This is the story behind the Living Legacy Path Method, and why I built it to loop instead of end.
The morning after Kailey died, I was back at the store.
Not because anyone made me. Because a $170M operation doesn’t pause for a funeral, even the funeral of your own child. My team needed a schedule. My region needed numbers. My family needed groceries, and someone had to buy them. So I put on the uniform, and I went in.
I tell people that not to sound tough. I tell them because it’s the reason every grief resource I was handed in those first weeks felt like it was written for somebody else’s life.
The five stages were never built for people like us
Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance. If you’ve lost someone, you’ve heard them recited so many times they’ve stopped sounding like help and started sounding like a checklist you’re failing.
Here’s what almost nobody says out loud: Elisabeth Kübler-Ross didn’t build those five stages by studying grieving parents. She built them by observing terminally ill patients coming to terms with their own deaths. It’s a model of someone approaching an ending, not a model of someone left behind to keep living. Somewhere along the way, it got repurposed for grief in general, stretched over a shape it was never measured for.
And even if the stages fit, they still assume something most bereaved parents I know don’t have: time. Space. A season where the rest of life politely steps back so you can do your grieving in peace, then rejoin everyone once you’ve “moved through” it.
I never got that season. I don’t know many bereaved parents who do. You’ve still got a team that needs leading, a household that needs running, kids at the table who still need dinner and homework help and someone showing up steady. Grief doesn’t check your calendar first.
So I stopped looking for a stage to finish. I started building something else.
Why cyclical, not linear
The Living Legacy Path Method is built on a different premise: grief isn’t a hallway you walk down once and exit through a door marked “healed.” It’s a path you walk again and again, in a loop, each time carrying a little more distance and a little more light than the last time around.
That’s not a metaphor I reached for to sound poetic. It’s the actual shape of what happened to me. I didn’t move through denial once and never feel it again. I’ve felt flashes of it years later, standing in a grocery store aisle, hand reaching for something my daughter used to eat before my brain caught up with what I was doing. I didn’t “complete” the hardest parts and set them down for good. I walk back through them, on anniversaries, on ordinary Tuesdays, in leadership meetings when someone asks an innocent question about kids.
The difference is what happens each time you walk it. The first lap nearly breaks you. The tenth lap, you recognize the terrain. You move through it faster. You carry it differently. That’s not failure to heal. That’s what healing actually looks like when you don’t get the luxury of stepping outside your life to do it.
The five landmarks of the path
I call them landmarks instead of stages on purpose. A stage implies you finish it and move to the next one permanently. A landmark is somewhere you return to, and recognize, and pass through again with more ground under you than the last time.
The Call
This is the wake-up moment. The phone call, the hospital room, the morning you understand your life has split into before and after. Nobody asks for this landmark. It arrives and rearranges everything on its own schedule. Every time grief resurfaces later, a new season, a new kind of hard, you feel a smaller echo of The Call again: something asking something enormous of you, with no warning.
The Tools
The practices and resources that make movement possible when movement feels impossible. For me this was Tony Robbins’ RPM system, Result, Purpose, Massive Action, a framework I’d used for years as a business tool, repurposed on the only goal that mattered: getting up tomorrow. Your tools might look different. The point isn’t the specific system. The point is having something that lets you put your hands on a day again when the day feels unholdable.
The Walk
The daily practice of carrying loss forward while still living your actual life. Not a grand gesture. The unglamorous, repetitive work of getting up, showing up, doing the next right thing, on a Tuesday nobody’s watching. This is where most of grief actually happens: not in the dramatic moments, in the thousands of ordinary ones.
The Double Life
Something nobody warns you about: you will learn to run two lives inside one body. The version of you that leads the meeting, answers the email, coaches the team, and the version of you that is still, underneath all of it, missing someone so badly it changes how you breathe. Both are real. Neither is a performance. The exhaustion you feel some days isn’t weakness, it’s the cost of running two operating systems at once, and nobody in the room can see the second one.
The Legacy
Turning what you’re carrying into something that serves other people. Not to justify the loss, nothing justifies it, but because love has to go somewhere, and legacy is one of the places it can still move. This is the landmark that turns the whole path from something you survive into something you build with.
You don’t walk these five in order once and graduate. You walk The Call again the day you realize you’re facing a new kind of hard. You walk The Double Life again the first time you laugh freely and catch yourself feeling guilty for it. You walk The Legacy again every time you find a new way to let what happened to you help someone else. The path doesn’t end. It deepens.
For the ones who don’t get to stop
I built the Living Legacy Path Method for a specific kind of person, because I am one: the leader who still has a team counting on them. The parent who still has other kids who need a functioning parent, not a version of them frozen at the worst day of their life. The operator who still has a business, a household, a P&L, a schedule that doesn’t leave room for “taking time.”
Most grief resources, gently and unintentionally, assume you have room to step back. Take a leave of absence. Clear your calendar. Give yourself permission to fall apart for a while. That advice isn’t wrong. It’s just not available to a lot of us. I couldn’t take a season off from running my store any more than a single parent can take a season off from raising their kids, or a small business owner can take a season off from keeping the doors open.
So the question I built the Living Legacy Path Method to answer wasn’t “how do I step back and heal.” It was: how do I keep leading, keep showing up, keep being who the people around me need me to be, while I am also, quietly, catastrophically, grieving. The answer isn’t a bypass. It’s not pretending you’re fine so nobody notices. It’s learning to walk the path in the fifteen minutes you have before the next meeting, instead of waiting for a stretch of time that may never come.
What this actually looks like, season by season
Year one looks different than year three. The first anniversary looks different than the tenth. The day you laugh and feel guilty for it looks different than the day you laugh and don’t. The Living Legacy Path Method isn’t a thirty-day program that promises you’ll feel better by a deadline. It’s a structure that holds you through all of those different seasons, because you’ll walk it through every one of them.
Some laps are short. You recognize The Call in a single hard afternoon, move through The Tools you already know how to use, and you’re back to steady footing by dinner. Some laps take longer. A death anniversary might pull you through all five landmarks over the course of a week, and that’s not backsliding, that’s the path doing exactly what it’s built to do.
What changes over time isn’t the shape of the path. It’s you. You get better at recognizing which landmark you’re standing in. You get faster at reaching for the right tool. You get less afraid of the loop, because you’ve walked it enough times to know you come back out the other side, carrying a little more legacy than you did the last time.
If you’re walking this right now
If you are leading a team, raising kids, running a house, keeping something alive, all while carrying a loss that never fully stops asking something of you, I want to say clearly: you are not doing grief wrong. You are doing the hardest thing a human being can do, with none of the space most grief resources assume you have.
There is a path. I will walk it with you.
If you want to see what building a legacy through everyday choices actually looks like, I wrote a full guide on that here.
If you want to start with something concrete, I put the first five steps of this framework into a free guide: 5 Gentle Steps for Carrying Grief Without Moving On. It’s built for the same person this whole method is built for: functioning in public, carrying something enormous in private.
And if you’re at a point where you’d rather talk than read, I hold a few Clarity Sessions each month, free, thirty minutes, no pitch. Just space to talk about where you are and what might actually help.
