There are moments in life that divide everything into before and after.
For Jean and Shelly, that moment came at 8:15.
Jean still remembers the exact time their daughter Chantal died.
8:15 — the moment when life as they knew it ended and an entirely different life began.
In this conversation, they share the long road that followed. The shock of Chantal’s cancer diagnosis. The exhausting fight through treatments. And the quiet devastation that comes when love and determination cannot change the outcome.
Jean speaks honestly about something many parents — and especially many fathers — feel after the loss of a child: the instinct to fix things. To protect the people you love and somehow make everything okay. But losing Chantal forced him to face a truth that grief eventually teaches again and again — some things simply cannot be fixed. That realization became the heart of the book he later wrote, Dads Can’t Fix Everything, where he reflects on grief, fatherhood, and the helplessness many parents feel when the unthinkable happens.
Music had always been a part of Jean and Shelly’s life together. It was woven into their family in ways both ordinary and meaningful. But after Chantal died, even the things that once brought joy felt distant for a time. Slowly, though, music began to find its way back — not as it was before, but as something shaped by memory, love, and the life they continue to carry forward.
Shelly shares another moment that stayed with her — reaching the five-year mark and realizing something she hadn’t expected. One day she noticed that life felt familiar again. Not the same life they once had, and not without grief, but a life where she could breathe and recognize herself again.
Over the years their journey has taken many forms — music, writing, advocacy, and the quiet rituals that keep Chantal present in their lives. Every year on her birthday, friends and family still gather with pizza and Caesars — her favorite — raising a glass and remembering the girl who changed their lives forever.
It is a reminder that love does not end when a life does.
It simply finds new ways to live on — in memory, in music, and in the quiet moments that still echo long after 8:15.
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