A Mother s Life After Losing Her Child

There are some losses in life that changes you. And then there are losses that change the entire person you thought you were going to be. Losing a child is one of those losses. Today we're having a conversation that many people avoid because they don't know what to say, what to ask, or how to sit with somebody else's grief. And I didn't ask her, as you guys know, I didn't ask her how to pronounce her name and I don't want to botch it. I should have asked that. That was one thing I should have asked. So how do you pronounce your first name? I got the rest. Okay. Awesome. Hiya. Okay. Hiya. Lee McDonald is here to tell her story, but we're going to go on beyond the moment of loss. We're talking about what happens after because eventually the call stops, the casseroles stop, the people go back to their lives and you're still here. So the question becomes, how do you live when life you know no longer exists? Welcome to keeping it real on purpose. And I'm your host Edna White and I welcome my guest Hiya to the stage. Hi, thank you for having me Edna and I'm happy to be here. I'm happy to share with your audience. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Can you tell us a little bit about what you, what you do and where you are right now and what you do? Sure. So as you all know, my name is Hiya. I am a mom, a wife and before any of that, I'm a woman. I'm also an entrepreneur. I've been an entrepreneur for about 16 years, no over 60 years. And so, you know, that's got its own set of experiences as well. And before, well, my very first foray into entrepreneurship was as a life coach. So that was my first business as an entrepreneur. So, you know, that is my background. I am a person who is always looking for the why behind things. And so it's, it's naturally, it naturally led me to life coaching naturally led me to the real estate investing business that we're doing now. But without going too deeply into that, I am, I'm here working to make sure that I make the most of every moment of my life because it's not promised. And it's great. That's the thing that I really want people to take from our conversation. Awesome. So take us back to the time when your world changed, what happened and what do you remember most about that experience? Well, it's interesting. It's an interesting question because my world has changed many times. And you know, this, I've experienced many different kinds of losses and you know, the first part of that journey I have two children, you know, my eldest daughter is seven. My second daughter is deceased. I experienced a miscarriage before my first daughter. So that was the first set of loss. You know, there's been a lot of loss and then, you know I'm not sure where your audience is, but faith is a big part of my life. But because of that faith, my first daughter was born, which no one expected, you know, naturally. And the expectation wasn't that I'd be able to have another child. So, but I got pregnant and had many more losses there and finally had another rainbow baby and that was my second daughter. And so, you know, there's a lot of joy when you find out that you're pregnant, or most times you find out you're pregnant and having a child. In the midst of that joy though, you know, I, I was an older mom. So in my forties and you know, they like to say your advanced maternal age when you're over 35. So I had to do a series of testing and you know, I was getting ready to go to Georgia and got a call and it said, Hey, your results show this. And I'm like, well, what is that? And then they explained it to me. And you know, my daughter had what's known as trisomy 18 and she was diagnosed when I was pregnant with her. And that is a chromosomal abnormality that they don't know very much about. And so when doctors see that their tendency or their practice is to say that it's not compatible with life. So can you imagine being pregnant with life and having someone tell you that? Well, we don't expect that it's going to go very far. And so that moment was crushing. You know, the moment I felt like my world was crumbling in just a split second. And I just didn't know how I was going to get through it. My husband and I, he crumbled as well, you know, but it was just a devastating piece of news to get. Yeah. That's heavy. And I hear that, you know, the loss wasn't just the loss of the child. It was many losses and your life, you know, just in, like you said, a split seconds changed, you know, throughout what we're experiencing. When women, when a woman, when a woman loses a child, people often focus on the grief, right? But what about your identity? Who were you before the loss and who did you discover yourself to be afterwards? I've always thought of myself as a strong person. And I've always been the kind of person who will look for the silver lining in any situation. And I think in life, if you're going to succeed in life, you can't just look at the thing and have that be the end all you have to look at. Okay. Well, what does it bring? You know, what are the seats of opportunity or what can I learn from this experience? So even with that being my personality and my character, hearing news like that, when you hit it's life and death, it's very