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Today is Donuts with Dad at Ava’s school.

And I’m sitting in my car completely at a loss for words.

I’m usually someone who tries to find a solution to everything. A way to fix it, make it better, or at least make it hurt a little less. But how do you fix something like this?

The first Donuts with Dad without her dad. The father-daughter dance coming up. All these little moments that suddenly feel so incredibly heavy.

I genuinely don’t know how to navigate this part of grief.
And I think that’s what scares me the most.

Every part of me wanted to keep her home today. Not because that’s the right thing to do, but because I wanted to protect her from another reminder of what she’s lost.

I look at this little girl and my heart absolutely breaks. She’s only nine years old, carrying emotions that most adults struggle to understand.

And all I want to do right now is walk into her classroom, wrap my arms around her, and make sure she’s okay.

But I can’t protect her from every hard moment. And I can’t give her back the one person I wish more than anything could be standing beside her today.

I just feel helpless.

I’m still sitting in my car, knowing I have a million things to get done, but I can’t seem to move. It’s one of those grief days where everything feels heavier. The gloomy weather, a song on the radio, the silence after school drop off… it’s needing another 20 minutes in your car just to pull yourself together.

I wish Rob were here to tell me how to handle this. He always knew what to say. Especially when it came to our girl.
She admired him. They were each other’s best friend.
And today, more than anything, I need his advice.

I don’t have some inspiring ending to this. I’m a mom trying to figure out how to help her daughter through something I’m still trying to understand myself.

And today, I could really use some help
figuring out how to do that. 💔

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Shoot The Sh!t w/ Britt 🎙️🖤
traveling through grief
Episode: The Six-Month Mark

I don’t even know how to explain what’s been happening inside my head these last few weeks. Something about hitting six months without Rob has completely changed the way grief feels.

It’s not just emotional anymore. I physically feel it. My body, my mind, my entire being. Something has shifted, and I don’t know how to explain it.

Maybe the adrenaline finally wore off. Maybe I’ve spent so long surviving that my body is finally catching up.

But holy shit, I miss my husband.

I miss hearing him come home from work. His stupid jokes. The way he always knew exactly what to say when everything was going wrong. I miss having someone who knew me better than I knew myself.

And lately, my mind won’t stop replaying everything. Our life before cancer. His final months. The conversations, the memories, the things I wish I could ask him now.

It’s fucking exhausting living inside my own head.

I’ve left my phone on Do Not Disturb for days. I’ve pulled away from people. Not because I don’t care, but because I genuinely don’t have the energy to explain something I don’t even understand myself.

And I think part of why I share so much is because I desperately want people to understand how incredible Rob was.

The husband I had. The father Ava had. The man who could make the worst day feel manageable just by being there.

I want people to understand how much I miss him because somehow I feel like he deserves that. He deserves to be remembered for the incredible man he was.

But how do you explain missing someone who was part of absolutely everything?

I wish I had some beautiful lesson to share about this stage of grief, but I don’t.

I’m struggling. I’m lonely. I’m mentally exhausted. And some days I’m just trying to make it through without falling apart.

Six months later, the world keeps moving, and I’m still trying to figure out how to live without my favorite person.

I just really fucking miss Rob Bohacik. 💔

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If 2026 me could go back to this time last year, I don’t think I’d have the heart to tell her you’re gone.

That sentence fucking destroys me.

Because a year ago, we were in Germany.

And I believed.

I didn’t just hope that treatment would work. I believed it would. I believed that doctor could help us. I believed we had found something that was going to give Rob more time. I believed so deeply that I brought all of you along with me and made you believe too.

I can see it in every memory popping up on my phone right now. In every post. Every picture. Every update I wrote from Germany.

I was so fucking sure this story was going to end differently.

And lately, instead of those memories making me happy, they make me angry.

I’m angry that we flew across the world chasing more time and still didn’t get enough of it.

I’m angry that I let myself picture years instead of months.

I’m angry that I thought maybe we had found the thing that would change everything.

