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00:00:00 - Jill Sullivan
Hi, Kim. Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today.
00:00:04 - Kim
I'm so blessed to be with you today, Jill. Thanks for having me.
00:00:07 - Jill Sullivan
Yeah, I have been looking forward to meeting you, even though it's just through the podcast. Typically, I have had the opportunity to meet my guests most of the time before they come on. But I have gotten to know you a little bit just by reading your book, which I enjoyed very much. But for the audience, for the folks who are listening, tell us a little bit about yourself. Tell us where you're from and what life is like for you there.
00:00:32 - Kim
Well, we are currently and lovingly residents of Tennessee. Now, my husband and I were both raised in southern California and thought that we would be there forever, and the Lord migrated us with a lot of our kids. We have six kids total, and most of them are here with us, and we have several grandkids. So life here in Tennessee is great and just really love the seasons and the beauty and a little bit slower. We are loving Tennessee. I'm not crazy about the snow we just had, but, I mean, you can't have everything.
00:01:11 - Jill Sullivan
That's right. It has been a crazy winter in Arkansas and Tennessee. Both this. Yeah. The pace of life, I imagine, is very different in Tennessee as opposed to southern California.
00:01:25 - Kim
It really is. We live close enough to Nashville that we can go if we want, and we did. When we moved here, we went into Nashville a lot more, and now we love our little community, and we have animals, and I get to have a garden. I had a garden in California, but having a garden in Tennessee and California are a lot different. And so I'm able to grow more things and learn how to endure the humidity, which is not. So, uh. So we have property and land, and I really like anything to do with being outside, with either my animals or the garden or hiking, any of that kind of stuff. So it is a little bit different for.
00:02:06 - Jill Sullivan
Yeah. Yeah. Well, that sounds very nice. So you mentioned that you have six children. We're here today to talk about your daughter, Nicole. Would you tell us a little bit about her? Help us get to know Nicole today.
00:02:21 - Kim
Like every mom, I think my kids are amazing. And so, yes, I'll be a little bit biased, but Nicole just had such an uncanny way of being present everywhere she went. And she loved everybody that she met, and we would be in the strangest places, and she would be over there visiting with people, and she just loved people unconditionally. She was a really tiny little person. Nobody intimidated her. She would walk up and strike a conversation with anybody, and that is really encouraging to me, even now, is just how she loved people, how she embraced people. She was very free in everything that she did. She didn't seem inhibited. And that's another thing that I really admire about her. She laughed easy, and she just lived fully present. And it was so fun to be with her because she always was having fun. She made fun out of the most mundane things. So we showed horses as a family. Two older girls showed horses, so we would travel around showing horses. And Nicole was a very good horse woman, for sure. She was a fierce competitor, but she also had a goal, to meet a new friend at every horse show she went to. And there would be a line of young little horse girls following her around, and she'd be teaching them about horses. So it was really fun to just be with her and to be in her presence wherever she was.
00:03:56 - Jill Sullivan
Yeah, she sounds like the type of personality that would just draw people to her.
00:04:00 - Kim
Yes, that's definitely a good description.
00:04:04 - Jill Sullivan
Yeah. So talk about what happened to Nicole in the winter of 1998.
