Rebuild Hope for a Grieving Family in Crisis

We need your help now more than ever. IWe need to get back to Denver from Florida to lay my girl to rest. I need help my friends. Anything you can contribute will help me and Cosmo get through this complete horrific disaster.

It is through agonizing grief that I’m forced to share with you, my beautiful daughter, Ambrosia Grace Monet McKittrick, has left this world. Someone took her life from her before she had the chance to make the decisions that would’ve led her home.

Please hold Grace in your heart and help send her on her way. She didn’t deserve this. She deserved all the love in the world. She was loved. She was also ostracized a lot. She had so much to share with the World. She wanted to be a healer and help others. She had an ember burning that was showing her a way.

I wasn’t really ready to write this post, but the police are going public to try and gather information and catch this asshole.

Please hold those you love close.

My family has been through a lot over the last 6 years. This is when my teenage daughter (now almost 21) fell victim to addiction as a result of generational trauma and addiction. Let me back up.

In 2003, the most beautiful adoption of a newborn girl happened. My husband, Al and I could not have our own children. He was HIV positive and I’d had one miscarriage and then an ectopic pregnancy. We turned to adoption. We met our kids' birth mom through our community work and 2.5 months later we were parents!

Back then, we really didn’t understand generational trauma. Now we do. Al and I loved and nurtured our oldest child and then, when she was 4, her birth mom got pregnant again and asked if we wanted to adopt this new baby. YES!!!!! We said.

Fast forward to our current situation. My oldest daughter’s trauma and addiction began to unravel our home. We tried and tried to get her well. I’ve spent 30 years providing advocacy and social services to people living with HIV, people experiencing homelessness, and people living in poverty, and yet when it came to helping my child I was powerless and became a victim of child to parent domestic violence. My self-esteem took a dive, COVID hit, my dad, who lived with us actually died at home on March 15, 2020. Then my brother died of a massive heart attack in 2021, and then, on December 5, 2022, a few months after we moved from Denver to Orlando and 2 weeks after finally moving into a home, my husband was in a fatal car accident.

I had just started a job and taken early social security to make ends meet. I got my addicted daughter to me in Florida and the abusive cycle started again.

Today, I am unemployed due to complex trauma and grief; I have a depressed, traumatized, grieving 16 year old who I will homeschool through the rest of high school; and I have no safety net or nest egg.

My older daughter is still struggling with active opioid addiction and my younger child is still struggling with depression and anxiety. I have been focusing on my healing so that I can save my oldest’s life. I’m it. She’s alienated everyone else.

I’m seeking help to get her into a quality recovery program and make sure my 16 year old and I can stay housed as I move forward. I am seeking non-stressful employment and looking forward to rebuilding happiness and a healthy family, but I can’t do it alone. I need your help! I have never asked for help before. And I have never been without family support - a place to land if need be.

This fundraiser has the ability to save 2 young lives from despair, depression and addiction, and me, their mom, from anguish and poverty. Your support will help us pay the rent for a few months and catch our furry ones up on their shots and care, as we move forward, as well as pay for my daughter’s PTSD and substance use treatment.

I never imagined I’d be in this place. The internal work I have been doing, including domestic violence therapy and spiritual healing are giving me the strength to actually take action. I am grateful for any help you can provide.