The baby crawled to his mother’s funeral, and what he did touched everyone’s heart. Losing a parent young is a loss that’s difficult to understand unless you’ve personally experienced it or seen it first hand, like funeral directors. To be Frank enough, losing parents at a young age is an unrecoverable damage to their childhood.
At that age, kids need unconditional love, security and basic needs. But when one know that their parents are no more, then they start growing independently and in a self motivated manner, realizing that no one will be there to catch them when they fall down and nurture them as their parents after they reach a certain age.
Those kids don’t even remember the faces of their parents. But for sure, children who had faced this type of loss will be stronger than others and stay as a role model to at least one person. That changes that person’s approach towards life. Dealing with grief is so misunderstood, it changes the course of everything we consider normal. I’m here today to tell you that grief chews you up and spits you out.
You become a victim. Unfortunately, nobody likes a victim, and a lot of people that you really care about will walk away. They don’t know how to deal with it, so they will do what is easiest for them. You will feel angry, but forgive them. Extreme grief is no joke.
It’s absolutely normal to fall apart, and for young children, it can be a shocking and confusing experience when they lose someone so close to them, like a parent who has always been there. It’s life altering. Grief is a difficult thing that makes itself felt in all aspects of your life. When something happens after some time has passed, people often think you have dealt with it and moved on. Unfortunately, that is rarely the case.
A counselor once told me that you have to grieve for the past, present and future, and the future keeps on happening each day. As you get older and gain more knowledge and life experience, you need to reprocess your grief through new eyes. As major life events happen. You need to work through how you feel about the situation now. Losing a parent at age eight doesn’t mean you’ll be sad for a time and then recover.
It was around midnight, just after his wife and unborn daughter’s funeral, that Zac Kincade noticed something in the photos. There was one of his sons trying to get closer as he watched his father shut the casket, knowing it would be the last time he would see his mother and sister forever. This was not just Kincaid’s reality. This was his nightmare after a drunk driver crashed into his wife, Crystal Kincaid’s car, killing her and their eight month old daughter. And it was a nightmare that Kincaid decided to share with the world, posting the photos on Facebook, hoping he could save another family from his pain.
I put those pictures up so everyone can see the nightmare that I’m living with my kids and are living every day for the rest of our lives, he told Daily Mail TV in an exclusive interview. I’m using it as a tool to protect everyone else. That’s what this is about. It’s not about me getting vengeance. This is about doing what’s right.
This is about making sure that my wife didn’t die for nothing, that my daughter didn’t die for nothing. This is my way to honor them. This is my way to save others. Kincaid’s world was completely torn apart when Marcos Forestall, 28, struck Crystals minivan in Hematitte, California, at 08:30 p.m. On September 9.
He was going 85 miles an hour, speeding down the wrong Lane. Kincaid, 34, had been on the phone with Crystal, who was getting off work early. She was planning to go on maternity leave. Just four days. We were talking, and then I just heard her scream, he recalled.
That scream only probably lasted about 2 seconds, but it replays in my mind very slowly. There was a quiver of almost like despair or impending doom. And then I heard the loudest crash. It sounded like the car was tumbling after that, but it didn’t. And then there was just silence.
I didn’t hear her whimper. The silence was terrifying. The silence lasted for a while. Kincaid could then hear people rushing to the car, trying to open the door. They told her Crystal was still breathing, that her legs were pinned, that a fire was coming for her.
I’m screaming from the floor. She’s pregnant. She’s pregnant. Is the baby okay? Kincaid, who was out of town for work at the time, recalled.
I was stuck 450 miles away from her on the other side of the phone. Then he could hear the fire Department arrive, cranking up a machine to get her out of the wrecked car. A police officer told him Crystal and baby both still had a pulse at that moment. I was like, okay, there’s hope, he said. But Kincaid couldn’t get a flight home that night, and a couple of hours later, a doctor called him to tell him that his daughter, who they had planned to name Avalon Onyx, was dead.
She was crying with me on the phone, telling me how perfect she was and how she had no damage and how she was fully developed, he said. Full head of hair and chubby cheeks and chubby thighs. How she is beautiful and perfect. And they told me I only had 4 hours to get there and hold her before the corner took her. Kincaid begged them to break the rules, but they couldn’t.
They couldn’t even open the blankets to let him see her on Facebook Live. I didn’t even see what my daughter looked like until September 26. During the funeral, he said. That was the first time I saw or held her. The next day, he got on a plane, only to find out that Crystal had failed her.
First neurological test, then she failed the second. The only thing left that was working was her heart. Kincaid had to tell the couple’s three children and his stepdaughter, who lives in Minnesota, that their mother was gone. They came to the hospital thinking they had a little sister, he said of the couple’s three children. They didn’t even see this coming.
It was really hard. They not only lost their little sister, they lost their mom. Just after having that devastating conversation, Kincaid received a link on Facebook from Crystal’s brother, Forrest. All had live streamed the crash that killed her. I had an accident, guys.
Look at what happened to me, Forestall, a boxing champion, can be heard saying in the video. Man, a car crossed in front of me. Look at my car, guys. Kincaid couldn’t believe what was playing on his screen. I was watching him try to put the blame on my wife and not take responsibility, he said.
And in the background, I saw my wife’s car on fire. I just couldn’t believe it. He didn’t even have enough humanity to go over there and try to open the door, hold her head up so she could breathe, trying to put out the fire. I saw somebody that was 100% narcissistic. I saw somebody that only cared about himself.
How broken do you have to be to not have enough humanity to help somebody that needs help? At that moment, I kind of went numb. But Kincaid was even more enraged when he found out that Forestall was only charged with one count of gross vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated. If convicted, he faces a maximum of ten years in prison. My daughter is 36 weeks, and she’s not even be considered as a human.
So one count. They say that’s it because of a lack of intent. And I find that real funny, that word intent. This guy is driving like a maniac in the wrong Lane and hit my wife on the other side of it head on. He didn’t try to break.
He didn’t try to swerve. He just hit her. He wasn’t just drunk. He was driving extremely reckless to say there was no intent. I know this.
His intent wasn’t good. I just had this gut feeling that he’s just going to be out there drinking and partying, feeling sorry for himself in no time. And that’s just not acceptable. It’s disgusting. Kincaid said he felt 100% betrayed by society when he found out.
They’re basically sending a message to my kids and me that my wife is just disposable and that my daughter is just a clump of cells, he added. To me, that’s not a world I want to live in. I don’t think any of us should be comfortable living in that kind of a world. That’s why Kincaid has since begun Change.org petition, hoping he can help enact harsher punishments for drunk driving. There needs to be a deterrent, he said.
These people get off with a slap on the wrist and probation. We need to make it so that people don’t want to risk getting in the car drunk. And that’s why Kincaid posted those heartbreaking photos on Facebook. His way of not letting anybody look the other way anymore. It’s a harsh reality, and people need to look at it because drunk driving destroys more than just people that are killed in the crash, he said.
I want to strike a nerve. I don’t want to be able to look the other way anymore. Look at my nightmare that I live with every day. There’s not a day that goes by that Kenk doesn’t think of Crystal, doesn’t think about picking up the phone and talking to her or wondering when she’ll come down the stairs. Taking it on by myself isn’t what scares me, he said.
It’s all the graduations and birthdays and Christmases she’s missing, not getting to see her smile with me. Losing a parent at that age is very hard. You formed attachment healthily. You were still dependent on your mom. She had been there for you your whole life, and then she passed away.
There’s not a right way or wrong way to mourn. Most people who have these kinds of attachment will grieve for a long time. Four years is not a long time. You will forever miss your mom. You may get by easier.