The One Thing I Wish I Could Take Back

When Chloe was seven, I told her her mom was gone forever. When she died, the universe showed me I was wrong.

I was walking with my daughter Chloe about a year after her mom died by suicide. Chloe was seven or eight years old. She asked me if I thought “Mommy was in heaven.” I told her no. Her mom was in the ground, and that was it.

I was raised in a family that scorned spirituality and religion. I vividly remember my dad railing against organized religion and the idea that there’s a God. He questioned how churches could be filled with gold artifacts while the indigent suffered outside the castle walls. He saw faith as a crutch for the weak-minded to lean on when life became too much for them.

It made enough sense to me that I didn’t question any of it for most of my life. There’s no god. When we die, the lights go out forever. Anything else was weak and illogical. And the last thing I was going to do was to raise weak kids.

When she asked me, I gave her the truth as I saw it. I thought accepting that her mother was gone would help her move forward.

I can see now that I was wrong. That moment stabs me in the heart every time I revisit it. My little girl was reaching for a way to stay connected to her mom, and I slammed the door. I wasn’t giving her truth. I was projecting my own pain. Cindy’s mental health issues and death had consumed my life, and I wanted to be done with that chapter of my life. Without knowing it, I dumped that weight onto Chloe’s tiny shoulders.

Twelve years later, Chloe died too. And in the kind of irony that only the universe can serve up, I ran face first into my beliefs. Was my girl just gone? Just like that? What did that mean for me, and everyone else left behind? More than anything, I wanted to believe she’s ok, at peace, and that I’ll see her again.

Before she died, I’d already started questioning my beliefs. I’d become less certain about things and more aware of how little I understood about our existence. I was more open to the idea of a higher power.

The chains of my old programming held fast. I kept wondering if my open-mindedness was just a grieving dad’s attempt to numb the pain. A kind of deathbed conversion, abandoning my beliefs the moment they became unbearable.

Then the signs started.

444

The first sign came the night Chloe died. There was a picture of her on our mantle. It’d been there for a long time. After finding out about her death, the pot light directly above her picture went out. There are about fifteen pot lights in our living room and that was the one that flickered off? And right then?

Still, of course it could have been a coincidence. I wanted to believe it was a sign, but my logical brain told me I was being ridiculous. Looking back on it, I think it was a way to protect myself from the misery of false hope. I was already neck-deep in all the pain I could handle.

A week later, a friend I hadn’t spoken to in ten years called. Half-asleep a few nights before, the number 444 had flashed in his mind over and over until it jolted him awake. He had no interest in numerology, but when he looked it up, he found it meant ‘angel number.’ Something told him he had to call me. A few months earlier, Chloe had tattooed 444 on her arm.

Holy. Shit.

What are the chances of a person I hadn’t spoken to in ten years, with no interest in numerology, having that experience, feeling like he had to talk to me, without knowing why, and my daughter having the same number tattooed on her?

When the police officer told me Chloe was dead, he said “She didn’t make it.” In that parking lot, talking to an old friend, I knew she had made it. She’d made it home to her mama and I think that’s where she always needed to be.

I realized, once again, how little I understand about anything. I thought back to that moment, walking with my little girl, and how certain I was about her mom. I imagined what it must have been like for her to hear that from her dad. I’ve thought about it many times since and it always causes my heart to hurt.

But, there’s no way to change the past. All we can do is make amends the best we can, learn, and grow from the decisions we make and the actions we take.

When Chloe was seven, I told her her mom was gone forever. When she died, the universe showed me I was wrong.

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I used to think I understood grief. I thought I had the answers. Then I lost my wife. Then my daughter. And grief taught me the hard way how little I actually knew.

Most men are just like I was. Totally unprepared. And that ignorance doesn’t just hurt us, it hurts the people we love most.

That’s why I created a free guide: 10 Hard Truths Every Man Needs to Hear About Grief. It’s not theory. It’s the lessons I had to learn in the ugliest way possible.

If you’re in it now — or love a man who is — this guide will give you the raw truth you won’t hear anywhere else.