For Our Kelly Hurst

Hello, y'all. My name is Heather B. Armstrong.

I spent last week in Springfield, Illinois, with my best friend Kelly Hurst. She lost her son, Morgan Riley Wickham, on the afternoon of March 2nd. He was the youngest of her four children, her baby boy. Morgan Riley, a beautiful name for a beautiful man whose name you should know and say and honor.

Today would have been his 27th birthday.

I have not lost a child. I have never lost a close family member or a close friend. I would wager that many of us haven’t suffered this kind of loss. But we are all human. We are all water, we are all sun. We are the Carrara of David’s eyes, the bend in his wrist. We are the strategy, the fear, the intrepid gaze toward Goliath. We are the art as it reveals itself to the artist. We are the eyes of the universe looking at itself, its arms reaching endlessly farther away from its origin, its ability to speak and sing and dance.

Stop saying that you can’t imagine this kind of pain. Because you can. If you cannot imagine this pain, it’s only because you won’t. And today, you must.

These funds will all go toward helping Kelly and her family navigate the next few hours and days and months of their lives. No mother should ever have to prepare for the financial impact of a sudden and unexpected event that explodes in this kind of horror only to continue to unravel and distend in barbaric waves every time she opens her eyes.

Most of us have one, maybe two people on the list of people we would run into a burning building to save knowing that by saving them we would die in their stead. Kelly is on everyone's list.

She has been our leader, our compass, our voice of reason. She has been all of our fists raised in outrage even when we were too scared to raise them ourselves. She possesses a tender mercy toward all of us in this community that radiates as naturally as the sun gives out heat. She is the mother everyone wishes they had.

Let us all hold her now in the way she has held us. ♥️