Kamri available to us. The pictures and videos we have won’t increase year after year. There won’t be new memories to make with her, apart from whatever effort we put in to continue to include her in family moments. The stories of her life are the same and won’t be added to. What we have is what we’ll have forever and now that we’re six years out, we’re finding that this is new grief territory to us. This terrain feels foreign and will probably be what we need to learn to navigate next. What does it look like to be Kamri’s parents, walking this road of grief, now that the initial first five years have passed and we’re entering into what feels like the next chapter of time, but without anything new of her to engage with?
I don’t know the answer to that, but this is where we find ourselves six years later. Grief might not look like it did in year one, three, or even five. Some days do, certainly (for me, her birthday this year). But most don’t. Even January 20th, the day she died, felt like an “older, well-travelled path” this year. A day of the usual mild disorientation and pointless wandering about, not doing much of importance, until 7pm when we sit on the couch and just spend time being quiet with Kamri for the 25 minutes of her life. Waves of sadness, sure, but not as debilitating this particular year as maybe in days or years past.
Grief looks and feels different- in some triumphant, “look how far we’ve come” ways, but also in some defeating, “and there is so much left of this road to cover” ways too. And that’s ok, but it’s also good to know, helpful to keep in mind. We’ll always be learning new things about this and what we’ve learned about year six is that it’s that wild mix of the joy of continuing to live and the pain of continuing to hold. A mix of triumph at how far we’ve walked and weariness at thought of the “forever path” here on earth. And that, at year six, grief is still weird. And painful. And present.
And that’s ok.
Haven Kamri Thomas
You know, grief is really weird. Like really, really weird. And what we’re learning is that it doesn’t get any less weird the longer you live with it. I’ve had a lot of thoughts swirling for the last two months and have spent a good bit of mental capacity trying to streamline them into words that fit together to make sentences that make even an ounce of sense. Not just for the sake of writing them down for anyone else to read, but also to better understand them myself.
(If you’re looking for the full story of Kamri’s life and medical journey, you can find it here. Since she passed away, I’ve been chronicling our walk through grief and you can find all of those reflections here.)
It’s been a trickier year for that than usual, as our season of “heightened” difficult emotions happens to be colliding headfirst with a season of heightened joy. This go around, we’ll have encountered Kamri’s 6th birthday (Dec. 28), the day she died (Jan. 20), and the birth of our last baby and second girl (Feb. 1) all within the span of just over a month… 35 days to be exact. I counted. 🙂 It’s A LOT. And yes, it feels like as much of “a lot” as it sounds like, but I also think that this little microcosm of seasonal experience is an unexpectedly accurate depiction of what grief looks like (for us), six years later… it’s a whole big mess of all of the life experiences; both the joyful and sorrowful ones. It’s everything all wrapped up together.
While that can be beautiful, sometimes it can also make it tricky to process, to untangle one thing from another. We see and feel it in the moments where we’re doing something we always dreamed of, like taking our family to Disney World last February in honor of her 5th birthday, while remembering standing in the same places after escaping to “the happiest place we could think of” after she died. Or when we’re celebrating the milestones we experience with other kids (ours included), while still painfully dreaming of what it would have been like to get to see them also happen for Kamri. Or, like over the last few months, trying to separate the grief of losing one child from the joy of welcoming another. Or even, to separate the realistic fears of an upcoming delivery from the past trauma-laden fears that just come from having been down this road before and having it not turn out like we thought or dreamed it would. Those moments.
There is some compartmentalizing that has to happen with this wild mix of life and to some extent, we can do that. Other times, it can feel near impossible. But I’m going to try, for the sake of my own ability to grasp it all… I’m going to try to separate some of the “here is what grief looks like now” from the “also, we’re about to enter into one of those (very layered) joyful life chapters and here’s the low down”. It’ll be two posts- worth and probably back to back because we are now T-minus TWO DAYS until it’s go time. And we all know that once that baby comes, there’s no telling when I’ll have the time or mental space to circle back and timestamp what life feels like TODAY, January 30, 2023… six years out and two days out, all at the same time. Six and two, a bizarre mix of reflection on the past and anticipation of the future. What a wild place to be. Today, I’ll work through the six. Tomorrow, the two.
So here it goes… what grief looks like in our world after six years.
