Amy Grace.
She was my older sister. She was a mom, a wife, a friend, and the loudest Def Leppard fan in any room she walked into. She was also, quietly, very lonely. This is the story of who she was, and why we send the letters in her name.
Amy walked into rooms and rooms got louder.
Amy was my older sister. She was a mom. She was a wife of more than twenty years. She was a friend to more people than I can count, and she was the kind of sister who would drive you crazy and then make you laugh about it in the same afternoon.
She had an infectious personality. If you spent five minutes with Amy, you left in a better mood than you came in with. I have never in my life met someone who could fill a room the way she could.
She loved her kids. She loved our parents. She loved her siblings, and yes, that includes the annoying younger brother writing this. She loved her coworkers, and her coworkers loved her right back. People who met her once still ask about her twelve years later.
Amy was also always trying to be better. She read. She tried new things. She worked hard at her job and harder at her marriage. She cared, a lot, about being a good person. She was one.
We took a lot of walks together toward the end of her life.
On those walks, Amy would tell me things she would not tell anyone else. She would describe the silence in her own house. She would talk about feeling invisible inside a marriage of more than twenty years. She would tell me how hard the days were starting to feel, and how she was trying, and how the trying was not working the way it used to.
A few weeks before she passed, she said something that has stayed with me for twelve years. She told me she could not remember the last time her husband said "I love you." She was not being dramatic. She was not exaggerating. She was sitting with a number of days that had gotten too big for her to hold.
You could see Amy fighting. She was fighting to stay here. She was fighting to feel okay. She was fighting to believe that the people around her actually saw her. Life was hard. Work was hard. Her marriage was hard. The loneliness, most of all, was the weight she could not put down.
She told me she couldn't remember the last time her husband said I love you.
From the founder's notesAmy took her own life at 42.
April 19, 2014 is the day Amy Grace took her own life. She was 42 years old. She had two sons who adored her, a family that loved her, and coworkers who still talk about her in the present tense. None of that was enough to hold the weight of what she was carrying.
Not a day goes by that I don't think about her. Twelve years later, I still catch myself wanting to tell her things. A song on the radio she would have loved. Something one of my kids said that sounded exactly like her. The anniversary comes around every April and it does not get any smaller.
I loved my older sister. I still do. I always will.
I can't send one to Amy. So I'm sending them to your kid.
I have a teenager of my own now. I know how quiet it can get in a teenager's head. I know how easy it is for a kid who looks completely fine at dinner to feel, at 11 p.m. in their own room, like nobody in the world is thinking about them.
There are millions of teenagers in that place right now. In the United States and everywhere else. Some of them will tell their parents. Most of them will not.
The Amy Grace Letters is the thing I wish somebody had done for Amy. A real piece of mail, in a real envelope, with real words on it, from a person who actually sat down and thought about them for a minute. Not a push notification. Not a screenshot. Something they can hold.
I want a teenager who feels invisible to walk to their mailbox, pull out an envelope with their name on the front, and know one thing for sure: somebody is pulling for them. Somebody knows they exist. They are not alone in this.
Every letter carries her name for a reason.
We called it The Amy Grace Letters because that is honestly what it is. A memorial. A thing my family built because we could not build the one we needed back then.
I am not trying to turn Amy into a symbol. She was a real person. She laughed too loud at her own jokes. She belted Def Leppard in the car. She was messy and funny and kind and full of fight. I miss her every single day.
If these letters reach one teenager and make them feel a little less alone, that is enough for me. If they reach a hundred, even better. If they reach the kid Amy used to be, the one who hid how hard it was, that is the whole reason we are doing this.
Every letter we send is the letter Amy never got.
Mike, Amy's brother and founder
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