Katana Rose was three years old when she passed from acute leukemia in November 2022.

A couple of months later, News 3 in Las Vegas interviewed me about what our family had been through. I told them, “I have kids, so I have to put on a mask, and I have to be strong for her.”

That sentence still explains a lot about what grief looked like for me at the time.

I didn’t feel strong. I had responsibilities.

THE MASK

You still have kids who need breakfast. Bills still show up. People need answers. Your family looks to you. There isn’t some clean stretch of time where everything around you stops while you figure out what just happened.

A few weeks after losing Katana, my wife Ashlee was diagnosed with an aggressive form of pulmonary hypertension. She was pregnant at the time. At 20 weeks, that pregnancy had to be ended to save her life.

There wasn’t time to process one thing before the next thing was already happening.

So I became functional.

I made calls. I talked to doctors. I handled what needed to be handled. I kept the kids moving and tried to keep the house from falling apart. From the outside, that can look like somebody is dealing with grief pretty well.

Inside, it can be completely different.

That experience changed how I look at fathers and grief. A lot of men know how to keep functioning long after they’ve stopped explaining what’s going on in their heads.

WHAT DOESN’T GET SAID

There were plenty of things I stopped saying out loud.

I didn’t always say when I was scared or when I had no idea what I was doing. There were times I didn’t bring Katana up because I knew everybody else was hurting too, and I didn’t want to be the person who changed the mood in the room again.

So a lot of it stayed in my head.

I could work, joke around, handle business, be around people and be a dad. Somebody meeting me for the first time might never know what I had been thinking about five minutes earlier.

People see you functioning and assume you’re doing better. Sometimes you are. Sometimes you’ve just learned how to carry more without showing it.

I don’t expect to become the person I was before Katana passed. Losing her changed the way I look at my kids, the way I think about time and the way I notice other fathers who are going through something they don’t know how to explain.

I’ve had good days since then. I’ve laughed. I’ve built things. I’ve had days that felt normal. I’ve also had random mornings where something puts her right back at the front of my mind.

That’s just part of my life now.

HOW MEN ACTUALLY TALK

One thing I’ve noticed about men is that some of our best conversations happen while we’re doing something else.

At the gym. Driving somewhere. Sitting in a garage. Working on something. Watching a fight.

A guy may never sit down across from another man and announce that he needs to talk about grief. He might say, “This week has been rough.”
If the other guy doesn’t rush past it, the real conversation might start there.

That matters more than people realize.

For a long time, I thought being strong meant absorbing everything and making sure everybody else was okay. I’m still a father, and there are plenty of moments when my kids need me to put my own feelings aside and be present for them.

I’ve learned that keeping everything in my head has a cost too. Nobody can know what you’re carrying if you never give them a chance to hear it.

THE NEXT MORNING

I am a father who lost his little girl and then had to keep being a father the next morning.

That’s the part I understand best.

I don’t have a perfect lesson to put on what happened to our family. I don’t think every painful thing needs one.

What I know is that saying something out loud can matter, especially for men who have gotten used to saying nothing.

Sometimes the whole conversation is, “I’ve been thinking about her a lot lately.”

That can be enough to open the door.

Katana Rose will always be my daughter. I will always be her father.

I still have a life to live, kids to raise, work to do and people I love. She is part of that life every day.