plain, right? It's in your face. Now you're looking at death in the face. And it's like, well, what silver lining, what silver lining am I going to find here? The silver lining. Yeah. And in that moment I couldn't think of what a silver lining could be not for myself or for this child. I mean, really the only thing that I had was my faith in God. That's it. Because when something like that happens, that's so dramatic and it's life changing. There is nothing you can say, okay, I'm going to go have my favorite snack and you know, everything will be okay when I come back. That's not how it's going to happen. Right? So everything that you know that you would go to for coping is not going to solve this. It's not going to address death. And so it took me some time, honestly, the process and figure out, okay, well, okay, well what next? Right. Cause it had to, you had to like, okay, you thought of yourself as a strong person. Now you hear this and you start to question, right? You start to bring those questions up. Am I, you know what do I do with this? You know, there was like, I know there was a myriad of questions. Yeah. And I think it's, I don't think that I so much questioned who I was. It was just, there was nothing. It was like, the whole world just, it's like, there's nothing. Right. Yeah. I would, I would think that would be like some type of non numbness because yeah, with that numbness there. So what had your relationships changed that you couldn't, you know, maybe speak to that to other people? Had they changed at all? I think people, you know, the people who are closest to me, they've always been supportive in with our pregnancies, whether there was a challenge like this or not. My husband and I wanted to make sure that we kept the discussions in the early pregnancy to those that we knew for sure what their intentions around us were, you know, positive energy. We weren't, whether there was devastating diagnosis or not, we weren't just going to blast everything out, you know, at the beginning of the pregnancy because we want to make sure that we're protecting our space and our child. So people were very sympathetic of course, but around grief, as you shared earlier, a lot of people don't know what to say. And you can't really blame them. I don't blame anyone for saying the wrong thing. Now, when our daughter did die, I'll share that story a little bit later. There are some things that people probably should not say. But you know, people were gracious to us. They provided whatever we needed. And one of the questions that it was asked me at that time, and then at another time, so I had a cancer scare last year, right? So in one of my friends asked me, as someone did back when we lost Aya, our second daughter, it was the question of what do you need? And as someone who is self-sufficient and used to running a company and getting things done and problem solving, being asked, what do you need? I didn't have an answer to that question. I didn't know what I needed because I'm used to doing stuff myself. Everything yourself. Yeah. And so then it became a question of, okay, well, you don't have to and you should not be handling everything by yourself. You do need other people. Not that I didn't think I didn't need other people, but give someone the chance to support you. That's what I had to also realize at that time. And it doesn't mean that it doesn't mean that you're weak. And I think a lot of women think so that if they have to ask for help, that it's a sign of weakness, but it didn't mean, I just didn't know what I needed. Right. But it doesn't mean that you're weak. And actually one of the things, one of the people think that receiving gifts is the only way for gifting to happen. But when you allow the space just for someone else to give and also when you give both are gifts. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's an important part too, for us as black women, brown women in general is we have to ask, you know, I, I, I too thought, you know, strong nearly killed me. So being strong is not, it's not a requirement. It's, it's being, you know, responding, you know, being responsible, but strong wasn't one for me and it nearly killed me. And I think being able to receive is also part of it is being able to receive, you know, whether, you know, we don't, we don't think we need it or not. You know, it's being able to receive, that's a scary thing. It's scary because we've been strong so long, we've been taught to be strong so long, but receiving is a great component, great component. You know, I think the receiving goes hand in hand with resting as well. And, you know, I'm at a stage in my life right now, I'm in menopause and I'm not ashamed to say it, but that is a lesson that if you didn't learn it before rest, if you don't learn how to rest, if you don't learn how to allow other people to pour into you as well, that increases stress, which will kill you eventually, you know? Sleep is so important. Let me tell you, sleep is so important. And even if you want to take a nap, we're so in, so, you know, um, set up to run all day, all day. And you just like, Oh, I need a nap. And you feel guilty about having a nap. You feel guilty about it. And you don't take a nap, right? You're depriving