Beautiful Souls,

I have something deeply personal to share with you—something most of you may not know. My heart has been heavy, filled with mixed feelings and questions. So I’m asking that you simply listen. No judgments, no attempts to fix anything. Just an open heart.

Just four months after losing my only son, Judson, in May 2021, I lost my father, Jim Lader, in October 2021. Two losses, bound together by the closeness of time but separated by a world of difference in emotion—a son, a father, a heartbreak, a reckoning.

To lose a child is beyond words, a pain so profound that it shifts the fabric of your existence. In my life, the love I carry for my son remains pure, absolute, and undying. Losing him was devastation in its rawest form, leaving an irreplaceable hole. And then, shortly after, I lost my dad, a man who brought such difficulty and pain into my life.

My father was not a good man. He hurt people, he abused those closest to him, and he left wounds that may never fully heal. He cheated and exploited, taking every opportunity to serve himself first. He was a tyrant, a man who left scars on my life and on the lives of those around him. And yet, he was still my father.

How am I supposed to feel about his passing? The grief is not the same. The loss of my father does not tear at my heart in the way that losing my son has. The devastation simply isn’t there. But there is something else—a lingering sadness, an emptiness that I can’t easily explain.

There are so many words that were never spoken, questions that will never be answered. And there is love that has no direction. Love that existed by sheer virtue of connection, born of that complex thread that ties a child to their parent, even when the parent was hurtful. I realize that, even now, there is a small part of me that feels the loss—not of the man he was, but of the father he could have been.

This loss brings me to a place of reflection: how do we grieve someone who caused us so much pain? And what do we do with the love that has nowhere to go? Life’s losses are complicated, and maybe that’s the truth we seldom acknowledge. We don’t have to fit our pain into neat categories or justify our feelings. Grief is what it is. It’s messy and tangled, full of conflicting emotions, and that’s okay.

To those who have experienced similar losses, I see you. Your grief is valid, whatever it looks like. Sometimes, the person we grieve was not a hero, and sometimes the love we feel is more for the idea of what could have been rather than the reality of who they were. We are allowed to carry that complexity and honor it as part of our human experience.

Thank you for listening.