In 2022, I experienced a man’s worst nightmare.
My beautiful three-year-old daughter, Katana Rose, passed away suddenly and unexpectedly from acute leukemia. Just one week after her funeral, my wife Ashlee, who was 20 weeks pregnant, was diagnosed with a life-threatening heart condition, severe pulmonary arterial hypertension.
She was already in heart failure. Continuing the pregnancy was too dangerous for her and the baby, so we had to end the pregnancy to save Ashlee’s life.
Within a very short period of time, our family had lost two daughters, my wife had been diagnosed with a life-threatening illness, and my picture-perfect life completely changed.
Destroyed.
But I was also still a father.
We had two children at home, and they hadn’t stopped being kids just because the adults around them were going through the worst period of our lives.
They still had confusion, boredom, hunger, sadness, questions, homework, toys, arguments, jokes and all the other things that come with being children.
Parenting after losing a child, while your other children are also grieving their sibling, is something I could never truly explain the feeling of.
It forces you to be stronger than you ever knew you could be.
Now you know what a hero is, and sometimes you regret having to learn that lesson. Ignorance really can be bliss.
Parenting Suddenly Felt Different
Before Katana passed away, parenting felt kind of easy!
Raising a couple of brats is no problem. You love them, protect them, feed them, teach them and hope for the best. Those were things I could control.
Afterward, those same boring responsibilities became ten times harder and ten times more important to me.
Our children had just watched the structure of their family change in ways they couldn’t possibly understand. Their sister was suddenly gone. Their mother was now extremely sick. The adults around them were grieving and would be forever.
Life was shook.
Nothing felt certain anymore.
As strong as I became, I couldn’t make that uncertainty disappear.
What I could do was make sure they knew we were STILL a family.
Could we go back to normal?
No.
That version of normal was gone forever.
But we could still live. We could still laugh. We could still go places. We could still make memories. We could still be happy without pretending none of this happened.
Our loved ones would want us to be happy.
And maybe that’s part of the energy that keeps them alive.
Kids Don’t Grieve Like Adults
Adults have expectations about what grief is supposed to look like.
Children don’t necessarily follow them.
A kid can be upset about something and then ask for a snack.
They can make six or seven jokes while you’re crying.
They can talk about the person they miss and ten minutes later want to play Roblox.
They can laugh on a day when everybody else feels miserable.
Trust me, I know.
Kids face this in such a different way.
That taught me that sometimes talking about grief is NOT the only way to deal with it. Sometimes playing together, getting out of the house and allowing yourself to be happy is part of grieving too.
I didn’t want my children to feel like they also had to give up being children because our family had experienced something terrible.
They deserved to laugh without feeling guilty about it.
They deserved birthdays that were about their birthdays.
They deserved to get excited about things.
They deserved outings, holidays, jokes, friends and ordinary memories.
If Carmine wanted to play, I wanted him to be able to play.
If Carmella was excited about something, I didn’t want her immediately wondering whether she was allowed to be excited because our family was grieving.
I never wanted happiness to become disrespectful in our house.
Being happy does not erase Katana.
Nothing could erase Katana.
She will always be part of our family.
And now we live the best we can for her.
Katana Is More Than What Happened to Her
Katana passed away from acute leukemia.
That’s part of her story.
But it is NOT who she was.
I think that’s something people can lose when they hear about a child who passed away. The tragedy becomes the headline, and suddenly everything that child actually was gets pushed behind it.
I don’t want that for my daughter.
Katana was a beautiful, adventurous little girl who had already experienced a lot of life before she was even four years old.
Ohio. California. Las Vegas.
She went from camping in the Ohio woods to exploring the Nevada desert and places like Seven Magic Mountains.
She loved telling stories.
She would take little action figures and animals and make up these crazy productions with them. Zebras, lions, whatever she had available became characters.
She had an imagination.
She was a creator.
THAT is my daughter.
She is NOT a sob story.
She is my hero.
When I say her name, I don’t want people only picturing a hospital.
I want people to understand that she lived.
She traveled.
She played.
She imagined things.
She made us laugh.
She had a personality.
She mattered before leukemia ever entered our lives, and she matters now.
That’s also something I’ve tried to teach my other children. Their sister isn’t some subject we are forbidden to mention because it makes everybody sad.
Katana is their sister.
She has a place in this family.
Fatherhood Continued
After Katana passed, small responsibilities became bigger.