We’ve learned that if grief is not something our culture talks about very often (we get it, they are uncomfortable waters to wade into), it certainly gets less talked about the longer the span of time someone experiences it. If we want to take it one step further, I think we could say that grief gets more challenging to wrap our minds around once we (intentionally or unintentionally) lean into the idea that “time heals all wounds” or, “we’re/they’re learning to live with it, so it seems less prevalent”. While there’s definitely truth to some of those sentiments (yes, time can be helpful in taming the ferocity and frequency of the initial grief waves and the “learning to live with it” is a healthy, natural adaptation to something that will be around for good), at the end of the day, it really doesn’t matter how much time has passed. Grief is grief and it’s weird. And painful. And present.
This is what I (re)learned this year. Year six. Six years of missing Kamri and mourning the loss of a life we thought we’d get to spend the rest of our days with. This was the year that I learned what it felt like to be reminded of the fact that it still really hurts. I should say, before we go down that road, I think the fact that, in some ways, the reason I had to be “reminded” is because, despite the ongoing hurt of loss, life has simultaneously been really beautiful, joyful, and full of hope these last six years.
We’ve grown so much in who we are and how we relate to the pain of losing Kamri. We talk about her and can talk about her pretty effortlessly, often without the presence of tough emotions or visual tears. We’ve learned how to answer (some of) our boys’ questions about her and where she is and when will she be coming back and when will we go and see her. We’ve worked so hard to hold her bedroom loosely enough that there are pieces that are there that will always be hers, while also allowing the room to flex and evolve so that each of our kids have been able to use and call it their own in some way. We’ve spent a lot (I mean, A LOT) of hours investing in our mental and emotional health in the counseling space and have put in so much effort to being the healthiest versions of ourselves as possible. We’ve gotten used to and sincerely welcome the messages we tend to get along the lines of “my co-worker is going through a miscarriage, what can I do to support her” or “our good friends just lost their baby, where do we even start in how to be there and care for them?”. It’s a unique place to be to be able to offer truth and insight into the pain that other’s may be experiencing and the types of support they may appreciate. We’ve been asked and said ‘yes’ to publicly sharing Kamri’s story, our walk with grieving her loss, and doing our best to represent the Lord, our faith, and our girl as best we can in those ways. We’ve learned the beautiful and heartbreaking role of being present for people in our own circles who are experiencing loss, their own versions of grief, or walking the painful road of having a child who is facing a medical condition that knocks you right off your feet as a parent and launches you into a dark, dark reality of “what will the end of this story look like?”. Six years brings a lot of roads travelled on this grief journey and a lot of growth because of it.
I think that’s why sometimes I forget. At the end of the day, even with all of the growth and “how far we’ve come”, grief is still grief. And it’s painful. And it’s present.
This is where grief is weird… sometimes it’s predictable and sometimes you just don’t see it coming until it’s a full-blown storm and you’re right in the middle of it. Predictably, year five was tough… for both of us. Five years old is a milestone birthday, one of the ones that sticks out as a benchmark year of your life. The milestones are hard. Another mile marker that stung a little extra happened about nine months after Kamri turned five… in September, Kamri would have started Kindergarten. The night before our school district had their first day of the 2022/2023 school year was a really sad one. It’s those moments when we remember what we lost and what we will never get to experience with our daughter. I started writing a post about what it felt like back then and never ended up finishing it, but here is some of what that moment of “milestone grief” felt like:
written on: Monday, August 29, 2022
Today was a first. For a lot of families, it was their child’s first day of school, some their very first day of Kindergarten. For us, it was one of the first significant milestones that hurt. You know, beyond the yearly birthdays… those days are tough, but they come once a year and we’ve learned how to navigate them, how to lean in when it feels sad and smile in genuine joy when it feels genuinely celebratory. But the life milestones? We haven’t hit too many of those yet… and I underestimated the feeling of the wave of grief that came rolling in last night when it hit me:
Our school district starts school tomorrow. Kamri is five, would be five if she were here. Tomorrow would be her first day of Kindergarten.
Some milestones are grayer in nature… kids start pre-school at different ages, lose teeth at unexpected times, learn how to ride a bike at some point in their childhood. I think maybe that’s why none of those felt like much of a loss comparatively. Sure, we would have loved to have walked her into pre-school for the first time, would have looked forward to playing tooth fairy, and would give a lot of things to watch our girl have enough breath in her lungs to pedal her first bike. Of course. But since all of those life moments don’t have a set date and time, there’s also not a set date and time to mourn them. Kindergarten, though? Dang. She’s five and school started today. This is it. This would have been it. I guess this is what losing Kamri feels like at year five. It still sucks. In some ways, more than ever.
And I guess that this… this is what grief looks like five years later.
