I Spent Nine Years Trying to Get Back to the Person I Was Before I Lost Maddie. Last Year I Finally Stopped.
The Grief Didn't Break Me Into a Lesser Person. It Broke Me Into Someone I Couldn't Have Become Any Other Way
For more than nine years after I lost Maddie, I was trying to get back to the person I was before she died.
Last year I finally stopped.
I realized I was never meant to go back.
I didn't understand that for a long time. Grief has a way of making you believe that recovery means restoration. That if you just work hard enough, get enough support, build enough purpose around the loss, eventually you'll find your way back to the version of yourself that existed before everything fell apart.
I spent years chasing that person.
He was easier to be. Less complicated. Less cracked open. He hadn't learned yet what I now know, that the signs were there, that the distance between a parent and a child can widen quietly and quickly, and that love alone isn't enough if you don't know what you're looking at.
That man didn't know what he was looking at when his daughter was struggling.
I do.
Somewhere in the last year, something shifted.
I can't point to a single moment. It was more like a slow realization that arrived the way most important things do, quietly, when I wasn't looking for it.
For years, memories of Maddie came with weight attached. Sadness. Guilt. Regret. The endless loop of what I missed, what I could have done differently, what I wish I'd known.
I didn't see what was coming.
Today, those same memories make me smile. They make me laugh. They inspire me. I'll think of her in the car, probably because that's where she lived, in the passenger seat, high-fiving herself when she nailed the rap part of a Justin Bieber song, and instead of the ache, there's warmth. Instead of the weight, there's something that feels a lot like gratitude.
That shift is one I am genuinely grateful for. It didn't arrive on schedule. It just came, quietly, when I stopped looking backward long enough to notice what was actually in front of me.
I stopped measuring myself against who I used to be. And when I did, I noticed something I hadn't been able to see while I was still looking backward.
Maddie hadn't left.
She was right here. On this journey. In every conversation I have with a parent who finally decides to act. In every teenager who finds their footing before things fall apart. In every employer who starts paying attention to what their people are carrying home at the end of the day.
I realized I wasn't doing this alone.
I never was.
The MentorWell didn't start as a fully formed idea. It started as a question I kept asking myself in the years after I lost her: what would have helped? What did I not know that I needed to know? What would have made the difference between noticing and missing what was right in front of me?
For a long time it was just a concept. Something I talked about, thought about, circled back to.
Then it started taking shape. Real shape. Parents showing up. Conversations that went somewhere. A community that became something I couldn't have designed on purpose. There are 120 families from around the world, calling it the safest space they'd found. Kids getting support earlier. Parents acting before the crisis instead of after.
For more than a year, for the first time, it felt less like something I was building and more like something she and I were building together.
That changes everything about how I show up for it.
April 11th is six days away.
Eleven years since I lost her. The day I'll never stop carrying.
But this year I'm arriving at it differently. Not trying to get through it. Not measuring how far I've come from the worst version of those early days. Not looking back at all, really.
Just showing up. Alongside her. Doing the work.
I'll have more to say on Saturday.
In the meantime, if you're carrying something you haven't been able to put down, I see you. And I'm glad you're still here.
Chris Coulter is the founder of The MentorWell — a parent support and youth mentorship ecosystem built in memory of his daughter Maddie Coulter, June 28, 2000 — April 11, 2015.
Learn more at thementorwell.com
