Patchies™ was built from love, memory, and the choice to keep going.

After my daughter’s life was taken from her in February 2022, I found myself in a place no one prepares you for. It was not something that could be treated. It was something that had to be survived.

I had already lost my mom in November 2021 to breast cancer. When my daughter was killed less than three months later by a drunk driver, the weight of that kind of loss was beyond anything I could have ever imagined carrying. In the middle of that grief, I started writing. I wrote through the hardest moments. What I was feeling. What I was thinking. What I did not understand. What I needed just to make it through.

Years later, when I was finally able to reflect without reopening every wound, I realized something. Someone else would one day be trying to survive something they thought they could not survive. Having survived it, I knew I might be able to help them survive it too. To help them reach the same understanding. The same kind of comfort. That even when someone is gone, love still remains.

That is where Patchies began.

Art had always been part of my life. My mom was an award-winning artist who built a business from her work in the 1960s through the 1980s. She created small patchwork clay animals called Patchwork Pets. Even as a child, she had me making them with her. That idea of taking pieces and creating something meaningful was something I grew up with.

I carried that into my own life, and I saw it again in my daughter. She was creative, bright, and full of life. She loved color, light, and that warm retro free-spirited style that feels like sunshine. Patchies became a reflection of all of that. My mother’s art. My daughter’s light. And my decision to turn pain into something that could help someone else.

During the darkest moments, when you feel like there is no light, that is when you have the opportunity to become the light.

What changed me was looking around and seeing nothing but darkness and realizing the light that was missing was me. I had to find a way to get my light back and now I am here to help others find theirs again.

Keep going. The sun will come.