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Losing a Child: Always Andy's Mom

As a pediatrician, married mom of three biological children and one foster son, my life was busy, rushing off to my office four days a week, seeing patients for three and working as a medical director of a local physician organization for one. I balanced this with rushing off to shuttle my kids to after sports and other after school activities. All of this changed one day in August of 2018 when my 14 year old son, Andy, was killed in a car accident. I felt like my life was over, and in some ways it was over, and a new life was forced to begin in its place. 

Grief is seldom discussed openly in our culture, and the death of a child makes people feel even more uncomfortable. On this blog and podcast, ‘Losing a Child: Always Andy’s Mom’, the topic is approached openly and honestly, speaking to people who have lost loved ones and experts who help care for them. Whether you are a parent experiencing loss or someone who wants to support another going through this tragedy, this blog and podcast strives to offer hope and help.

Jul 30, 2026

Jackie knew it was coming.

That is one of the hardest things about this kind of grief. For years, she had watched her son Sebastian struggle with mental health and addiction, and there came a point, as she puts it, where it was no longer an if but a when. She braced herself. She prepared. She thought maybe that would...


Jul 23, 2026

Payton loved rainbows.

She knew all the colors, knew them in order, and would paint them perfectly every time. But she always added a pink line at the bottom, because she simply could not understand why pink was not already there. Every single rainbow she ever painted had that extra pink line.

The Friday before she...


Jul 16, 2026

There is a line from Samuel Beckett that a friend whispered to Stephen outside the hospital room where his wife Kate was dying.

I can't go on. I'll go on.

It became, as Stephen says in his memoir, a pretty accurate summary of his life after Kate and Anna.

Anna came home from China at seven months old, a charming,...


Jul 9, 2026

Bryan carried the sadness.

That was his decision. Not the devastation, not the incapacitation, but the sadness. A conscious, daily choice to let his broken heart stay open rather than rebuild the walls around it. And in doing so, he discovered something he did not expect.

The broken heart made him better.

Noah was...


Jul 2, 2026

This week's episode didn't happen the way we planned.

It was supposed to be a livestream. And then, within the same week, both Gwen and I found ourselves facing something neither of us expected. My mother-in-law, who had been like a mother to me for nearly 30 years, was suddenly placed on hospice. Gwen's own...