Because six months later, Rob was gone.

And I know we would have tried anything. I know I would make that trip again. I know when someone you love is fighting for their life, you grab onto every ounce of hope you can find.

But knowing that doesn’t make looking back any easier.

Sometimes I see that version of myself in those memories and I almost want to protect her.

She was walking around Germany believing she was helping save her husband.

She had absolutely no fucking idea what was coming.

And maybe that’s the part that hurts the most.

I wouldn’t tell her.

If I could go back and sit beside that girl for five minutes, I don’t think I could look her in the eyes and tell her that all of the hope in her heart wasn’t going to change the ending.

I’d let her believe a little longer.

Because she was going to find out soon enough.

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I want to be the best mom I can possibly be for Ava.

I want to give her the right advice. Say the right things. Make the right decisions. Protect her while still teaching her how to navigate this life.

But the truth is… I’m fucking terrified sometimes.

Because I’m her mom, but now I’m also trying to carry the pieces of being her dad too.

And when your daughter had a dad like Rob, those are some pretty fucking impossible shoes to fill.

He just knew.

He knew what to say and when to say it. He knew what I was thinking before I could even get the words out. He could tell when I was struggling before I even realized it myself, or before I was willing to admit it.

There was never supposed to be a world where I had to make all of these decisions without turning to him and saying, “What do you think?”

Before we lost him, we recorded so many conversations. We talked about Ava. About life. About the future. About the things he wanted her to know and the things he wanted me to remember.

Words for years from now.

Words for the days when I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.

And listening to his voice is still one of the hardest things for me.

Because the second I hear it, I can almost forget.

For just a second, he’s still here.

Then it stops.

There are days I feel confident that I can do this. And there are days I would give absolutely anything to sit next to him for five minutes and ask him what the hell I’m supposed to do.

Today was one of those days.

So I went back to his words.

And as hard as they are to hear, I’m so fucking grateful we have them.

Because even though Ava and I have to keep figuring out this life without him physically here…

her dad still has something to say.

And these are his words. ❤️‍🩹

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Loving him through cancer changed me.

Becoming his caregiver changed me.

Watching our normal life turn into scans, hospitals, medications and waiting for the next piece of bad news changed me.

Watching him die changed me.

And then waking up the next morning and realizing the world was still moving changed me.

I think that’s the part of grief I never understood before.

You don’t just lose your person. You lose the version of yourself that existed with them.

I miss having a partner.
I miss being someone’s person.
I miss having someone who already knows the entire story without needing an explanation.
I miss parenting beside him.
I miss ordinary.

And lately, I don’t recognize myself some days.

I’m quieter. More guarded. Things I used to care about don’t matter anymore. Even my favorite time of year feels different.

I spent so much time trying to save Rob that I never stopped to wonder who I would be if we couldn’t.

Now I’m finding out.

I’m still a mom. I still work. I still laugh.
I still show up. I still make plans.

But I’m different.

Loving him changed me.
Fighting beside him changed me.
Losing him changed me.

And learning how to live without him is still changing me.

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🤍 It's lonely being first. were you the first in yours?

📹: @grieftrips in Bali

Patient Zero Taylor Swift

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meet Hebe, one of my good friends and many great gifts of grief 🤍

who’s someone you’ve met through your journey of grief? #griefandloss #griefjourney #griefsupport

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@blairfromblairland and I are both grievers, we've built the grief support system we wish we had but didn't exist.
Comment "HELD" and I'll send you the details

🗓 Tomorrow 30 Sep at 9am PT / 12pm ET / 5pm UK we're going live right here to answer whatever you want to ask. Set a reminder, or just turn up.

Six months, in a circle small enough to feel held in

📞 Two calls a month, grief workshop and open call every second Wednesday
💬 Daily check-ins and direct access to Rachel and Blair in the group chat, for all the days in between
👥 A local grief buddy match
⭐ + more

#griefworkshop #griefcommunity
#griefandloss

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I think the six-month mark has broken something open in me that I wasn’t prepared for.

