Losing a Child: Always Andy's Mom

Marcy Larson, MD
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  • Mental Health
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When pediatrician mom of three, Marcy Larson's 14 yo son, Andy, was killed in a car accident in 2018, she felt like her life was over. In many ways, that life was over, and a new one forced to begin in its place. Come alongside her as she works through this journey of healing. She discusses grief and child loss with other grieving parents and those who work to help them in their grief. This podcast is for grieving parents and well as those who support them.

  1. 1h ago

    Episode 362: Even Still, She Was Joy - Ellie's Mama

    Kayla called her God's baby from the very beginning. She had been through six or seven miscarriages before Ellie arrived, and from the moment Ellie was born eight weeks early with a heart condition so severe the doctors were not sure she would make it, Kayla understood something in her bones: this child may not be hers to keep. She was only hers to love. And love her she did. For 574 days in the hospital. Through intestinal surgery and open-heart surgery and ECMO twice and sepsis and a tracheostomy and every obstacle that life and medicine could throw at a tiny, premature little girl who had no idea she was supposed to be defeated. That is the thing about Ellie. She did not get the memo. She gave wicked side-eyes to the nurses who dared take her temperature. She pretended to be asleep when the physical therapist walked in, then opened her eyes the moment she left. She played with her balloon with her oxygen saturation in the thirties. She said mama for the first and only time right before her tracheostomy, as if she knew exactly what her mama needed to hear. When her surgeon came in with the clamp trial running and the whole room holding its breath, Ellie was kicking. She was always kicking. And in her final months at home, through all of it, she was happy. Kayla says near the end of this conversation something that I have not been able to stop thinking about. She says she has joy and she has grief, and one is her right foot and one is her left foot, and you cannot walk without both. She will walk like that for the rest of her life. And I think that is Ellie's greatest gift to her mama. Not just the side-eye and the balloons and the rattle toy and the one perfect "mama" - but the living proof that joy and suffering are not opposites. That a person can be in both at the same time, fully and completely, and still choose joy. Ellie did it every single day of her life, with her oxygen in the thirties and her chest full of tubes and the whole medical world bracing for the worst. Now, her mama, Kayla, tries to follow in her daughter's footsteps as she navigates this new life without her. Kayla also says this: there is an Ellie-shaped hole in her heart, and she will die with it. Not as a wound, but as a shape. The exact outline of a little girl who proved that even in the hardest, most impossible life, joy finds a way through. Not because Ellie's life was too small. But because it was so very full.

  2. Aug 13

    Episode 361: Let Me Be Sad

    There are many terms I have heard when talking about the anniversary of your child's death - Heaven Day. Angelversary. Going Home Day. But today, Gwen gave us a new one that she found in the book, Rare Bird - Crappiversary. It made us laugh. And then it made us cry. Because it is exactly right. Some days deserve to be named accurately. Some days do not need to be dressed up or softened or reframed into something more palatable. Some days just need to be what they are. This week, two of those days fall within three days of each other. August 12th and August 15th - the anniversaries of Caleb's death and Andy's death. And this episode releases on August 13th, right between them. Gwen asked Chrisy and me what we would write on a t-shirt for the anniversary. Chrisy said: I'm sad. I can't fix it. So let me be sad. I said: Today sucks and I need a hug. We mean it. Not as defeat. Not as a loss of hope. But as a radical act of honesty that this community understands better than anyone. Because one of the hardest things about the anniversary is the pressure, the pressure to act ok for the people around you, to reassure others that you are fine, to receive platitudes graciously when what you actually need is for someone to just sit with you in it. What helps is not the person who tries to fix it. What helps is the friend who texts to say, I hear Imagine Dragons and I think of your son. What helps is someone who says, today sucks, and I love you. What helps is not being alone in the weight of it. Grief requires work. Hard, daily, unglamorous work. And it does get more manageable over time, lighter, less sharp. The darkness is not as overwhelming as it once was, and it is easier and easier to find the next small bit of light to walk toward. But the anniversary is still the crappiversary. And it is okay to say so. Let me be sad. Just for today. Just for this.

  3. Aug 6

    Episode 360: Find the Light. Walk to It. - Lily's Mom

    div]:bg-bg-000/50 [&_pre>div]:border-0.5 [&_pre>div]:border-border-400 [&_.ignore-pre-bg>div]:bg-transparent [&_.standard-markdown_:is(p,blockquote,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)]:pl-2 [&_.standard-markdown_:is(p,blockquote,ul,ol,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)]:pr-8 [&_.progressive-markdown_:is(p,blockquote,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)]:pl-2 [&_.progressive-markdown_:is(p,blockquote,ul,ol,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)]:pr-8">     div]:bg-bg-000/50 [&_pre>div]:border-0.5 [&_pre>div]:border-border-400 [&_.ignore-pre-bg>div]:bg-transparent [&_.standard-markdown_:is(p,blockquote,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)]:pl-2 [&_.standard-markdown_:is(p,blockquote,ul,ol,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)]:pr-8 [&_.progressive-markdown_:is(p,blockquote,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)]:pl-2 [&_.progressive-markdown_:is(p,blockquote,ul,ol,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)]:pr-8"> 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.

