How Maddie's Death Prepared Me for My Mom's Passing

My Mom passed away Thursday night.

She had a stroke the night before. She wasn't in pain. She went quietly. Comfortably. Surrounded by those who loved her. The way you hope for someone you love, even when hoping for it breaks your heart.

I was there. Our family was there.

And I was calm. And not performing calm for the people around me.

Actually calm.

And I know exactly why.

Eleven years ago, I lost my daughter Maddie.

I didn't know it then, but that loss, the grief work, the therapy, the thousands of conversations with other parents carrying impossible things, the purpose I slowly built from the wreckage of the worst moment of my life, was preparing me for this one.

Grief is a brutal teacher. But it teaches you things nothing else can. These are what my friend, Jason Mackenzie, has referred to a “The Gifts of Grief”.

It teaches you that love doesn't end when someone does. It teaches you that presence doesn't require a heartbeat. It teaches you that the people we lose don't always leave, sometimes they just change form.

Maddie taught me that.

She's been teaching me ever since.

When Mom passed, I felt Maddie on my shoulder.

That's the only way I know how to describe it. A calm I couldn't fully explain. A steadiness that didn't feel entirely like mine. The ability to be methodical, to help the people around me process what was happening, to hold the room while everyone else felt the weight of it.

It was surreal. At moments I felt outside my body, watching from a different vantage point, clear-eyed in a way that grief rarely allows.

That wasn't me.

That was Maddie.

Her presence was the gift she brought to that room. To our family. To a moment that could have broken all of us.

I've thought a lot about why. About what it means that losing a child could somehow prepare you for losing a parent. I think it's this, when you have survived the unsurvivable, when you have walked through the kind of grief most people cannot imagine and come out the other side changed but still standing, you develop a relationship with loss that is different from most people's.

You stop being afraid of it.

It hurts. Immeasurably.

But because you know, from the inside, that it doesn't destroy you.

Maddie showed me that. Every day for eleven years, she has shown me that.

We were in the ICU room when Mom passed.

Afterward, when the moment had settled, our family began to gather ourselves. Understanding the next steps. The practical things that arrive uninvited even in the most sacred moments.

I leaned over.

I kissed her on the forehead.

I told her I loved her.

And then I had to leave her there.

That was the moment I broke. It wasn’t from losing her, I had already begun to make peace with that in the quiet of those final hours. But from leaving her alone in that room. From walking out of a door and knowing she was still inside.

I didn't want to leave her alone.

I don't think I'll ever fully reconcile that moment. Some things aren't meant to be reconciled. They're just meant to be carried.

I know how to carry things now.

Maddie taught me that too.

My Dad just lost his partner of more than 60 years.

Sixty years. More than four times the length of Maddie's entire life. A love built across decades, across a family, across a life that became inseparable from another.

I don't know what that loss feels like. I can't.

But I know grief. I know the early days when it feels like the ground has disappeared beneath you. I know the moments when you reach for someone who isn't there and the absence is so physical it takes your breath away. I know what it means to recalibrate an entire existence around a presence that is suddenly gone.

Maddie is going to help me help him.

That's what I believe. That's what I feel.

She gave me eleven years of preparation for this. She gave me the calm when I needed it most. And now she'll give me the words, the patience, the lived experience to walk beside my Dad as he begins a journey I know something about.

He won't walk it alone.

None of us will.

My Mom gets to be with Maddie now.

I have held onto that since Thursday night and I will keep holding onto it. Two of the people I love most in this world, together somewhere I can't see but somehow still feel.

At times over the past eleven years, I thought it was supposed to be me.

There were seasons, dark ones, where I wondered why I was still here and she wasn't. Where the weight of it was heavy enough that I questioned the point of any of it.

I know now.

Maddie had another job in store for me.

To build something from the loss. To show up for thousands of strangers at 6am. To sit with my Dad in his grief and offer him what she gave me, the knowledge that the people we lose don't disappear.

They just find new ways to show up.

She showed up Thursday night.

She'll keep showing up.

That is her gift. To me. To our family. To every person who has ever found this page at their lowest moment and felt, for the first time, a little less alone.

If you're navigating grief, your own or someone you love, you don't have to carry it alone.

I love you, Mom. Thank Maddie for me when you see her.