The Story of Still Here

Heilbronn, 1994

I was born in September 1979 in Heilbronn, Germany. I had a normal childhood—a loving family, an older brother who was my world. Then, when I was 15, my brother died in a car accident.

Most people see a death as a single event. A funeral, some grief, then life goes on. But what I experienced was the beginning of a 30-year slow-motion collapse. The death of my brother was not an ending—it was the first domino.

The Family That Evaporated

After the accident, my family disintegrated. My father became a shell of a man, consumed by anger and a depression he would never fully recover from. My mother tried to hold things together but her business collapsed under the weight of it all. When I turned 18, she left to try to start a new life somewhere else.

I stayed with my father. I chose to study in my hometown just so he wouldn't be alone. I was 18, grieving my brother, watching my parents fall apart, and there was no one—no therapist, no support group, no one in my circle of friends or extended family—to teach a teenager how to process the death of a sibling while his parents were checking out of life.

So I did what a lot of young people do. I numbed it. Partying, drinking, running from the silence. For years.

Building a Life on Fractured Ground

Somehow I built a career, traveled, created a life that looked functional from the outside. But grief doesn't go away because you ignore it. It lives in the foundation of everything you build. Every relationship, every decision, every quiet moment alone—it's there, waiting.

I carried the weight of being the last one holding the family together. The mediator. The one who showed up. The one who answered the phone at 2am.

The Final Wave

In 2023, my mother was diagnosed with leukemia. For two years, I became her primary support—driving across the country, managing doctors, navigating the brutal machinery of hospitals and insurance and hope and despair.

On October 30, 2025, my mother died. She was frustrated, tired, and ready to go. I held her hand and let her.

Five months later, on March 30, 2026, my father followed. Kidney failure and a stroke had taken what was left of him. He had given up long before his body did.

In the span of 30 years, I lost my brother, my mother, and my father. My entire immediate family. Gone.

Why Still Here Exists

After my father's death, I realized I was the last one standing. No siblings. No parents. Just me and 30 years of accumulated grief that I had never properly processed.

I don't hate therapy. But what actually helped me—what gave me the first real breath of relief—was talking to people who understood. Not people who said “I'm sorry for your loss” and changed the subject. People who had lived it. People who knew what it felt like to inherit a lifetime of someone else's trauma, to be the one who stayed, to carry grief so long it became part of your identity.

Still Here is the platform I wish had existed when I was 15 and my world fell apart. It's a sanctuary for people who are navigating loss—not just the acute shock of death, but the long tail. The anniversaries. The complicated family dynamics. The ambiguous losses. The grief that nobody talks about because it's been “too long” or it's “not a real loss.”

Every loss is real. Every grief is valid. And no one should have to carry it alone.