In the beginning, I questioned myself constantly.

Why wasn’t I crying more? Why could I leave the house? Why could I work, travel, laugh, go to softball games and somehow keep functioning when my entire life had just changed?

Now I think I understand.

I was surviving on adrenaline.

There were decisions to make. Things to handle. A little girl who still needed her mom. Life kept moving, so somehow I did too.

But somewhere around six months, the adrenaline ran out.

And grief feels completely different now.

I can’t stop crying. Things that didn’t knock me down before are hitting harder and faster. Driving has become difficult. The silence feels louder. And I can actually see myself pushing people away more and more every day.

That part makes me ashamed.

Because I’m doing it to people who love me hard. People who have stayed. People who care about me. And I KNOW I’m doing it. I can watch myself putting up the walls and still don’t know how to stop.

I’m in a really messy place mentally.

Maybe my body knew I couldn’t carry the full weight of everything six months ago. Maybe it protected me until I could.

Because now the noise I spent months outrunning has caught up with me.

I can’t cancel it out anymore. It’s here. And some days, it fucking haunts me.

But I keep coming back to something Stephen Colbert said: you don’t get to pick and choose what you’re grateful for.

That hit me differently.

Because I would never choose this pain. I would never choose a life without Rob. But I would choose the life that gave me Rob every single time.

Maybe gratitude isn’t pretending any of this is okay.

Maybe it’s understanding that the pain exists because the love existed first.

And right now, that’s about as far as I’ve gotten.

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🤍 It isn't grief you're afraid of. It's that if you stop holding it back, you won't be able to stop.

➡️ So you ration it. Ten minutes in the car. Never on a work morning. Not anywhere you'd have to explain your face afterwards. Which means you have never actually found out what happens if you let it come.

"It was done in such a beautiful way that I could sit with grief and not collapse" is exactly how I designed Grief Trips.

A grief workshop in the morning, and then a lunch. Followed by a beautiful afternoon on a sandbank with crsytal clear waters. Someone crying at dinner and nobody panicking.The same table laughing not long after.

Here's the part people don't expect. The structure is what makes it safe to come apart. Nobody is asking you to be strong for six days. You're being asked to stop bracing, somewhere built to catch you, with people who just get it.

And then you find out the thing you were afraid of doesn't happen. You feel all of it, and you're still play. That you can is what you fly home with.

💬 Comment "TRIP" and I'll send you the details on the next Maldives Grief Trip.

#griefawareness #griefandloss #grieftravel #griefretreat #healingretreat

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💛 It's often not the funeral that's the hardest part. It's the ordinary Wednesdays months (and years) later.

Many of you have told me this. So this is what we built the Happy Grieving Group Program for.

Six months online. A small circle that meets every second Wednesday and gets to know your person by name and actually wants to know how your grief has been lately.

🗓 The first call is Wednesday 7 October.

➡️ Applications are open now. Comment GROUP for the link, or go to the link in bio.

📞 On Wednesday 30 Sep 9am PT / 12pm ET, @blairfromblairland and I are going live here to answer anything you want to ask.

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🌙 After my dad died, I spent 2 months solo traveling in Morocco. One thing that stayed with me: when someone dies there, their grief rituals gather the whole community to mourn together for days. There I also realised that new experiences are the closest thing to feeling alive again, without erasing grief.

I am so excited to invite you to join me on a week of Grief Trips in Morocco that holds space for what you've lost and what's still possible living.

💛 Step into the hammam spa, a ritual to cleanse the body and mind
💛 Talk about our loved ones over mint tea
💛 Embrace uncertainty getting lost in the medina
💛 Stay present with new sights and scents in the local market
💛 Feel wonder under the Agafay desert sky

➡️ Comment TRIP for more details

#healingretreat #grieftravel #griefretreat
#griefandloss

🔉: @cassandralibang_ (Grief Trips participant)

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