When Grief Becomes the Air You Breathe: Melissa Mae Carlton's Journey Through Loss

Influencer Melissa Mae Carlton has spent the last two years learning a language no parent should ever have to speak. In April 2024, her daughter Abigail died suddenly at age 9. Nearly two years later, in February 2026, her daughter Molly passed away at age 5. Both losses carry the same cruel explanation: PPA2, a genetic mitochondrial condition that the family only fully understood after Molly’s postmortem diagnosis revealed what Abigail had been fighting all along.

Through Instagram posts and vulnerable messages to her followers, Carlton has become a voice for something most of us can barely imagine—the weight of burying two children and finding a way to keep living. Her words don’t offer false comfort or neat resolution. Instead, they offer something rarer: honest documentation of what catastrophic grief actually feels like.

The shift in Carlton’s perspective offers quiet wisdom. Two years after Abigail’s death, she wrote about learning to“count backwards instead of forwards,”borrowing language from speaker Hank R. Smith at BYU’s Life After Loss Conference. It’s a reframe that transforms time itself—instead of measuring distance from her daughter’s death, Carlton measures distance toward her.“We’re getting closer to you, not further away,”she wrote, imagining Abigail“running around laughing and smiling.”It’s not healing. It’s survival with a heartbeat.

But the last six months have tested even that hard-won perspective. In a June 2026 message, Carlton described the emotional toll as“trying to survive while drowning,”admitting the family has faced“grief, uncertainty, things I can’t publicly discuss, and challenges that have tested us in every possible way.”Yet even in that darkness, she’s found direction—quietly working on advocacy efforts, awareness initiatives, and legislative change to help other families navigate genetic mitochondrial conditions.

What Carlton’s journey reflects is the messy, non-linear reality of grief that grief books and support groups rarely capture. There are incredibly painful things behind the scenes. There are also incredible things happening. Life doesn’t pause for loss; it forces you to hold both at once. Her willingness to name that contradiction—not as strength, but as survival—may be the most powerful thing she’s shared.