00:04:12 - Kim
It was three days after Christmas. We lived in California at that time, and we were going to go camping up at Pismo beach, and it was a really fun place. We enjoyed to go after Christmas, after everything was kind of busy, the busy holidays. A lot of times, we just leave everything as is and drive up there and whoever could make it with us from the extended family. So we camped on the beach. We had set up our camp, and we were offroading. So we had atvs. We had a three Wheeler and some four wheelers, motorcycles, and we just went out on the dunes to. It was sand dunes. And so we went out on the sand dunes so the kids could play on the atvs and just kind of our first day getting to know the dunes, and I was just standing up by the truck and looked up in time to see someone go off a high dune at a high rate of speed. And it took a few minutes. They were on a three wheeler, and it took a few seconds for me to realize that it was Nicole, and everybody was just standing there paralyzed as we watched her fall on this atv. And even kind of going back a little bit, I just want to retrace a little bit. I had encouraged, Nicole wasn't riding, and earlier that day, I had encouraged her, Nicole, go take your turn. You're letting everybody else ride. You go take your turn. And so she did. And so even as that realization came to me that she was falling and she shouldn't be, it just seemed like a defied reason, like, she should not be. That should not be her. That's impossible. And as we all ran toward her, it was as if we were running through, like everything was slow motion. As you run and you go. I felt like I couldn't go fast enough. My husband got to her first, my husband and his dad, and they removed her helmet, and she was unresponsive. And for me, those moments started coming in snapshots, because it wasn't like I can't remember a lot of that day, but I can remember snapshots. And one of the first snapshots I remember is my husband picking Nicole up and facing me and the look on his face, and she was unresponsive, and that's kind of burned into my mind and trying to figure out, okay, what do we do? Because an
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ambulance couldn't get out to where we were, so we were remote, and so they ended up putting her in the back of the truck. My husband began doing CPR, and I stayed back with our youngest son at the time, Alex. And so some people gathered around us. The Lord sent us so many people to help us that day, and I can't help but wonder how many of them were angels, because it was just what we needed at the perfect time. We had some other relatives there. They took care of Alex while this jeep approached us and said, hey, can we take you up to the beach to meet the ambulance? And I was just sitting in the back of that jeep and just praying, Lord, make her breathe. Please let her breathe over and over. That's the only prayer I could say. And as we pulled up to the beach, we finally got up there. The paramedics were there, and Larry was still in the back of the truck with Nicole. And the truck was surrounded by people. And I was trying to get up there to her. And we had a pretty high truck, so it was kind of hard for me to reach her. And I just remember the closest I could get was up to her little foot, and I was just holding her foot. And I looked at my husband, and again, the look on his face was pure devastation. He had been giving her CPR, so he had seen what had happened close up, and they took her away in the ambulance. He rode with her. I got a ride with a ranger to take her to the ambulance, I mean, to the hospital. And I was just saying the same prayer, Lord, please help her breathe. Please help her breathe. And the ranger put his hand on mine, and he said, keep praying. And in my mind, I thought, oh, this is a sign this is a sign that she's going to be healed and it's all going to be okay, because I thought, you just pray and it's going to be okay, because we had never been through a traumatic situation like that before. And so he took me to the hospital, and in my mind, I just kept praying and remembering his words. As Larry and I came up to her hospital room, they had already wheeled her in there, and they were working on her. And Larry and I were praying, and Larry said in his prayer, Lord, we just pray for your will and for you to help us. And I snapped at him. I said, don't pray that. I just need her better. I just need her here with us. They ended up taking us into the family room, where they take people when things are not good. And the doctor came in with the chaplain and said very bluntly, basically, she died at the beach. And most of our family was together at that point, and we just kind of fell in to one another. And I remember thinking about the ranger's prayer. I mean, the ranger's words, just keep praying. And the Lord, it's not me because I am such a wimp. And I was in panic mode. But the Lord reached down and he just reminded me, just keep praying. The chaplain asked us, do you want me to pray the Lord's prayer with you? And I said, no, we need to pray from our hearts. So we just started praying. And my husband's prayer, because he knows me and he knows how this had the potential to devastate us. And he said his prayer was, Lord, please keep Satan out. Don't let Satan in. Don't let Satan in. Because Satan's goal for this was to be destroy us and for us to walk away from our relationship with the Lord. I didn't even grasp that at that time as much as later, in later years, I realized what an important prayer that was. We had to go through the steps then to take care of things after that. And again, it's in snapshots, just those decisions you have to make while you're in the hospital.
00:10:46 - Jill Sullivan
Yeah. It's so hard for me to imagine because our circumstances were so different. Our daughter was diagnosed with cancer, and we had a full year to go through treatments and all of those things, but also grapple with the thought that we might lose her, that she might go to heaven. I can't imagine having a fun family day at the dunes and all of a sudden something like this happens. I mean, how do you deal with that as a parent?
00:11:16 - Kim
I think that contrast is so shocking that that's why I could only remember little glimpses of the day. And now I recognize that as the Lord's protection over us. But I think that contrast, in such a quick moment, you go from having fun to actually seeing this happen. And I think for us, everything was like a little step, that the Lord, he just protected us. I didn't know it at the time, and I know it's how he creates us, but everything was just a little step. Every decision was just a step. Leaving the hospital was probably some of the hardest steps because you have to. Leaving her there. And I know so many parents have expressed this, even to me, leaving them there is just so hard because you feel like you need to take them with you.
