How to Keep Living After Losing a Child: Caroline Baudino’s Advice That Helped a Grieving Mother Survive

Healing isn’t linear, and after losing a child it can feel impossible. On Coming in Hot with Caroline Baudino, special guest Karla Smiley shares how she’s navigated the loss of her son Jimmy at 27—and how a Facebook scroll in her darkest weeks sparked a two-year friendship with Baudino that helped her keep moving. 

Smiley describes the 4:30 a.m. knock, the disbelief, and the quiet that followed when the house “felt like a funeral home” after Jimmy’s passing. Baudino met that pain with presence and practical nudges. “We have to support each other,” she says.

Start with the smallest step

When everything in your world stops, sometimes the only thing you can do is move your body. For Smiley that meant listening when Baudino said exactly what she needed to hear—even if it stung.

“I was scrolling through Facebook to put a picture up about the funeral,” Smiley shares about how she connected with Baudino. She recalls the advice that became her lifeline: “The first thing you said was, ‘get up, get dressed.’ No, it was ‘get the fuck up and get dressed.’” 

It was the wake-up call she didn’t know she needed. Those words became her routine: getting out of bed, brushing her hair, stepping outside, “feeling the grass.” Small choices not to fix the pain but to prove she could still take action, even when nothing made sense.

“Just reminding yourself you’re worth it,” Baudino tells her. “As long as we can find little pockets of joy and be up and dressed and living because that’s what we’re here to do.” Sometimes survival starts with putting on pants.

Walk through it, not around it

There’s no shortcut through grief, and Baudino never pretended there was. When Smiley told her she didn’t want to go on, Baudino said something that stuck: “You have to walk through the grief to get to the other side.”

It’s the kind of honesty that feels like a gut punch, but it’s also freeing. It gives permission to feel everything—the anger, disbelief, and heartbreak—without judgment. Smiley says that message was what finally helped her stop running from her emotions and start living with them. “Life is gonna look so different,” Baudino tells Smiley. “But it doesn’t mean that we can’t be happy in the heart and find moments of joy.”

Make space for relief

Grief can take up every inch of space in your life if you let it. That’s why Baudino encouraged Smiley to create a physical boundary with it. “Get a room in your house,” Smiley remembers Baudino telling her, “You said leave the grief at the door.” Smiley and her twin sister chose a room and turned it into a no-grief zone—a place where laughter, light, and calm were allowed to exist again. “My twin sister came over and we did this whole room,” Smiley says. “We all need a safe space. We have permission to be happy, we have permission to feel good.”

That room became Smiley’s small refuge. It didn’t erase the sadness, but it proved that joy and grief can exist in the same house—a reminder that healing can happen in corners, not just in grand gestures.

‘Put your oxygen mask on first’

When you’re grieving, even small choices can feel overwhelming. Bigger choices—about your marriage, your job, your future—can send you spiraling. Baudino reminded Smiley to slow down and “put [her] oxygen mask on first.” It’s the same advice you’d hear on a plane, but it applies to life, too: Take care of yourself before you try to fix everything else.

It’s easy to blow up your life when you’re in pain, Baudino says, but that’s rarely when you see things clearly. That perspective helped Smiley pause before reacting. Instead of torching everything in the middle of heartbreak, she focused on rebuilding her foundation first. Only then can you make choices “from a good place,” rather than from panic.

Build a simple toolkit

Grief doesn’t disappear—you just learn to carry it differently. The key is finding what keeps you grounded when the pain feels unbearable. 

For Smiley, those tools became second nature: stepping outside for fresh air, writing things down, lighting a candle, putting on makeup, sending a text to Baudino, or helping someone else. None of it fixed the loss—but together, they created rhythm, a sense of life returning in fragments.

Baudino emphasizes that these tools don’t have to be complicated. Breathing, walking, getting dressed, noticing a moment of calm—those little things don’t erase grief, but they give it edges—boundaries that make it possible to exist alongside it. 

Healing isn’t one big breakthrough; it’s hundreds of quiet moments where you choose to keep going.

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