139. The Honesty of a Broken Heart
Last week, one of my young soccer players taught me something about life, grief, and recovery that I don’t think I will ever forget. She didn’t teach it to me with some profound speech. She didn’t have a carefully prepared explanation about loss or some wisdom that you would expect to hear from an adult who has spent decades navigating the hardest parts of life. She taught it to me with three simple words: “I’m pretty sad.” Her name is Alice; she is only nine years old, and last week she tragically lost her 43-year-old mother, Lauren, after a courageous year-long battle with cancer. Lauren leaves behind her loving husband and two beautiful young daughters, Alice and her five-year-old sister, Olivia. There are moments in life when words feel painfully inadequate, and the death of a mother at 43 years old, leaving behind two little girls, is certainly one of them. There is nothing I can write that makes that fair, nothing I can say that makes it understandable, and nothing anyone can do to take away the enormous hole her absence will leave in the lives of the countless people who loved her.
I had known Lauren for a few years because I have been fortunate enough to coach both of her daughters. Over that time, I came to know her as far more than simply another parent standing along the sidelines. Lauren was one of those people who seemed to bring positivity with her wherever she went. She was always there cheering on her daughters, encouraging them from the sidelines, and taking pride in watching them do something they loved. Even throughout her battle with cancer, I remember seeing that same loving and supportive mother at the soccer fields. When I think of Lauren, that is one of the images that will always stay with me—a mother on the sidelines, watching her girls play and making sure they knew she was there. As a coach, you spend countless hours with families over the years, and some people leave an impression on you without ever realizing they are doing it. Lauren was one of those people, and I feel incredibly fortunate that soccer gave me the opportunity to know her and to coach the two girls she loved so deeply.
Having had the privilege of coaching both Alice and Olivia, I can also tell you that so many of the qualities I admired in Lauren are already visible in her daughters. Both girls carry that same positivity, kindness, and ability to bring joy to the people around them. They are the kind of kids who make coaching rewarding—not simply because of what they can do with a soccer ball, but because of who they are becoming as people. When I watch them interact with others, encourage them, smile, laugh, and simply enjoy being on the field, I can see pieces of their mother in them. It is clear to me that Lauren left an incredible and lasting impression on both of her daughters during the years she was given with them. There is something both heartbreaking and beautiful about knowing that as Alice and Olivia grow older, parts of Lauren will continue growing right alongside them. They will carry her lessons, her kindness, her positivity, and most importantly, her love into the people they eventually become. Lauren deserved so many more years with her girls, but the impact she made on them in the years she had is something even cancer and death can never take away.
Lauren passed away on Tuesday, and our team had a training session scheduled for Wednesday evening. I never expected to see Alice there. Truthfully, soccer seemed like it should have been the furthest thing from her mind less than 24 hours after losing her mom. Yet when practice time arrived, so did Alice, walking onto the field with her father, a man who had just lost his wife and was somehow finding the strength to bring his daughter somewhere familiar. Just seeing the two of them there stopped me in my tracks. As a coach, I have watched children demonstrate courage in championship games, take penalty kicks with everything riding on them, play through pain, and get back up after difficult losses, but none of that comes close to the kind of courage I witnessed that Wednesday. Alice simply showing up was one of the strongest things I have ever seen a child do.
A few parents and I walked over to offer our condolences, although “I’m sorry” felt painfully small for something so enormous. I went directly to Alice, wrapped her in a big hug, and asked her the only question I could think to ask: “How are you holding up, Al?” She looked at me and answered, “I’m pretty sad.” Of course she was. Her mother had died the day before, and sadness was probably only one tiny word for an ocean of emotions a nine-year-old should never have to understand. Yet strangely, the sadness in her answer wasn’t what stayed with me. What stayed with me was how easily she said it. There was no pretending, no attempt to make me comfortable, no automatic “I’m fine,” and no mask covering what was happening inside of her. She was hurting. I asked how she felt, and she told me the truth.
I have thought about those three words repeatedly ever since because, as an addict in recovery from substance use disorders, I spent much of my life doing exactly the opposite. Alice is nine years old, and somehow, she was able to do something that took me decades to learn how to do. She identified what she was feeling, accepted that she was feeling it, and said it out loud. I spent years believing emotions were problems that needed to be solved, escaped, hidden, or chemically erased. If I was sad, I drank. If I was afraid, I used. If I was angry, ashamed, lonely, overwhelmed, insecure, grieving, or simply uncomfortable inside my own skin, I searched for something that could make the feeling disappear. I became incredibly skilled at answering “How are you?” with “I’m good” while my entire life was collapsing behind those two words. I could tell everyone I was fine while quietly destroying myself.
