Heather has always loved out loud.
She has always talked about her boys to anyone who will listen, shown pictures to strangers, shared memories on social media without a second thought. It never dawned on her not to. And when she lost her youngest son Owen, whom everyone called O, it never dawned on her to stop.
O was funny, mischievous, and big-hearted in equal measure. The kind of boy who once spent $40 of his own money on meat sticks at thirteen years old just to hand them out to classmates and leave one on his teacher’s desk because she was having a bad day. The kind of boy who left notes on his desk at home that said, you mean my heart to me.
So when she lost him, she did not go quiet.
She started collecting “O signs” almost immediately, writing every one of them down in a notebook because she was so afraid of missing a single one. She built the chaos garden she and O had planned together, grew hundreds of flowers, preserved every bloom, and turned them into art that now goes out into the world carrying a little bit of his love in each piece. She created a journal for others to record their own signs from the loved ones they have lost. She organized a second line, a Louisiana-style brass band parade through the streets of her town, on what would have been O’s first birthday after his death, inviting everyone who had lost someone to suicide to come celebrate how their person lived, not how they died. She carries O’s photo everywhere her family travels, because she promised him they would see the world together, and she intends to keep that promise.
None of it was planned. None of it was strategic. It was just love, looking for somewhere to go, and finding it.
Near the end of our conversation, Heather shares a poem she found on one of her hardest days, written by Sharon Marsh. She reads it at the second line every year. I think it is the most beautiful summary of everything she has done since losing O.
I’ll live for you.
Your life was cut short, but there is still so much living for you to do.
I will live for you.
I will take you with me everywhere I go.
Drink coffee in dimly lit cafes, travel to foreign places, put my toes in the sand, create memories.
So that whenever I see you again, I can tell you all about it.
And she will. She already is.
At the end of this conversation, she shares one more story. A man she met in Antigua, who never knew O, sent her a message months later to say his daughter had been born. And then he said, “Don’t worry, Heather. I’m going to teach her to love like O.”
A stranger who never met O. Teaching his newborn daughter to love like him.
That is what grieving out loud does. It lets the people who loved your child keep loving them. And it lets the people who never knew them love them too.
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