Grief, Grace, and Growing Up

How My Relationship with Gavin Has Changed Since Losing Halleigh On May 21st, 2025, our world cracked open and changed forever. That was the day we met our beautiful daughter, Halleigh May — and the day we had to say goodbye to her all at once. Since then, Gavin and I have been learning to live in a world that feels both full of her and painfully empty at the same time. Grief has a way of testing love — not breaking it, necessarily, but shaping it into something new and unfamiliar. Some days, it makes you reach for each other. Other days, it makes you feel like you’re speaking two different languages. Before Halleigh, our love was light and forward-looking. We planned things — our future home, road trips, baby names, Sunday mornings. We laughed a lot. Our biggest arguments were about what to eat or what movie to watch. Life was simple, full of hope. After Halleigh, everything slowed down. There was a quietness between us at first. Not distance exactly, but the kind of silence t...

Finding Purpose in Pain: Turning Grief Into Action *Posted by Gracie | Grief, Grace, and Growing Up* Losing our daughter, Halleigh May, changed everything. Stillbirth isn’t something you ever think will be part of your story—especially when you’re 18 and full of dreams about what life as young parents would be like. Gavin and I had talked about everything from baby clothes to bedtime routines. We were planning a life. We were planning *her* life. And then, in a heartbeat, all of that changed. In the days after losing her, we were surrounded by silence. The silence in her nursery. The silence of people not knowing what to say. The silence inside us when the weight of her absence became too much. But through that silence, something started to grow: a sense of purpose. Not all at once—sometimes it still comes and goes—but we’ve slowly started finding ways to take this pain and build something with it. For me, that means pursuing something I’ve dreamed about: starting hair school. Some day...

Halleigh May’s Story — The Day Our World Changed This is the post I’ve both dreaded and needed to write. It’s the story of our daughter, Halleigh May . The story of how she came into our lives, how she changed us forever, and how we’re learning to live in a world without her in our arms — but forever in our hearts. If you read my intro post, you already have a bit of an idea of her story. But I want to share it in full — everything we experienced, from the shock of finding out we were pregnant, to the heartbreak of losing her, and the raw moments in between. We found out we were pregnant around Christmas time , and at the time, I wasn’t even 17 yet, and Gavin was 18. It was a total shock — we were young, scared, and unsure of what the future would hold. But even in the fear, we loved her instantly. The second that test turned positive, something inside both of us changed. We were going to be parents. At our first ultrasound around 10 weeks, we saw our little bean and heard her hea...

Welcome to Grief, Grace, and Growing Up Hi — and thank you so much for being here. My name is Gracie , and this blog is something I never imagined I’d be starting at 18. But life has a way of changing your course in an instant, and this is where my journey — Gavin’s, too — is taking us right now. On May 21st, 2025, at 3:33 AM , my fiancé Gavin and I said hello and goodbye to our daughter, Halleigh May . She was born still at 26 weeks. We don’t have any clear answers about why it happened, and maybe we never will. That’s one of the hardest parts: living with the unknown. But out of that heartbreak, we’ve created this space — Grief, Grace, and Growing Up — as a way to grieve, remember, and honor our daughter. It’s a place to share our story and connect with others who are grieving too, because loss doesn’t have to be faced alone. This blog is also a place to share the messy, beautiful, sometimes painful journey of growing up. Gavin and I are only 18, and we have so much of our liv...