  4. Jul 30

    Episode 359: A Season of Tears - Sebastian's Mom

    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 soften the blow. It did not. Sebastian was Jackie's firstborn, a towheaded, blue-eyed dynamo who walked at ten months old and never really stopped moving. He was curious about everything, passionate about soccer, and a national chess champion not once but twice before he decided it was no longer cool. He played D2 college soccer, loved the outdoors, and could make a room come alive. He and Jackie were so much alike that they butted heads constantly, but they always knew they loved each other. His last words to her were I love you, Mom. He died by suicide in 2017 at the age of 23. He was in a rehab program. He was supposed to be safe. Jackie says she never found herself angry at God, but she was angry at Sebastian for a long time. She clung to Jesus anyway. She went to church and hid in the front corner of the earliest service where nobody knew her, and she cried for two years. She went walking every day and listened to her Bible, unable to read it, barely retaining any of it, but letting it wash over her. She could only get through the Psalms, underlining every lament. She told people simply: I cannot see God in the midst of this, but I know He is there. Where else am I going to go? She calls those first years her season of tears. And she allowed herself to be in it. What she has built on the other side of it is remarkable. After thirteen writing classes, years of anonymous essays on Substack, and the steady encouragement of a writing coach and a grief counselor she would read her writing aloud to, Jackie has written a book. It is called Messy Mourning: Hope for Mothers Grieving the Loss of a Child by Suicide, and it is written specifically for the mothers who know this particular grief, the grief that comes wrapped in silence, the grief no one quite knows what to say about. Jackie is clear: suicide loss is different. Not harder or easier than other losses, but different. The world does not know how to respond to it. People go quiet. Well-meaning things get said that land like stones. And beneath it all, there is still an unspoken stigma that Jackie is determined to push back against with every word she writes. Her son was more than how he died. Her season of tears was not the end of her story. And no mother who has lost a child this way should have to carry it alone. Messy Mourning is available on Amazon and at JackieMBaker.com, where you can also find companion resources including a journal, a 30-day lament guide, and a playlist her daughter made in Sebastian's memory.

  5. Jul 23

    Episode 358: The Conversation that Keeps Us - Payton's Mom

    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 died, she painted one more. It was still drying on the easel at her Christian school when her class came in on Monday morning. Payton was five years old, a ray of sunshine with bright blue eyes and blonde hair, the kind of little girl who would run up to someone she had never met, say hi, give them a hug, and be ready to go be best friends. She cheered for her little brother Blake when he struggled to hit milestones. She gave her toys away to neighbors because that was just who she was. She asked endless questions about heaven, about the colors no one on earth has ever seen yet. On the Sunday before Thanksgiving, she was struck and killed by a neighbor's car while walking her little brother around their quiet neighborhood circle. Holly is an ER nurse and a paramedic. She ran CPR on her own daughter in the entryway of their home, called her hospital to get the trauma team ready, and walked through the trauma bay knowing exactly where she was going. She was usually the calm during someone else's storm. That day, she could not be that for her own child. Payton was gone that afternoon. In this conversation, Holly speaks with remarkable honesty about the six months since, about navigating grief alongside a new baby, about walking away from a career she has loved since she was eighteen, about the foundation (Payton's Pink Rainbow Project) she and her husband started in Payton's name, and about a faith that has been shaken to its core, but has not let go. She tells God every single day: I am so mad at you. But I am going to remain faithful. Some days she does not believe the words when she says them. She says them anyway. And her friend asked her something that stopped her cold. When you are doubting God, who are you actually talking to? If you did not believe He was real, you would not be in conversation at all. I shared something I carried early in my own grief. As long as I was angry at God, that meant I believed He existed. And as long as I believe He exists, I am okay. The conversations may be cruddy. But as long as we are still having them, we are okay. That is the conversation that keeps us.

