Episode
Episode 359: A Season of Tears - Sebastian's Mom
- Published
- Jul 30, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 3601
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://andysmom.libsyn.com/359-a-season-of-tears-sebastians-mom
Actions
POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/losing-a-child-always-andy-s-mom-252545/episodes/episode-359-a-season-of-tears-sebastian-s-mom/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/losing-a-child-always-andy-s-mom-252545/episode-359-a-season-of-tears-sebastian-s-mom.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.
Summary
Jackie knew it was coming. That is one of the hardest things about this kind of grief. For years, she had watched her son Sebastian struggle with mental health and addiction, and there came a point, as she puts it, where it was no longer an if but a when. She braced herself. She prepared. She thought maybe that would soften the blow. It did not. Sebastian was Jackie's firstborn, a towheaded, blue-eyed dynamo who walked at ten months old and never really stopped moving. He was curious about everything, passionate about soccer, and a national chess champion not once but twice before he decided it was no longer cool. He played D2 college soccer, loved the outdoors, and could make a room come alive. He and Jackie were so much alike that they butted heads constantly, but they always knew they loved each other. His last words to her were I love you, Mom. He died by suicide in 2017 at the age of 23. He was in a rehab program. He was supposed to be safe. Jackie says she never found herself angry at God, but she was angry at Sebastian for a long time. She clung to Jesus anyway. She went to church and hid in the front corner of the earliest service where nobody knew her, and she cried for two years. She went walking every day and listened to her Bible, unable to read it, barely retaining any of it, but letting it wash over her. She could only get through the Psalms, underlining every lament. She told people simply: I cannot see God in the midst of this, but I know He is there. Where else am I going to go? She calls those first years her season of tears. And she allowed herself to be in it. What she has built on the other side of it is remarkable. After thirteen writing classes, years of anonymous essays on Substack, and the steady encouragement of a writing coach and a grief cou…