Episode 8 The Part I Never Talked About

Trigger Warning: This episode contains discussion of the death of a child, SIDS, grief, loss, and the devastating emotional pain that follows. Some of the content may be difficult or triggering for listeners who have experienced child loss or bereavement. Please listen when you feel emotionally safe to do so.Sometimes an episode isn’t planned.Sometimes it simply comes from somewhere inside you that says, I need to share this.This is one of those episodes.For Episode Eight, I’m sharing some of my crumbs of pain—pieces of writing I originally wrote in my very first book, Inside Me, alongside parts of my own story that I’ve carried for many years.I’m going to talk about my daughter, Maxie, and the devastating loss of her life to SIDS. I’ll talk about the kind of love that can be so enormous that when it is suddenly taken from you, it feels like it has destroyed every part of you.Because sometimes we don’t understand just how deeply we can love someone until we are forced to live without them.There are pieces of grief that never completely disappear. We learn to carry them differently. We learn how to breathe around them. We learn that healing doesn’t mean forgetting, and it certainly doesn’t mean that the pain never visits again.I’m still coming through it.Maybe I always will be.But I came through places I once thought would destroy me.And within those places, I found words.Words that became Inside Me. Words that held my pain when I couldn’t. Words that eventually helped me begin to understand that even the deepest wounds can become part of the story of who we are—not the end of it.So today, I’m opening those pages again.These are my crumbs of pain.And perhaps, somewhere within them, you might find a crumb of your own.