Some of the hardest things I did during that period would look completely unimpressive to somebody looking at our family from the outside.
Getting out of bed.
Making sure everybody ate.
Answering a child’s question when my mind was somewhere completely different.
Keeping a promise.
Keeping a smile when I could.
Remembering that somebody still needed Dad.
Strength doesn’t always look dramatic.
I’ve been around fighters and combat sports for years. In that world, strength is obvious. It’s physical. People can see it.
Parenting taught me a completely different version of strength.
Sometimes I didn’t feel strong at all.
But I HAD to save my family.
That was enough to move me.
I hear people talk about motivation constantly.
Motivation became almost meaningless to me during that period because there were plenty of mornings when I wasn’t motivated to do anything.
Responsibility was different.
Mope your ass to work.
My kids didn’t need to know whether Dad woke up feeling inspired that morning.
They needed Dad.
I needed to be strong, or at least strong enough, to keep us moving.
That doesn’t mean hiding every emotion from your children or pretending you’re fine 24 hours a day.
My children knew I missed their sister.
They knew things were difficult.
Children can feel when something is off anyway. You aren’t fooling them as much as you think.
But they shouldn’t have to become responsible for carrying their father’s emotions.
That’s on ME.
There were times I cried privately. There were also times I cried around people I trusted. I’ve become much more comfortable admitting that.
Men can cry.
Strong men can cry.
Fighters bleed and cry.
Strength isn’t pretending you don’t feel anything.
The responsibility is making sure your children don’t suddenly have to become the adults because you’re hurting.
Keeping Some Rules Helped Too
One thing I don’t hear discussed as much is discipline after a family loss.
When your children have already been through something terrible, there can be a temptation to let everything go.
Why argue about homework?
Why enforce bedtime?
Why tell a kid no when they’ve already experienced something that feels so unfair?
You already feel bad.
You already feel guilty.
Sometimes you just want to give them whatever makes them happy for the next five minutes.
I understand that thinking because we fell into it a little ourselves.
Then I caught it.
I don’t believe removing every expectation would have helped my children.
Children also find security in knowing where the boundaries are.
STRUCTURE.
So I continued parenting them.
Tough or not, they still needed love. They still needed rules. They still needed respect. They still needed to know what was expected from them.
We adjusted when they needed us to adjust.
We weren’t harsh about everything.
There were days when homework wasn’t the biggest problem in the world.
There were days when somebody simply needed more patience.
But there were still responsibilities and expectations.
A child experiencing grief is something no parent could completely understand from the outside because every child is different.
In our house, keeping some expectations was another way of maintaining continuity.
Mom and Dad were still Mom and Dad.
The household still had a shape.
Maybe not the same shape.
Maybe not always a pretty one.
But there was still something holding it together.
Obviously, none of this was perfect.
Life is messy.
Families are messy.
Parenthood is definitely messy.
Messy doesn’t mean finished.
None of us are perfect.
I Had to Look at How Much I Was Working
This is probably the hardest parenting lesson for me personally.
Before Katana passed away, I worked constantly.
I was always trying something. Building something. Chasing another idea. Thinking about another business.
In my mind, I was doing exactly what a father was supposed to do.
I was trying to build a future for my family.
I still carry regret about how much time I spent working before Katana passed.
I was securing a future for my daughter that I had no idea wouldn’t exist.
That hits me SO hard.
I can’t change it now.
I also don’t think the lesson is that parents shouldn’t work hard.
That’s ridiculous.
We have bills.
Children need homes, food, clothing and opportunities.
Providing for your family is real.
The lesson for me was that the future cannot be the only place you’re trying to be a good parent.
Your children are living RIGHT NOW.
They need you present.
Think about it. Today is the future you were worrying about five years ago.
This is the future of the past.
How do we forget that?
If my child is trying to tell me something and I’m mentally three businesses away, am I really being a father in that moment?
MAN UP.
BE A BETTER LEADER.
Building something for your kids is important.
Knowing your kids while you’re building it is important too.
I still work hard. That’s never going to change about me.
But I try to recognize the difference between providing for my family and disappearing into work.
Life is ruthless.
It doesn’t empathize with you.
And it definitely doesn’t wait for you.
Taking Care of Myself Became Part of Parenting
After everything our family went through in 2022, I didn’t handle it well physically at first.
I drank more.
I ate a lot of fast food.
I gained a tremendous amount of weight.
At my heaviest I reached about 465 pounds.
It’s insane for me to think about now.
