Dan Straffords’s Story

What has changed for you and the girls since we last shared your story?

Dan Strafford wishes he could say nothing has changed.

But it has been a year of change in many ways.

Grief looks different now for Dan and his daughters. It is less about the immediate pain and triage of loss, and more about understanding what longer-term grief looks like as the girls get older.

They are seeing the world differently now. Each of them is figuring out how she feels about losing her mom in her own way.

That has taught Dan something important: their grief is not the same as his.

“I had a life before my wife,” Dan says. “I had a world where I didn’t know her.”

His daughters never did.

“So the way they process losing their mother is different from the way I process losing my wife,” he says. “And it’s different for each one of them, too.”

Was there a moment when you recognized that their grief was changing?

One moment came on the way home from vacation.

Dan and the girls were sitting at a McDonald’s at a rest stop when Ailish asked him where his wedding ring was. Dan has not worn it in about two years, and Ailish was not really asking why. She simply wanted to know where it was.

Then Maeve asked him why he did not wear it.

Dan explained that it was something he had stopped wearing and that, at a certain point, it felt strange to keep wearing it.

Maeve looked at him and said, “But you made a commitment.”

Dan tried to make a joke about “till death do us part,” because humor is one of the ways he moves through hard things. But he could tell that answer was not enough for her.

The next morning, he sat all three girls down.

He realized it was a conversation they had not fully had.

“I told them that the way I’m fulfilling my commitment to their mother is by helping them deal with their grief and raising them the way we wanted to raise them,” Dan says.

Dan talks about being a single parent, but to him, that is more about function: having to do everything, or most things, on his own.

But in how he parents his daughters, Kim is still part of it.

“In how I parent them, I’m still parenting with their mother,” Dan says.

He thinks that was what Maeve needed to hear.

 

How do the girls each carry their mom with them?

Dan sees each of his daughters grieving and remembering Kim differently.

Ailish is very open about it. She will say, “I miss Mommy,” and want to talk.

Maeve is open enough, but she is also very much a 13-year-old girl now, with the snark and attitude that come with that age.

Nora is in what Dan calls her “emo phase,” so her reactions ebb and flow.

Sometimes, the girls use humor.

Maeve and Nora once bought shirts at Five Below that said, “Sorry, I can’t. My mom said no,” and they thought it was hilarious because, of course, their mom cannot say no.

For Dan, moments like that are part of how they process the loss.

They can joke about something that might feel completely different to him, or even to Ailish.

“I think I’m learning that grief doesn’t just look different from person to person,” Dan says. “It changes as they grow.”

How are you preserving Kim’s story?

Dan has been writing stories about Kim.

For a while, he could have kept writing about how losing her affects him now. But eventually, he realized there needed to be a line around the stories.

He wanted them to be about Kim’s time with them, not only the time after.

Many of the stories started as Facebook posts, copied and pasted together. Now, someone is helping him edit them and shape them into something more complete.

Dan and his family also have a scholarship fund in Kim’s name, and he hosts a trivia night each year to raise money for it. Eventually, he has thought about putting the stories together and letting anything they raise go toward the scholarship.

Mostly, though, Dan is grateful to be finishing something.

“I have a problem with starting things and not ending them,” he says. “So having a finish line for this feels good.”

Why did you and the girls want to come back to Runway?

For Dan, the answer is simple.

The girls wanted to.

He is happy to participate in anything that helps Runway. Anything he can do for the organization, he would do in a heartbeat.

But when he brought up the idea of returning to Runway, Maeve’s face lit up.

“She was like, ‘Wait, we can do it again? I thought we could only do it once,’” Dan says.

He expected Nora to maybe be unsure. Instead, her reaction was immediate: “Hell yeah.”

Ailish was in right away too.

For Dan, Runway became something unexpected for his daughters.

“It was something brought to us because of pain that brought them joy,” he says.

The girls had so much fun. They met people. Maeve reconnected with friends. The experience became something they genuinely loved.

“So why wouldn’t we come back?” Dan says.

 

What has Runway given you personally?

Runway has given Dan community.

When Kim passed away, Dan realized he needed to find people.

Kim grew up in the community where they live. She knew everyone, and everyone knew Dan as her husband.

After she died, Dan began deliberately building community. He joined the PTO and is now the PTO president at the elementary school. He joined the girls’ basketball board. He started looking for places where he and his daughters could belong.

Runway became another one of those communities.

It has helped Dan find people who have gone through similar things, or at least things that are close enough to understand.

It reminds him that other people have lived through deep loss and are still here.

“They’re still breathing,” Dan says. “They’re still walking. They’re still working.”

For Dan, that matters.

It makes continuing feel possible.

“So it’s possible,” he says. “It’s possible to keep doing it.”

What are we celebrating this year?

This year, Dan and his daughters return to the Runway stage in memory of Kim.

They return with grief that has changed, grown, and taken new shapes.

They return with humor, honesty, love, and the kind of courage it takes to keep showing up for one another.

They return because something born from pain gave the girls joy.

And they return because Runway has become a place where their family can remember Kim, honor her, and feel surrounded by a community that understands.

On the Runway stage, we look forward to celebrating Dan, Ailish, Maeve, and Nora as they carry Kim’s memory forward — reminding us all that love continues, grief changes, and it is possible to keep doing it.