your body. Your soul, you know, um, your spirit of that, that re-energizing that it's literally telling you it's literally telling you, but you were not taking it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, we, as women we're just not one dimensional. And one thing that we might think, okay, it's siloed in this one place. It's not going to touch these other parts. That's just not how we're, it's just not. Did you feel like you were, you know, um, in, during the healing process, um, you know, during the losses, did you feel like you were just functioning or you were just, you know, what did you feel like that was that functioning or was it something else? So this is something when I'm in crisis, I've learned, I actually work because it gives me something to do. You know, I guess it takes my mind off it because my mind is always thinking. Um, when I had my very first miscarriage and I remember this distinctly, I was on the phone closing a deal because I could not sit there because the doctor sent me back home. They said, we can't do anything for you. You just have to kind of let it run its course. And I was devastated, but I was like, well, I can't sit here and just think about what's happening, you know, like physically and I can see it. So I was on the phone making calls, you know, to close a deal. And then, you know, this time around with Aya, um, there's a lot that I learned and I'm not sure that I can fully articulate everything between, you know, that first loss and then, but I knew that I needed rest. Uh, I knew, I knew that I could not just go back to, let me just go do stuff. So that happened in 2022 and realistically speaking, it took me about two years before I could come back to being fully myself in the business. And, um, I wasn't rushing, you know, through it. And I, I, I acknowledged definitely the fact that, Hey, I am not the same person. I cannot pretend to be the same person. Uh, aside from the emotional part, part, this may be perimenopause. It was childbirth, but also brief my memory. I suffered a lot of memory loss. Um, and so, you know, that was part of it too, but my team and, you know, we, there may be some business owners in your audience too, but I think this is also part of why it's important to really structure your business properly because when you need rest, you need to make sure that your, this other part of your world isn't going to crumble. And then you have to figure out how am I going to survive? Right. So thankfully we had, um, my husband and I, we had spent years just building our team. And when I had died, we didn't have to say to them, Oh, we need help with this, that, and the other. They took the business and they ran the business while we were breathing, you know, in the midst of breathing. And I'm so grateful for that. So grateful for my team. They're still with us. Um, you know, it, it allowed me the space to breathe and to rest and to figure out what am I doing next? What do I want to do because I didn't know what I wanted to do because it's like, I couldn't go back to business as usual. That didn't, it's like, what is the greater meaning of what I'm doing? Why am I doing all of this? So sometimes, sometimes survival gets mistaken for healing a lot. And I know I've been in that space where going through things and, and then I get up and work and it's, that's not the, that's not the thing to do because all you do is, again, we're multi-leveled and the healing is multi-layered and it hits the nervous system. It hits the mind, the heart, all of these areas, you know, and then we think it's only supposed to be messing with this, but it messes with this and it messes with the nervous system. And then we turn on survival mode. So we go to work. And that's what I did at work. And I crumbled at work, crumbled, you know? And of course, you know, like you said, having a great team, you know, I had a great team. It did miss the beat. And I was like, I can't do it. I can't do it. I can't come back. I gotta take time, you know, um, to, to go through this and, you know, we can still function and still be carrying an enormous amount of pain. That's one thing that I did learn, um, in being in survival mode. What do people misunderstand, misunderstand about losing a child? Well, I think grief, you know, as you said earlier, um, eventually people providing food and whatever else that will end. Um, but I think mainstream and generally speaking, there's this idea that grief has an end point and so it will look different at certain points, but there's no date that it's like, okay, you're done or you should be done. And I think some people feel when I talk about it, you know, they're like, Oh, this is four years ago. So you should be in this place now. I'm like, that's not how it goes, you know? And especially when you lose a child, um, there's a saying that goes, when you have a child, it's like watching your heartbeat outside of your body. And I think that's pretty accurate. So if your heart is beating outside of your body, imagine when your heart stops and you're watching that happen. That is, that is the loss of a child. And you're still here. You still have people, another child and a husband and parents, everybody who still have their relationship to you who will