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.
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- Episode 360: Find the Light. Walk to It. - Lily's Mom
Aug 6, 2026
Jamie's mother gave her a gift years before she knew she would
need it.
Her mother would say, "During times of darkness, find a little bit of light. Stand in it. Be still and wait for the next bit. Then walk to that light."
It sounds simple. And then you lose your child, and you understand what it actually costs to do it.
Jamie lost her daughter Lily in September of 2025. Lily was eighteen years old, a lionheart, a girl who was fierce and loyal and creative and strong, who was studying to be a primary school teacher, who loved animals and made Christmas crafts for the whole family every year, whose last tattoo was her grandmother's birth flower in her grandmother's own handwriting. She died suddenly on a Saturday night after finishing a double shift at work, from a previously undiagnosed cardiac condition, and Jamie's world was split in two - a before, and an after, and a rupture so complete that nothing on the other side of it looked the same.
And yet she has kept walking. One small bit of light at a time.
The best friend who happened to have become a funeral director just five years earlier, and who was called to Lily's body that very night, and who knew immediately to take her fingerprints. The podcast that found Jamie at exactly the right moment, even though she had been searching for months. The counselor who drew a circle and said grief never gets smaller, but your world grows bigger around it, and the people who stay help you carry it. The TikTok reel Lily had made of everything that mattered to her, shown to her by a friend at the exact moment Jamie was paralyzed in her daughter's room, not knowing what to keep. Lily's friends, still coming over, still sitting in her room, all wearing lily tattoos on their wrists.
Light. And then another. And then another.
Jamie says it plainly near the end of this conversation, quoting something she had heard on this very podcast: God protects us from nothing. But he sustains us through all things.
She believes that. And the ten months since Lily died are her proof.
Find the light. Walk to it. Be still.