  6. Jul 16

    Episode 357: I Can't Go On; I'll Go On - Anna's Dad

    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, sweet, luminously happy little girl who had a gift for drawing people to her. Children would flock to her on the playground, sensing something in her they could not name. She loved music, loved to sing, loved every meal she was ever given. She also had a rare and devastating neurogenetic disorder called Niemann-Pick Type C, diagnosed when she was five, after a fall and a head bleed led doctors to notice her enlarged liver and spleen. They told Stephen and Kate she would likely not live past thirteen. She lived to be twenty. Kate died of lung cancer in March of 2012, three years before Anna. She walked into the hospital on her own, refused to let Stephen call an ambulance, would not let him help her through the door. Doctors were puzzled by how a woman with a tumor wrapped around her lung could still be walking around. It was, Stephen says quietly, very much on brand for her. He was left to grieve his wife while watching his daughter continue her slow decline, and to hold his younger daughter Jane together through all of it. He did not do it gracefully. He did it the only way anyone does it. Imperfectly. One foot, then the other. I recognized something in Stephen's words that I have carried in my own grief. There were so many days when I turned to my dear friend and said, I can't do this. And every time, she looked right back at me and said, Marcy, you are doing this. That is the whole of it, right there. You feel like you cannot, and somehow, impossibly, you do. Stephen's memoir, A Ribbon for Your Hair, captures that truth with a writer's precision and a father's aching heart. He reflects on the weather of grief, how you live in it, how sometimes you notice it and sometimes it is just there. He shares the grief advice he received over the years, much of it well-meaning, almost none of it useful. And he stands on a sidewalk outside the apartment where he and Kate were once happy, weeping, while strangers walk past him as if nothing in the world has changed. Because for them, nothing has. That is grief's loneliest truth. He survived it because he had to. Because Jane needed him. Because that is what we do. I can't go on. I'll go on. A Ribbon for Your Hair is available on Amazon and wherever books are sold.

  7. Jul 9

    Episode 356: The Broken Heart Stays Open - Noah's Dad

    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 Bryan's son, born in 1987, a boy of rare and tender empathy who greeted his father every morning before work and asked, at ten years old, to attend the funeral of a classmate's father because he already knew, somehow, how to be present in someone else's pain. He grew into a young man full of promise, studying finance and Chinese, warm and funny and deeply loved. And then, quietly, the opioid crisis found him. He once told his father that the first time he took one of those drugs, it was the first time in his life he had ever felt completely free of anxiety. What followed were years of loving a child through addiction. Rehab. Sobriety. Relapse. Bryan eventually had to fire his own son from the company he ran. He and his wife told Noah they could no longer pay his rent, that they would support his recovery but not his destruction. Noah understood. He said a friend would drive him to rehab. The call from rehab never came. Bryan had the police do a welfare check. Noah was gone. In the years since, Bryan made a choice. He would not rebuild what grief had torn down. He would stay open, stay soft, stay reachable by other people's suffering. Because he had come to understand that as long as we tell ourselves we are safe, as long as we build the little narratives that say the worst cannot happen to us, we create invisible walls between ourselves and everyone around us who is hurting. Grief demolished those walls. And in their rubble, something beautiful grew. One evening, Bryan and his wife Carolyn walked together and reached the familiar dead end of the why. And one of them said, simply, oh well. And they both laughed. Not because anything was less sad. But because releasing the need for an answer brought such relief that joy slipped in uninvited, right through the broken places. Joy and sorrow are not opposites. The broken heart that stays open is the one that feels everything more deeply. Carrying deep sadness, Bryan says, is a condition for me being as compassionate a person as I can be. Bryan's book, The Gift of a Broken Heart, is available wherever books are sold and at thegiftofabrokenheart.com.

  8. Jul 2

    Episode 355 - No One Right Way – Gwen & Marcy

    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 mother was in hospice as well. We looked at each other and simply said, we cannot do a livestream this week. So we didn't. We let it be smaller, quieter, and just the two of us. And in a strange way, that became exactly the right backdrop for the topic at hand. This episode is built around questions we posed to our community about navigating grief alongside the demands of daily work. What tips would you share about going back to work? How do you balance the daily grind of work and your grief? Do your coworkers and bosses know the pain you carry, and how much do you disclose? The answers that poured in revealed something important. There is no one right way to do this. Some of you went back to work and told everyone everything. Others went back and told no one at all. Some of you simply could not go back, not to the same job, not to any job, at least not yet. All of those are valid. All of those are normal, depending on your circumstances, your safety, and what you personally need in order to function. Practical tips came pouring in too, like asking for help navigating FMLA paperwork, returning part-time before full-time, and clearly communicating boundaries to coworkers and supervisors rather than trying to silently muscle through. Some of you found that work became a meaningful place to honor your child, while others found it became a place to set grief aside for a few hours, a kind of necessary, temporary relief. The conversation around disclosure was especially honest. Some workplaces respond with grace and flexibility, and others do not. Some losses carry complicated layers underneath them that need to stay private for many reasons. Disclosure is not a one-time decision but something navigated moment by moment, situation by situation, for the rest of your life. And things change. I once believed I could never see patients again, retreating into administrative work instead, only to find myself months later unable to bear administrative work at all, wanting nothing but my patients back. A job that meant nothing before a child's death can become someone's entire calling afterward. Grief and work are not static, and neither are we. If you are navigating this balance yourself right now, we hope this conversation reminds you that whatever choice you have made, or are making, is the right one for you. There is no universal answer here. There is only yours.

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About

When pediatrician mom of three, Marcy Larson's 14 yo son, Andy, was killed in a car accident in 2018, she felt like her life was over. In many ways, that life was over, and a new one forced to begin in its place. Come alongside her as she works through this journey of healing. She discusses grief and child loss with other grieving parents and those who work to help them in their grief. This podcast is for grieving parents and well as those who support them.

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