00:12:10 - Jill Sullivan
Sure.
00:12:10 - Kim
And that was the longest walk out to our truck. Just getting out to the truck and then driving home.
00:12:17 - Jill Sullivan
Yeah. Well, and I love the prayer that your husband was led to say. Satan, stay away. Satan, keep away. You can't have us. Wow. Wow. I love that.
00:12:29 - Kim
That prayer really was, I think, Holy Spirit inspired just. And that prayer was, we prayed that often, and he prayed that over me often. And I just so appreciate that, how he was open to what the Lord was speaking right then, because I was just resistant of anything that was reality at that point.
00:12:50 - Jill Sullivan
Oh, sure, absolutely. In your book, you write about the decision not to see Nicole that night. Talk about that a little bit.
00:13:02 - Kim
The nurses came in and asked after we knew, and they know what we wanted to do. They said, would you like to see her? And Larry and I both agreed that we did not want to see her at that point. And I think one of the things is we were with her during the accident that we didn't have to try to make our brains understand what happened. We saw it. But also for me, I'm such a visual person. I needed to remember her alive. I
knew that she wasn't there. And I think that that, for me, was an important decision. We did get a lock of her hair and those kind of things and spent time there, but for us, it was important to remember her fully alive and free, the way she was. There were times that I doubted that, and there were times that I thought, did I do the wrong thing? And I actually thought, am I being wimpy? Because I'm not facing that? Am I turning away? But for me, I feel like the Lord allows us to just. He just allowed me to grieve in that way. Now, I know for some parents, it's more important for them to go in and see their loved one, especially if it's in an accident, when they haven't not been there, when they get this devastating news that they have to go so they can actually tell their brain. So I really believe there's no right or wrong way. But for me, even thinking about that, even this morning, I thought, no, I'm so thankful for me, from my own heart, that that's the decision that we made.
00:14:36 - Jill Sullivan
Yeah, I think that's just the reason I wanted you to share that is because I imagine there are people who wrestle with that. Did I make the right decision to see my child or not to see my child? And I think it's important what you said. It's different for everyone, and whichever you chose to do is the right thing for you, and that's okay. One of the things that you write about in your book is the idea of lost dreams. Our girls, Nicole and Hannah, were the same age, 17, right, when they went to heaven. And so we share a lot of the same lost dreams. How have you dealt with those things that Nicole missed? And I'm putting missed, in air quotes, high school graduation, going to college, getting married, having children, all of those things that we missed out with our girls. How have you dealt with that?
00:15:27 - Kim
That was one of the most difficult parts of our journey, was Hannah a senior, I'm assuming?
00:15:34 - Jill Sullivan
She was actually in the spring of her junior year.
00:15:35 - Kim
Okay, so she was younger. Nicole was a senior, and so we had just had senior pictures done. You have all of these things, even as a junior, as they go into high school. You have all of these landmark things that you look forward to as a high. Then, you know, she was going to graduate in the spring. She showed horses extensively. We had horse shows on the calendar, all of those kind of things. Those were part of the dreams that we had. And then when Nicole went to heaven, it just stopped, all that. And to have to figure out how to walk through that graduation was one of the first things we had to walk through our school was we went to a really small charter school, and they were so gracious, and they honored Nicole at graduation. They had a chair with her cap and gown, and so they invited us. But again, you have that contrast. Grief has so many contrasts, but the contrast of just when you walk in and it takes your breath away when you see that capping gown up there, and then contrast that with all the people that they're celebrating. And her classmates and their families were so gracious and kind to us, but we had to learn to just go ahead and grieve that Nicole would not graduate on earth. Now, Nicole's not missing anything. Hannah's not missing anything. Our kids, they are free, but it's us. But then also just celebrate with their friends, her friends who had graduated, who, they were so kind to us and hugged us, but we knew they struggled when they left that graduation ceremony. They were going to have parties. They struggled how to handle that with us. So that contrast of holding that grief and holding that sorrow. And I think that it's important that we do acknowledge those things hurt, but also learn to celebrate with the other people that knew Nicole deeply. When her best friend got married, it was hard because I knew on this earth Nicole would not get married. But then when her best friend got married, it was one of those things. I did not really particularly want to go, but it was important to her that we were there. And at one point, this is just a little side note. God comforts us every time that we are able to look outside ourselves. When I showed up there, it wasn't because I was brave. It wasn't because the Lord compelled me to go. But one of the things we have is a little sign of butterflies. So when the Lord sends us a butterfly, it reminds us of Nicole. And so, I am not kidding, it was in a weird time of year, but all of these butterflies started coming up before the bride, before her best friend. And I just felt like the Lord just gave us a little hug and just squeezed us and said, no, this is good. You're here to celebrate with Mandy, and you can still grieve the loss of Nicole, but he always has reminded me Nicole is more alive than we are. So you just need to understand that, yes, honor that sadness, but also be able to congratulate those. And it's a fine line, and it is a hard contrast at times.
