Two Years After Losing Her Daughter, Grief Keeps Changing

It’s been just over two years since Melissa Allen lost her daughter, Liv, after a sudden illness at 18 years old. Melissa has joined Heather on A Place of Yes before, but grief looks different now. Some days she can work, laugh, show up for the people she loves, and feel genuinely grateful for her life. Other days, a photograph can send her right back to the earliest days of loss. And as her younger daughter, Sophia, graduated from high school and left for college, Melissa found herself confronting an entirely new layer of grief: watching one daughter reach the milestones the other never had the chance to experience.

In this conversation, Melissa and Heather talk honestly about what child loss looks like years later and the losses that continue to emerge as life moves forward. They discuss the complicated mix of pride and heartbreak that comes with watching their surviving children grow up, the strange loneliness of an empty nest after losing a child, and the work of allowing yourself to have terrible days without letting them consume your life. Melissa also reflects on how the Live Like Liv Foundation has given her a way to help others and keep Liv’s memory present, while acknowledging that grief work can sometimes carry its own emotional cost. Together, she and Heather talk about giving their living children space to build lives of their own, finding comfort in the smallest memories, and the perspective that comes from experiencing the unimaginable. As Melissa puts it, “death humbles you”—and more than two years later, she is still learning what it means to carry that truth forward.

Resources & Ways to Connect

• Live Like Liv Foundation: https://livelikelivfoundation.org/

• Jake’s Help from Heaven Website: http://jakeshelpfromheaven.org/

• Jake’s Help from Heaven Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jakeshelp

• Jake’s Help from Heaven Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jakeshelp

• APOY Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aplaceofyespodcast

• Heather’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/heathersstraughter

• Our YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@aplaceofyespodcast

• For more of Heather’s writing and thoughts: https://ohheather.substack.com/

• Everything’s Jakey (Substack): https://everythingsjakey.substack.com/