The Evolution of

PHYLLIS A. LANIER

Where Grief Meets Purpose

Written by: Dr. Sonya Alise McKinzie, Editor in Chief

Grief has a way of entering life quietly at first, like a shadow stretching across the floor, and then suddenly, without warning, it becomes the room itself. For Phyllis A. Lanier, grief did not arrive as a single moment or a single heartbreak. It came in layers, each one heavier than the last, reshaping her world in ways she never imagined she would have to endure. She lost her first husband. She lost her mother. And then, in 2021, she lost her daughter, Kelsey, during childbirth. That final loss was the kind of pain that changes the temperature of a life, the kind that makes the air feel different, the kind that forces you to learn how to breathe all over again. Yet even in the midst of that devastation, something remarkable began to take shape. It did not happen quickly. It did not happen easily. But slowly, gently, and with a strength she did not know she possessed, Phyllis began to rise. Not in the way people sometimes expect grief to transform a person, not with a triumphant shout or a sudden burst of clarity, but with a quiet, steady determination to honor her daughter’s memory and to help others who might one day find themselves standing in the same darkness she had walked through. Her journey into writing began in the most tender and heartbreaking of moments. After Kelsey’s passing, Phyllis found herself face to face with the innocence of her grandchildren, who were too young to understand death but old enough to feel the ache of their mother’s absence.

Their questions were simple, but they carried the weight of the world. Why isn’t Mommy coming home? Where is she? When will we see her again? These were questions no grandmother should ever have to answer, yet there she was, trying to find words that could hold their pain without breaking them.

She remembers that moment vividly. “They were too young to understand such a deep loss, yet old enough to feel it in a very real way,” she wrote. Their confusion pierced her heart. She wanted to avoid the conversation entirely because speaking the truth aloud made it real. But she also knew that silence would not protect them. It would only deepen their confusion and leave them alone with feelings too big for their small bodies to hold.

In that moment, she realized something profound. This was not just her family’s story. It was a story lived quietly in countless homes across the country, where families navigate grief without a roadmap and children try to make sense of loss without the language to express it. “I understood that this was not just our family’s story,” she reflected. “It was a story many families quietly live through.” If she could put love, grief, and hope into words for children, maybe another family would feel less alone. That realization became the seed of her first children’s book, Where Is Mommy? Love never leaves – It simply changes where it lives, a tender children’s picture book that helps young hearts understand grief after the loss of a mother. Writing, however, was not a gentle process. It was a reckoning. It was a journey into the parts of her heart she had tried to protect from the sharp edges of memory.

Some days the words flowed naturally, like something that had been waiting beneath the surface. Other days they dragged her into the darkest corners of her grief, forcing her to confront emotions she had buried so deeply she had almost forgotten they were there. “Writing took me to a very dark place for a while, because it forced me to sit with pain I had packed away,” she admitted. It reopened wounds she did not know were still raw, not only from losing her daughter but also from losing her mother, a grief she had never fully allowed herself to feel.

Yet writing also became a lifeline. It became a way to make meaning out of heartbreak, to transform pain into something that could help others. It became a way to honor her daughter’s memory by creating something that could bring comfort to children who were hurting, children who needed gentle words to help them understand the unimaginable.