00:18:58 - Jill Sullivan
Yeah. Well, then it's a both, and you grieve both and you can rejoice. And it's hard. It's hard to find that balance. And I think it comes with time. And what a sweet gift the Lord gave you that day.
00:19:12 - Kim
Yeah. I just remember kind of almost laughing because it was just so not laughing, just laughing out of joy, like, oh, Lord, thank you. And he has done that so often with us, with our whole family and some of the kids. At every single wedding that our kids have been in, there's been butterflies tucked in everywhere. And then sometimes butterflies just visit. And I know that's not Nicole, but it's the Lord reminding me of life and beauty. And just because she's not here with us now doesn't mean that we don't honor those memories that when she was here.
00:19:50 - Jill Sullivan
Yeah, I love that. Chapter eight of your book is titled letting go. What are some of the things you've had to let go of?
00:20:01 - Kim
Well, one of them is the dreams, the loss
of dreams, the calendar. When we came home from the hospital, we lived quite a ways from where she had passed away. And when we came home, there were horse show entry forms on the counter. There were things on the calendar that we had to deal with. We had animals, her animals, her horses and all of that. We had to let go of some of those things. We kept some of her animals, but she had a show horse, and we had invested that into that horse. For her to show, for her to qualify for the youth world and quarter horse, for her to do all those things, it wasn't fair for us to keep that horse. He would just have languished in the barn. And so we had to let go of that dream and sell him. And that was a very difficult thing. When Nicole passed away, anything with her name on it, anything like mail, I don't know if anybody else is like this, but I could not throw away. She would sign up for everything, for a free boat at the mall or whatever. And so I was forever getting junk mail. But if it had her name on it, I couldn't get rid of it. It just took forever to let that go, because it felt like if I was letting that go, I was letting go of her even more. And so there were a lot of things like that. Her little dog that was with us in Pismo beach when she passed away, her little dog got ran over in just the most random accident. And it was one of those things I felt like I told the Lord, I said, I don't want to give up anything else. Do I have to? And he just kept reminding me, you have to open your hands. You have to let these things go. Because I was holding so tight to anything tangible that represented Nicole's life that I wasn't grieving, I wasn't growing, I wasn't healing, because I was so clenched up, holding everything so tightly. And so when he pried open my hands, and some of them, I had to make the choice, and some of them I felt like I had to let go of, not by my choice, but every time I was able to do those things and let things go, it freed my heart up a little bit more to heal.
00:22:22 - Jill Sullivan
Yeah. So letting go can be a freeing process.
00:22:26 - Kim
It is so healing. It is so healing. It's a hard process, because we feel like when we lose someone, we just want to make everything. I wanted to control everything around me because my world felt so out of control. Right. We just. Okay. This is so out of my realm of what I can handle, Lord. Then I wanted everything else. I wanted to know where the kids were. I wanted to control everything. And within that control, I was trying to take things out of God's hands. And he very gently showed me that I was not going to heal, and the people around me were not going to heal through that process. It was only hindering, just moving forward and not moving forward, leaving Nicole behind, but moving forward in our healing and what we had to do every day in surviving, even.
