40 Days, 5 Stages, One Unbreakable Love By Jamara Brooks-Parmer | UniqGrief Garden

There are moments in life that divide you into before and after.

For me, it was the 40 days and nights I spent watching my daughter Jahmya, fight through something no child should ever have to understand, the reality of life and death.

She was only 14.

In that sacred, heavy space of palliative care, time moved differently. The machines hummed, prayers filled the room, and every breath felt both like a gift and a question. I did not have the language for what I was witnessing at the time, but as we near one year, I’m finding myself searching. I needed answers. I want to better understand. I needed to make sense of what my eyes witnessed, and my heart had lived through.

That is when I began to deep dive into learning about the five stages of grief, introduced by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

And as I read and educate myself, my spirit whispered, you saw this already.

Because in those 40 days, I did not just lose my daughter.

I witnessed her process.

I saw moments where Jahmya would have a spacy look and GAZE around the room, quiet, almost as if she was trying to make sense of what was happening. That gentle distance was denial. Not loud, not dramatic, just a soft protection over her heart and lungs. The major organs that were struggling.

There were moments of frustration too. Not always spoken of course because she was intubated but felt. The discomfort, the exhaustion, what happen & why me that did not always need words. That was anger, not in rage, but in resistance to what her body was enduring.

Then came the questions. The subtle bargaining. The searching in her eyes. The moments where you could tell she was trying to understand if things could change, if there was another way, if healing would come differently than expected.

And then the heaviness.

A quiet sadness that filled the room even when no one said a word. The kind of silence that speaks. The kind of stillness that lets you know this is REAL(ity), this is happening. That was the weight of depression. And as her mother, that was one of the hardest spaces to sit in, because I could not fix it. I could only be present.

But what will stay with me forever

is her ACCEPTANCE.

Not in a way that says she gave up, because she did not. Jahmya fought. She smiled.

She loved. She comforted us. But there was a peace that came over her. A stillness. A knowing.

Something so fragile, yet so powerful, that it left me in awe.

How does a 14-year-old come to terms with something that most adults struggle to grasp?

That question still sits with me.

What I have come to understand is this, grief is not just something we experience after loss. Sometimes, grief begins before. In palliative care, I learned that the families of the critically ill live in both hope and heartbreak at the same time. You are praying for healing while preparing your heart for the unimaginable.

That is a sacred kind of duality.

And now, as I continue my own grief journey, I realize I am walking through those same stages, not in order, not neatly, but in waves. Some days I am in deep sorrow. Some days I am functioning. Some days I am building legacy through UniqGrief Garden. And some days I am simply trying to breathe through the ache.

To any family walking through palliative care or carrying the loss of a child, I want you to know this

You are not alone in what you are feeling.

What you witnessed, what you are experiencing has depth, it has meaning, and it deserves to be acknowledged.

Your child’s emotions mattered.

Your experience matters.

Your grief matters.

And even in the heartbreak, there is something sacred in the love you shared, in the moments you held, in the strength you did not know you had.

Jahmya’s life taught me that even the smallest bodies can carry the deepest wisdom.

Her journey showed me that grief and love are forever intertwined. And if her 40 days taught me anything, it is this! Love does not end when life does. It transforms. It stretches. It lives on in memory, in purpose, and in every life, we continue to touch.