crumble if something happens to you. So you can't just disappear. You know, you can't just crumble into that. You still have to be here and function. What did you need from the people that you didn't always receive? That's a, that's a great question. And it's not one that I'm, I have the answer for at this moment. Um, let me think about that for a second. I cannot, I can't really give an answer. Um, and the reason is I feel like, you know, if I were able to pinpoint something, it really just feels like blame, I think. And I wouldn't want to say that there's blame I'm assigned to any person with regard to how they dealt with me and this situation of loss, because people can only, um, they can only act based on the experiences they've had. So if they don't have any experience with dealing with something like this, you know, they're also going to be at a loss of how to handle it. You know, he's the other person. Um, you know, the experience I said I shared earlier, the one woman I wish my, honestly, she was not somebody close to me, but the day our daughter died, so she died in our arms. We watched her take her last breath. And then we had to pack the room, the NICU room and, um, take everything home. So they have these volunteers at the hospital and, uh, this one lady, she was coming down the hallway as we're exiting on the room, hospital room. And she's like, Oh my gosh, your baby. And the nurse had to say to her, their, their daughter just died. So she's like, Oh, she pulled that. So now she was walking us to the elevator with all our stuff and she was chatting with me and she asked, Oh, what's wrong. And then she said, or what happened with your daughter? And I told her what it was. And she said, well, at least she didn't live. And you had a, you know, a disabled child or something like that. What I wish some people would understand is that silence is just as as having worse. Now I know my husband, that's it. Don't say a word. I know my husband, he was walking ahead of me. I know he heard that he probably wanted to like throw everything at this lady. What is she saying? Yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. During grief. If you say very little, don't even, don't even say pray for you because you don't even know what to pray for. Just hush. Just hush and hug me. That's it. Keep it moving. Cause you know, you're full of emotions at that point, you know, and you know, I talked about my faith and how important God is to me. However, at that time, you know, when people are searching for words to say in a moment, they'll say, Oh, well it's God's plan. I'm like, that is not what I want to hear. Right. That's what I'm saying. Don't say it. Tell us that. I get it. I get that. That's very important. I'm glad you brought those points up. So at some point you have had to figure out how to keep living without feeling like you're betraying your child that you lost. What did that look like for you? And so being that I am still who I am, I'm usually thinking ahead. So for a number of reasons, but one of the reasons we had her cremated is because we knew that eventually we might want to move. And I did not want the idea of having my daughter buried in some place. And then I leave and go somewhere else and practically her spirit's not here anymore. But, you know, just thinking through those things, you know, that was part of my healing journey and the healing journey for my husband as well. But we include her in our prayers. You know, she is part of our family because some people they'll say, how many kids do you have? And I know those who know, some people might expect me to say, well, one, no, I have two children. One is here and one is not, but I have two children. They came out of my body. So, um, yeah, I, I say her name too, because some people also think that well, once someone dies, their memory is completely erased. That's not true. You know, and the other thing that I learned from the experience of, um, I as life and death, and I try to share this as much as possible with people. People think that they know how much time they have. They may not outwardly say that, but the way we live indicates that we think we have more time than we have. We don't know when our time is. And I think people also think that age determines how much impact you have. It does not. You know, I watched my daughter, she was weeks old. She didn't speak a word. She was just there. Do you know how many people's lives she touched? Doctors, nurses, everybody that encountered her. She, she may not have lived a long time. She finished her plan here on earth. She did what she needed to do here on earth. She had the impact she had to have. And so I want people to understand that I don't care if you're five or 50 or 90, that does not mean, you know, that you've done all that you're supposed to do and the time that you have on you need to figure out what is, what are you here to create? You know, what, what impact are you here to make? Have you done it yet? And if you haven't done it, what are you going to do about it? Because tomorrow is not promised. That's it. That's it. Every day, like it's your last day and really, you seriously mean that. Yeah. What has this loss taught you about what really matters? Um, you know, stuff, stuff