Some dates just carry weight.

April 23rd. The anniversary of Taylor's death. Two days after what would have been Andy's 22nd birthday.

When Jam reached out and asked to come back on, I looked at the calendar and knew immediately. There was no one else I wanted in this space this week.

If you haven't yet listened to Episode 157, I'd encourage you to start there. Jam first came on just four months after losing Taylor, her 13-year-old daughter, a girl who rode the special needs bus by choice every single day so she could sit beside her twin sister Morgan, who saved her lunch seat without fail, who never met a stranger and never stopped looking for someone to love. In that first episode, the word that kept coming to me as I listened was compassion. It still does.

Now, nearly four years later, Jam is back.

And what strikes me most about this conversation is simply that she is here. That she is still standing. That she is still showing up - for Morgan, for her husband, for the families her foundation has served, for the women in her Starlight support group who have become some of her closest friends in the world.

She didn't think she would survive this.

She is surviving it.

We talk about what these four years have looked like from the fog of the first year, the harder truths of years two and three, and now, the slow, uneven work of figuring out who you are on the other side of the worst thing you have ever lived through. We talk about the May Flowers Taylor George Foundation, which has helped ten families navigate burial expenses, sibling travel, and the crushing practical weight of sudden loss. We talk about Morgan and the particular heartbreak of watching a child grieve in a language she cannot fully speak. We talk about finding your people, even when they live a thousand miles away.

And we talk about what it means to still be figuring it out at year four. To not yet know exactly what God is asking of you next. To be healing without yet being whole.

Jam says it simply and beautifully near the end of our conversation: I honestly thought I would not survive it. And I am. It may not be pretty every day. But I'm surviving.

I want to say to every single one of you what my friend Michele used to say to me, again and again, when I told her I couldn't do this:

You are doing it.

It may not be pretty. It may not look the way you thought surviving was supposed to look. But every single day that you get up and live your life without your child, that is the work. That is surviving. And you are doing it.