I have three living children.
They lost two siblings.
There is no way to say that without it sounding abstract. It is not abstract. It is specific. It lives in childhood memories, shared bedrooms, inside jokes, and a history no one else carries the same way.
Grief did not move through our family in one direction. It split. It settled differently in each of us.
My children did not grieve the same way I did. They could not. They were not parents losing children. They were siblings losing their first best friends, their playmates, the people who knew the family before things broke.
Michael carried grief quietly. Practically. Life continued because it had to.
Nicole tried to understand it, to think through it, to place it somewhere that made sense.
Amanda felt it deeply but kept it contained, revealing pieces only when it felt right.
None of this was wrong. None of it was better or worse.
They were surviving something they never should have had to survive.
What complicated this even more is that one of the siblings they lost was also grieving the first loss herself. Kayla carried suicidal ideation long before she died. Sometime later, when we were beginning to understand the depth of her own struggle, she said something that startled me. She said she was angry that he did it first.
That sentence did not come from cruelty. It came from recognition. From fear. From identification. From a place where grief and danger were already living together.
Seeing what his death did to our family kept her alive longer. I believe that. She saw the devastation and understood what her absence would do. Love gave her resistance. It gave her friction. She fought hard to stay alive. She really did. Because she loved us.
Her fight does not disappear because of how her life ended.
Inside all of this, I struggled to be the kind of support I wanted to be for my living children. My own grief was overwhelming. I was losing a child while trying to remain a mother to the ones who stayed. My capacity narrowed. Love did not disappear, but my ability to carry everything at once did.
I was aware of their grief even when I could not tend to it the way I wished I could. I saw what they had lost even when I did not have words or energy left.
They did not need me to process their grief for them. They needed me to still exist as their mother in whatever shape I could manage. Sometimes that meant quiet presence. Sometimes shared silence. Sometimes mutual brokenness.
They carry this differently. I trust that.
They are still here. That matters.
And I want this written somewhere. That I see them. That I honor how they survived something that reshaped our family forever. That the children who stayed are not secondary to the children who died.
They are living with the same fractures. They just learned to walk on them in their own ways.
