A random Thursday where I start a blog.
Humbled…
Guys, I’m just so humbled after doing a TikTok live with the family last night. We have been having a particularly hard week. We attended the RescYOU Fest on Saturday. The RescYOU fest was the first fundraiser for a local non-profit that helps families who suffer child loss. We were the “anchor of hope” family of the year and we shared our story. While this was a wonderful (BUT HOT) event, Mom is always “extra sad” after any event involving the kids.
In addition to this, we are the “spotlight family” for the Sudden Impact program. I will explain more about this later, but we are filming so that we are the intro to every presentation for the upcoming year. In addition to what we film, we wanted to include some clips from the funeral. We are trying to make an impact on these young teen minds so that they can always remember our story and make good choices when it comes to safe driving. This has caused us to come across some funeral footage that we had not seen. I believe this is what has had Mom so sad these past few days. We have collected footage of the pallbearers rolling the caskets to their final resting places and also footage of the funeral procession with THREE hearses. Watching it six months later for the first time hurt just as much as the day of.
I say all of this to say that Mom has been particularly sad this week and had cried on and off all day yesterday. A lot of people, who are kinder than I can describe, had asked Kyle to create a wish list for his birthday last week. In true Mom fashion, she didn’t allow Kyle to open his gifts unless we did it on camera so that he could thank everyone. During the live while we were unboxing all of our PO box goodies, Kyle’s tattoos came up in discussion. We talked about how he planned to get a memorial tattoo/tattoos for the kids, but he just hadn’t decided on what to get yet. Lots of people graciously started offering to fund his tattoo. While this was absolutely not anything Kyle was asking for, everyone insisted on pitching in and paying for his tattoo. He started receiving venmo after venmo, cash app after cash app. He had the biggest smile on his face. It has been so long since we have seen a genuine smile on Kyle’s face. He has the softest heart and he has taken this loss so devastatingly hard. It really touched my mom’s heart to see him smile. On top of her own immense, unbearable grief, seeing her children grief so massively adds to the difficultly of each day. I just hung up the phone with her and she stated “as soon as I opened my eyes, I thought, ugh, another day.” She said that this is probably her most difficult week yet (and I can tell) aside from the beginning. It is just so difficult to see my mom go through such pain. My mom has had such a hard childhood (I can elaborate on this later) and has always kept the most wonderful attitude. I couldn’t think of a less-deserving person for this tragedy to happen to. As if that wasn’t enough to bless us, my ALWAYS HUNGRY daughter was bugging me for fast food, as usual, and everyone started demanding my venmo so that they could buy her dinner! She had also receiving lots of love from the PO box so she was already smiling. She received enough money to even buy some hoody from a youtuber that she follows. This blessed my momma heart because yesterday, she was in her room the entire day with the lights off and wouldn’t really answer any questions. I kept asking if anything was wrong and she would just say no. So seeing a smile on her face made my heart smile. I guess I am saying all of this to say thank you. Thank you to everyone who was on that live last night. Thank you to everyone who has sent gifts to the PO box. Thank you to everyone who leaves kind and encouraging words for us everyday. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. From the very bottom of our hearts, you have no idea how much this helps us get by each day.
It has been very heavy on my heart for the past two days to start blogging with Mom. What are you guys’ thoughts on this? Do you think it would help others that are grieving to read what we are going through? Would it make them feel less alone? I am giving it a try here and I guess I will see where this takes us.