I hated everything about myself physically at that point.
There were huge things in our lives I couldn’t control.
I couldn’t control leukemia.
I couldn’t control my wife’s diagnosis.
I couldn’t change what happened with the pregnancy.
I felt helpless.
Angry.
FURIOUS.
Then I became angry at myself.
Eventually, I needed somewhere productive to put that rage.
So I put it into the gym.
I worked HARD.
I worked on my diet.
I pushed myself.
I shaped myself.
I rebuilt myself.
I started losing weight and gaining muscle, and eventually I got down to around 280 pounds without weight-loss surgery, GLP-1 medications, peptides or steroids.
Just work, anger, discipline and a lot of trauma turned into fuel.
There was nothing exciting about most of it.
It was repetitive.
The food was bland.
Workouts were rough.
Some days sucked.
But looking and feeling better was worth it.
Living for the people I still have here is worth it.
I NEEDED to become the strongest version of myself I could be for them, especially now.
Taking care of yourself isn’t automatically selfish.
Sometimes it’s leadership.
Your children need their father.
If I want to be here for them, my health has to be high on the list of things I’m responsible for.
That changed the way I looked at exercise.
It wasn’t just about how I looked anymore.
It became part of fatherhood.
There Is No Perfect Grief Schedule
I would be very careful about giving another grieving parent some perfect schedule to follow.
I don’t think one exists.
We are all different, and so are our families.
I know firsthand that grief can make even simple things difficult.
Triggers suck.
Something can hit you out of nowhere.
A song.
A location.
A date.
A smell.
A picture you weren’t expecting to see.
A memory.
Then suddenly your entire mood changes.
But talking about Katana mattered to me because avoiding her name wasn’t going to make losing her hurt less.
Sharing her energy helps me know she’s STILL HERE.
I’m only recently speaking publicly about some of this.
For years, work became one of the places I hid.
Get rich and forget!
Of course, that doesn’t actually work.
Eventually I started realizing how many things I hadn’t really faced.
Then some of the anger came back.
In a strange way, that brought some of my motivation back too.
There is a difference between keeping your family moving and staying so busy that you never allow yourself to think or take time to actually be with them.
I’m still learning where that line is.
I don’t want my kids to learn that being strong means never acknowledging pain.
I also don’t want them learning that working hard and chasing money should come before love.
At the same time, I don’t want pain running the entire household either.
We still need structure.
We still need money.
We still need goals.
We still need a future.
Like I said, the world IS ruthless.
But we keep fighting.
That’s leadership.
Bad things happen.
Sometimes unbelievably bad things happen.
We feel what we feel.
Then the morning comes.
Now what?
Do we lay in bed and cry forever?
Do we stop living too?
No.
WE HAVE TO LIVE.
For ourselves and for the people who depend on us.
What I Would Tell Another Parent Going Through Family Loss
I don’t have a formula for grieving parents, and I would be suspicious of anybody who claims they do.
But I can tell you what helped me.
Keep showing up for your children even when showing up looks unimpressive.
Make the food.
Keep the promise.
Go to the birthday.
Laugh at the stupid joke.
Say their sibling’s name.
Let them be sad.
Let them be happy too.
Don’t make happiness something they have to apologize for.
Keep enough structure in the house that your children know somebody is still driving the car.
Pay attention to your own health and behavior.
Taking care of yourself becomes part of taking care of your family when people depend on you.
And don’t become so focused on building your children’s future that you disappear from their present.
I reached out at different points in grief and sometimes came away even more disappointed.
Eventually I had to reach inward too.
And I found POWER.
Not some magical power that fixed what happened.
Nothing fixes it.
I found enough power to get up.
Enough power to keep parenting.
Enough power to work.
Enough power to change my body.
Enough power to keep my family together.
Enough power to say my daughter’s name without allowing the worst thing that happened to her to become the only thing people know about her.
I don’t think our family was ever going to “get back to normal.”
The old normal included Katana physically being here.
I can’t recreate that.
But our life now?
Katana still has a place in it.
Just in a different way.
Every time her brother or sister talks about her, she has a place.
Every time we tell one of her stories, she has a place.
Every time something I build has a little piece of her behind the reason I’m building it, she has a place.
We all pass away, but some people refuse to disappear.
I refuse to let my daughter disappear.
Her name was Katana Rose.
And the things I build today have purpose behind them.
I want to flood the world with Roses.
Trap Gambino
Instagram: @TrapDaddyMMA