has never been important, you know, to me, but, um, stuff is just stuff. Relationships are important. You know, they're, they've always been important. Um, and I think really taking stock of your life. And as I said, just a moment ago that what you are here to do, because we're not just here to work and pay bills and pay taxes. That's not why we're here. You know, those are byproducts, but you're here to do something to leave an impact. Um, I didn't create you to just show up and pay bills. So ask yourself the question, what am I doing? What did I say I wanted to do in this life? You know, be honest. People really need to be honest with themselves, you know, and some people may, um, some people may prod you or, you know, talk negatively about you or what you haven't done. Um, but really they don't matter. Um, you're living the life in your body and your soul and in your spirit, and you need to make sure that you are living in truth and you're aligned, you know, with why you're here. Gotcha. Do you think you would have learned that lesson without the loss? Um, yeah, I've had a lot of losses and I think, you know, it's not that I wish loss on anybody, but I think it teaches you a lot of things that just having ease does not. Um, and so, you know, the way I, what I have learned and I've especially seen, you know, my faith relationship has grown through entrepreneurship because there's so many unknowns in entrepreneurship, you know, like sometimes the only way forward is okay. Um, and so, you know, I've learned so many things along the way and what I've recognized in my journey is that when there's something that I need to learn that I have not learned, it will, the lesson will show up again until I learned it. Um, and so I wouldn't trade any of these experiences. I don't want to go through them again, but there are things, you know, yeah, it has taught me resilience. It taught, it taught me that I'm stronger than I thought I was. I thought I was strong, but that's not, you know, strength in the absence of tragedy or trial. I don't really think that's real strength. Right, right. Exactly. Okay. Now there's a part that we have that we act, that we have people write in before the show starts on this topic. We don't tell them who's coming, but the question here that has been afraid to be asked is, can you love your life again after losing a child without feeling guilty about it? And that question is to you. Yeah, you absolutely can. Um, and this may not be palatable for some people listening, but before you become a mother or a wife or any of the other labels that we have, you are a person. You came into this world by yourself. Right? So as much as I love my children and wanted to have my daughter here, um, she's not here. I am still here. I have to show up for myself, you know, like I have to show up and live this life that I've been blessed with. So yeah, um, I am still grieving. It looks different every single day. Um, but I am happy, uh, because I have made a decision that there are certain, uh, certain types of people, certain experiences that I will not allow in my space because I value my life in the time that I have. Right. So negativity, dishonesty, all those things, no space in my life, you know, for that. And so for me to create a happy life, I am being judicious about what I allow into this life. That's great. That's beautiful. I love that. Okay. For the mother who is watching this right now, who has lost a child and feels like nobody understands who she has become, what do you want her to know? You don't have to justify who you've become to anybody. Um, you don't, it's just that simple, you know, and the people who will be with you and be for you, they will be for you regardless of who you've become. Those who only wanted you for what you could do for them or how you show up for them in their lives and they don't like who you've become while they're going to fall away. And you know, it's important that you, you know, you're already grieving. It's let them go, let them go. Yeah. Love that. What I appreciate about this conversation is that we're not pretending grief has a neat ending. And I love that for, for everyone that's listening. Even for you, I love that sometimes the next move isn't forgetting and that's another part of it. Um, sometimes the next move is learning how to carry the love, carry the loss, and you shared all of that, you know, and you still make room for life that remains. I love that. Hiya. Thank you for trusting us with this part of your story. And the, and to the persons that are listening, your grief may not look like someone else's. So don't even try to compare. Just go with it. Healing may not have the timeline somebody else's expects and your next chapter does not erase the chapter that came before it. So you heard the story today and now let's, let's not talk about it. Let's do something about it. If you like this video, like it, share it, and send it to someone you love that's going through this. And remember, you know, we appreciate you for coming again. Hiya. Thank you so much for sharing your story. Thanks for having me. Oh, you're welcome. You're welcome. Keep growing audience, keep healing and keep it real on purpose. We're going to say goodbye for now.