Affiliate Leader Focus: Chris Myers, Co-Affiliate Leader of Helping Fathers Heal

My daughter Paige passed suddenly on August 29, 2017. She was 22 and had just begun graduate school the day before. Paige was diagnosed at age nine with Friedreich’s Ataxia, a progressive and untreatable disease. While I lived with the awareness that she might leave before me, I never expected it to happen so early and so suddenly. The best word I have found for what followed is “shattered.”

I am an engineer — someone who looks for structure, understanding, and answers. After Paige’s transition I read voraciously about the afterlife and near-death experiences, searching for meaning wherever I could find it. That path eventually led me to Helping Parents Heal, where my first experience was with a local chapter. Sitting with other parents who were living through the same unimaginable loss was comforting.

When Mike Edwards announced a new online group for dads, I joined right away.  In the early days of HFH, we might have 5 or 6 dads on our weekly Zoom meetings.  There were times it was just me and Mike!  We worked through some discouragement, and eventually the group took off.  We have several hundred members of the Facebook group now, and our meetings have 30 to 50 dads every week.

The men of Helping Fathers Heal have been an inspiration of hope and love to me — showing one another unconditional support, witnessing each other’s pain, and traveling through grief together as brothers. I am honored to help lead the HFH group, helping to create a space where fathers can be real, vulnerable, and understood.

Today, more than eight years into this journey, I have grown from hopeful skepticism into a personal knowing that Paige lives on and that there is a loving source behind all of this. Most of my shattered pieces have been carefully glued back together, though a few are still missing and many cracks remain visible — reminders not only of loss, but of love that continues.  

~Chris Myers, Co-Affiliate Leader, Helping Fathers Heal

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