00:23:19 - Jill Sullivan
Yeah. We always say here while we're waiting that as we move forward, we're not leaving our children behind because they're ahead of us every day. As we move forward on this journey of life, we're just one day closer to seeing our kids moving to them. So moving forward is a good thing.
00:23:37 - Kim
Yes. That's beautiful. I love that.
00:23:40 - Jill Sullivan
Yeah. To me, I like looking at it that way. It helps me. Another chapter in your book is called Laughter and Joy. And some may wonder how a chapter by that title could possibly be included in a book about the loss of a child. So talk about the place of laughter and joy in the grief journey.
00:24:00 - Kim
After Nicole went to heaven, I thought I could never. I couldn't even imagine ever feeling joy again. I knew that we grieved with hope. Thessalonians tells us that we do grieve with hope. So I knew that. But as far as feeling any type of joy, it just felt like that that was impossible. And in my flawed way of thinking, I felt like I was leaving Nicole behind again, thinking that, and also feeling like I was not honoring the loss and in a way that I was dishonouring her. And that is completely wrong. And the enemy was trying to keep. He puts those thoughts in our head, and those are normal thoughts. Absolutely. So that we stay where we are. And so I thought there was no way that I could ever feel joy again. But I started to realize that feeling joy and living life in a way that honors the Lord first and also Nicole's memory. I mean, she lived a great example of how to live. And so with that, if I lived in this dark place with void of joy, then I was not honoring the life that the Lord had given me to live. And so I had to learn that it's know we can have joy and we can have sorrow and they can coincide.
00:25:25 - Jill Sullivan
That's right.
00:25:26 - Kim
And I had to recognize that. And there were times, and I think that this is common in grief. There were times that I would start laughing. Something would remind me of Nicole. And it was so close that I would start crying immediately after. It's just such a raw. There's such. This jagged, raw line there. And joy and sorrow, they are so close to the same, but you can't recognize joy without recognizing the sorrow as well. So I learned that I had to honor Nicole's memory, to honor the life the Lord's given me. I had to embrace that. And it came in waves. And even sometimes now I'll feel myself being like, I have to do a check. Okay, it's been a while since I've laughed. It's been a while since I have to literally do that check. And then I'll realize, okay, I need to do all of these things to put myself in a good place to receive the Lord's joy. Because it's the Lord that gives us the joy. It's in him. It's only in him that we have joy. So it was a journey and learning that it was okay to embrace that.
00:26:37 - Jill Sullivan
Yeah, I think that's important for people to hear. Chapter Eleven of your book is titled Unanswered Questions. And I know that every bereaved parent struggles with this issue. Talk about the unanswered questions you've struggled with and how God has walked you through them.
00:26:56 - Kim
I think the biggest for me was, why? I think, why didn't you save her? Why didn't you stop this? And I think that. I thought that if I could figure out the big reason why, that I would be healed. And what the Lord started teaching me is, even if he did give me the big reason why, and I don't think my heart and my soul could contain it. We can't contain his reasons, but it still wouldn't take away my pain. So to be able to take those questions and sometimes anger towards God and be able again to open my hands and give those questions to him, especially the reason. The question of why. Why didn't you stop this, Lord, I know you could, because there's people that are healed in miraculous ways. I knew that he could. And during that time, he showed me if I give him those questions on this side of heaven, I probably won't have the answer to that. And maybe on the other side of heaven, it won't even matter because everything will become clear. But he gave me an eternal perspective, because in the question of why, it's a very narrow perspective. Of God. It's looking to this earth, to everything that we can see is all there is. And what he did, what he showed me, is if I gave him those questions, he expanded my view of him. So it was more of an eternal perspective and he would carry me through my pain. So that was the biggest unanswered question that I had, was just why?
00:28:40 - Jill Sullivan
Wow. I love that thought of that narrow perspective versus a wider, more eternal perspective, that if we just want the answer to why, then we're not going to get a satisfactory answer on this earth.
00:29:06 - Kim
If we're looking through that narrow perspective of just wanting an answer, we've got to have an eternal perspective, because scripture tells us that we look to the things that are unseen, because the things that are unseen are eternal, the things we can see. All of this is temporary. And so to be able to continually remind ourselves this is not all there is. And then that diminishes all the questions, because the questions don't matter quite as much.