I struggled a lot these last two months missing Kamri. I’ll write on behalf of myself, as although there are things Mitch and I share in how we experience grief, it’s not fair to him to speak on his behalf, as there are also things we experience quite differently. This past season was one of them. I think it was the perfect storm leading up to her birthday on December 28th that made this year, year six, particularly difficult. Without going too far into specifics, there were things I was personally involved with leading up to this season that left me feeling a bit more raw, having spent more time thinking about her by the time her actual birthday came around. For one, I had agreed to speak in a few different public settings on the topic of loss and how to navigate grief around the holiday season. Inevitably, in those moments, I will also share parts of Kamri’s story and, in turn, have to go to some pretty hard spaces and back to some dark moments in our story in order to do that. But it’s been six years and I am more equipped to be able to do so now, right? Yes. This is true, but as I learned this year, there is still personal cost and I underestimated the emotional toll it takes. By the time her birthday came around, I had already spent a month wading into some of the most painful places and memories and I was raw because of it. I found myself struggling in all of the quiet moments of December, feeling just so, so sad; tears so much more “at the ready” at any given moment. Her birthday wasn’t much different- while we did all of the fun, celebratory (and usual) traditions together, it was a hard day for me. In some ways, it felt like the kind of grief I felt in some of those initial days after she died, and made me wonder if really anything had changed from six years ago to now. I had underestimated the fact that even though it had been six years, I wasn’t immune to the ripple effects of being vulnerable and available with Kamri’s story and our journey of grief. They still, and will always, have personal impact and come at a personal cost. While that’s ok, it’s something I had to learn and something I’ll need to keep in mind, no matter “how long it’s been”.
Additionally, as you may or may not have heard… we’re expecting the final addition to our family, coming February 1st. A sweet baby girl. We are over the moon excited to welcome this little love, but as you can probably imagine, it has been a complex, unbelievably layered pregnancy experience. For all of us. I’ll save those musings (along with all the “we’re about to deliver our final baby in just a few days from writing this and we are ALL the emotions” thoughts) for another post. 🙂 What I will say here, though, is that this pregnancy, the timing of it, the fact that it’s a girl, the additional hormones… all of it, has added extra dimensions to this sixth year of our journey of grief.
And then, finally, I (maybe ‘we’) realized something about grief that wasn’t as apparent in the first few years and reminded us of what I’ve been saying since the beginning of this post: grief is painful and it is present, no matter how long it’s been. The thing about year six is that it’s taking on new facets that only come with the passing of time. And that is something I didn’t see coming.
I think what hit me hardest this year, this past season, was the fact that when you lose someone, there are no new developments. While the rest of the world continues to turn and progress, the story of loss doesn’t change. Sure, we evolve and the walk through that grief evolves with us if we allow it to, but the story stays the same. It doesn’t matter how much growth has happened, how many bridges we’ve crossed in the last six years- our story is still the same. This was perhaps the most painful realization for me over the last two months and something I am still feeling hurt by.
I am still the mom… I will always be the mom… that didn’t get to bring Kamri home. Mitch is still the dad that lost his daughter. No amount of time or growth or work we’ve done to heal will ever change that fact. That still is and will always be the story. And that really hurts. Even, and especially, six years later.
Along those same lines, there will never be anything more of Kamri available to us. The pictures and videos we have won’t increase year after year. There won’t be new memories to make with her, apart from whatever effort we put in to continue to include her in family moments. The stories of her life are the same and won’t be added to. What we have is what we’ll have forever and now that we’re six years out, we’re finding that this is new grief territory to us. This terrain feels foreign and will probably be what we need to learn to navigate next. What does it look like to be Kamri’s parents, walking this road of grief, now that the initial first five years have passed and we’re entering into what feels like the next chapter of time, but without anything new of her to engage with?
I don’t know the answer to that, but this is where we find ourselves six years later. Grief might not look like it did in year one, three, or even five. Some days do, certainly (for me, her birthday this year). But most don’t. Even January 20th, the day she died, felt like an “older, well-travelled path” this year. A day of the usual mild disorientation and pointless wandering about, not doing much of importance, until 7pm when we sit on the couch and just spend time being quiet with Kamri for the 25 minutes of her life. Waves of sadness, sure, but not as debilitating this particular year as maybe in days or years past.
Grief looks and feels different- in some triumphant, “look how far we’ve come” ways, but also in some defeating, “and there is so much left of this road to cover” ways too. And that’s ok, but it’s also good to know, helpful to keep in mind. We’ll always be learning new things about this and what we’ve learned about year six is that it’s that wild mix of the joy of continuing to live and the pain of continuing to hold. A mix of triumph at how far we’ve walked and weariness at thought of the “forever path” here on earth. And that, at year six, grief is still weird. And painful. And present.
And that’s ok.