That is one of the cruelest things addiction did to me: it convinced me that feeling pain was weakness while slowly killing me in my attempt to avoid it. I didn’t know how to say, “I’m sad.” I didn’t know how to say, “I’m scared.” I didn’t know how to say, “I’m lonely,” “I’m ashamed,” “I’m struggling,” or perhaps most importantly, “I need help.” Instead, I learned to numb every uncomfortable emotion before it had the opportunity to teach me anything. Alcohol and drugs became my emotional vocabulary. When I couldn’t explain what was happening inside of me, substances did the talking. They temporarily silenced everything I was unwilling or unable to say, but every feeling I buried remained somewhere underneath, waiting for me.
That is the problem with running from emotions: eventually, they catch up. I spent years believing that if I drank enough or used enough, maybe I could stay ahead of them forever. For a few hours, sometimes I could. Chemicals could turn down the volume on grief, anxiety, fear, regret, and shame, but they could never actually remove any of it. When the substances wore off, everything was still there, usually accompanied by new problems created while I was trying to escape the old ones. Eventually, I wasn’t using because something terrible had happened that day. I was using because I had accumulated years of feelings that I never learned how to process. I had built an emotional debt so enormous that I no longer knew where the original pain ended and the addiction began.
Recovery has forced me to learn a completely different way of living. Sobriety has required me to understand that sadness will not kill me, even when it feels unbearable. Fear does not have to be immediately eliminated. Anger can exist without being acted upon. Shame can be discussed instead of hidden. Grief can be carried without being drowned in alcohol or buried underneath drugs. That sounds simple when I write it, but for someone like me, it has been one of the most difficult lessons of recovery. I spent so much of my life believing the goal was to feel good all the time. Recovery has taught me that the goal is not to feel good all the time; the goal is to remain present no matter what I am feeling.
Then a nine-year-old girl walked onto my soccer field one day after losing her mother and demonstrated that lesson better than I ever could. “I’m pretty sad.” She didn’t pretend everything was okay. She didn’t try to protect me from the discomfort of hearing the truth. She simply acknowledged the emotion that was sitting inside of her at that moment. I realize Alice is at the beginning of a grief journey that no child should have to take, and there will be emotions ahead that may be difficult for her to understand, express, or even name. There will be birthdays, holidays, soccer games, school events, graduations, and countless ordinary moments when she will desperately wish her mother were standing beside her, but in that brief interaction, she reminded me that there is tremendous courage in simply telling the truth about how much something hurts.
I think adults sometimes accidentally teach children the opposite. We innocently tell them, “Don’t cry,” or “Be strong.” We try to distract them when they are hurting because watching a child suffer makes us uncomfortable. Our intentions are usually loving, but somewhere along the way, many of us begin confusing strength with the absence of emotion. We start believing strong people don’t cry, don’t admit fear, don’t fall apart, and certainly don’t tell other people when they are struggling. I believed that for years. Addiction thrived inside that belief because every emotion I refused to express became another reason to escape. Today, I believe strength sometimes sounds exactly like a nine-year-old girl saying, “I’m pretty sad.”
There was another part of Alice showing up that Wednesday that struck me deeply. She came to soccer. She came to her teammates. She came to a place that was familiar when almost everything about her world had suddenly changed. I don’t know exactly what was going through her mind, and I would never pretend to understand the grief of a child who has just lost her mother. Maybe she wanted a distraction for an hour. Maybe she wanted to see her friends. Maybe she wanted to kick a soccer ball and experience one small piece of normal life in a world that had become anything but normal. Whatever the reason, there was something incredibly moving about watching her step onto that field. Sometimes when life breaks our hearts, we need somewhere familiar to remind us that we are still standing.
Recovery has taught me the importance of those places too. When my world feels unstable, I need people and places that remind me who I am and what I am fighting for. I need connection because isolation has always been dangerous for me. Addiction wanted me alone with my thoughts, my secrets, my shame, and my substances. Recovery asks me to show up, especially when I don’t feel like showing up. It asks me to walk through the door, answer the phone, talk to someone, go to the meeting, sit with people who care about me, or simply admit that today hurts. There have been times in recovery when showing up was the only victory I had to offer. Alice reminded me that sometimes showing up while your heart is broken is its own extraordinary act of courage.
As her coach, I wish I could protect Alice from what comes next. I wish there were some drill I could design, some speech I could give, or some lesson I could teach that would make grief easier for her. Coaches are used to trying to fix things. When players struggle, we identify the problem and work on it. If their first touch needs improvement, we work on it. If their confidence is low, we encourage them. If they make a mistake, we help them understand it and try again. Grief does not work that way. There is no drill that fixes the absence of your mother, no halftime speech that makes death fair, and no scoreboard that tells you when you have finally beaten sadness.
Maybe my job, and the job of everyone who loves Alice and Olivia, isn’t to fix their grief at all. Maybe it is simply to make sure they never have to carry it completely alone. Maybe it is to give them room to laugh without feeling guilty and room to cry without feeling embarrassed. Maybe it is to let Alice come to soccer when she needs soccer and step away when she doesn’t. Maybe it is to keep asking how she is doing and genuinely listen to whatever answer comes back. Some days that answer may be, “I’m good.” Other days it may be, “I’m angry,” “I miss my mom,” “I don’t want to talk about it,” or simply, “I’m pretty sad.” The greatest gift we can give someone who is grieving may not be the perfect words; it may simply be creating a place where they don’t need perfect words.
I think about Lauren too. I think about the year she spent courageously fighting cancer while still being a mother to two young girls. I think about everything a parent must feel when battling an illness while looking into the faces of children they desperately want to watch grow up. I cannot begin to imagine the weight of that. What I can say is that the love a mother gives her children does not disappear when she dies. It remains in the lessons she taught, the memories she created, the traditions she started, the photographs hanging on walls, the stories people will continue telling, and the countless pieces of herself she placed inside her daughters. Alice and Olivia will grow older carrying pieces of Lauren with them. Cancer may have ended Lauren’s life far too soon, but it cannot erase the love she spent that life giving them.
One of the most painful lessons I have learned in recovery is that life does not promise us fairness. Sobriety does not create some protective shield around us where tragedy stops happening. People still get sick. People still die. Relationships still end. Dreams still fall apart. We still receive phone calls we wish we could unhear and encounter days we would give anything to rewrite. For years, I used substances because I thought I could negotiate with pain. I believed that if life hurt me, I had the right to escape for a while. Recovery has taught me that I cannot control what life places in front of me, but I can choose whether I face it honestly or run from it.
I wish I had learned that lesson when I was Alice’s age. I wonder how different parts of my life might have been if I had learned early that emotions were not enemies. Maybe I would have understood that sadness did not require alcohol, anxiety did not require pills, and shame did not require isolation. Maybe I would have learned that saying “I’m not okay today” is infinitely stronger than pretending everything is perfect while quietly falling apart. I cannot go backward and teach the younger version of myself those lessons. I can only practice them now. Recovery gives me the opportunity to become emotionally honest today, even if I arrived at that understanding decades later than I wish I had. Sometimes my greatest teachers in recovery are not counselors, books, meetings, or other recovering addicts; sometimes they are nine-year-old soccer players who have no idea they are teaching me anything at all.
I have replayed that Wednesday afternoon in my mind many times since. I keep seeing Alice walking onto the field, and I keep hearing those three words. “I’m pretty sad.” I wish more of us could answer that honestly when someone asks how we are doing. I wish the person struggling with addiction could say, “I’m scared.” I wish the person drowning in grief could say, “I’m hurting.” I wish the person who feels completely overwhelmed could say, “I need somebody.” Perhaps if we learned to speak our pain before we tried to escape it, fewer people would have to discover the way I did that buried emotions do not stay buried forever.
I don’t know what Alice will remember about that training session years from now. She may remember every detail, or she may remember almost none of it. I hope, however, that somewhere inside her she remembers that she walked onto a soccer field carrying unimaginable sadness and was surrounded by people who cared about her. I hope she remembers that nobody expected her to pretend. I hope she always knows that her teammates, her soccer families, her coaches, and the people who love her will continue to be there when the field feels like a place she needs to be. Most of all, I hope she never loses the ability she showed me that afternoon—the ability to tell the truth about what is happening inside her heart. There is more courage in that honesty than I understood for most of my life.
Lauren’s death is heartbreaking, and there is no lesson beautiful enough to make the loss of a 43-year-old mother with two young daughters anything other than devastating. I would never try to turn someone else’s tragedy into a neat, inspirational message because grief deserves more respect than that. What I can do is acknowledge what one small moment taught me about my own recovery. For years, I believed strength meant swallowing my pain, hiding my fear, and finding some way to numb whatever hurt. Today, I understand strength differently. Sometimes strength is getting out of bed the day after your world changes. Sometimes strength is walking onto a soccer field because you need somewhere familiar to stand, and sometimes strength is looking someone in the eyes when they ask how you are doing and simply telling them the truth.
I am an addict in recovery from substance use disorders, and I am still learning how to do that. I am still learning to name what hurts before my disease convinces me to run from it. I am still learning that I can be sad without needing to escape, scared without needing to numb myself, and overwhelmed without pretending that I have everything under control. Recovery has taught me many things, but perhaps one of its greatest lessons is that I am allowed to feel everything that comes with life. Last Wednesday, a nine-year-old girl who had just endured a loss no child should have to experience reminded me of that lesson with more courage and honesty than she will probably ever realize. Three words that would be easy to overlook have stayed with me ever since “I’m pretty sad.” And maybe there are moments when healing begins with nothing more complicated than having the courage to say exactly that.
The family kindly requests that donations be made toward Alice’s and Olivia’s future education via the GoFundMe link below:
And remember, if you’re struggling or know someone who is struggling, please don’t lose hope. If that had happened to me, I wouldn’t be able to help spread awareness today.
I.L.M.O.L.G. <3
