"I didn't want to heal. I wanted to grieve my daughter."

Kelly Cervantes has been clear about the thing that made healing feel like a betrayal.

"I didn't want to heal," she said in an interview about her book Normal Broken. "I wanted to grieve my daughter. I was afraid of healing because I thought that meant getting over her in some way or forgetting."

Anyone who has lost someone central will recognise the trap. The culture offers you two options, moving on or staying stuck, and neither one lets you keep the person. Kelly's answer, arrived at over years and written down in two books, is that those are not the only options: "Healing isn't about forgetting and moving on, but instead moving forward while remembering."

That sentence is why we asked her and Miguel to open the Main Stage conversation on what lasts.

Who they are

Kelly Cervantes is a writer, speaker and advocate. Her blog Inchstones began as an account of raising a medically complex child, and the name is the whole philosophy: inchstones, not milestones, because her daughter's progress was measured in inches and every one of them counted. She is the USA Today bestselling author of Normal Broken: The Grief Companion for When It's Time to Heal but You're Not Sure You Want To, and of The Luckiest: A Memoir of Love, Loss, Motherhood, and the Pursuit of Self, published in November 2025. She hosts Seizing Life, the podcast of CURE Epilepsy, and sits on the boards of CURE Epilepsy and the Undiagnosed Diseases Network Foundation.

Miguel Cervantes originated the title role of Alexander Hamilton in the Chicago production of Hamilton, leading that company from its 2016 opening to its final performance, then played the role on Broadway from 2020 to 2024. Two thousand and thirteen performances in all. He advocates for epilepsy research alongside Kelly.

Their daughter Adelaide Grace was diagnosed with infantile spasms, a severe form of epilepsy, at nine months old. No underlying cause was identified in her lifetime. She died in October 2019, just before her fourth birthday. Kelly's words at the time: "She went peacefully in my arms, surrounded by love."

When Miguel left the show in January 2024, he told Playbill there is a line he says all the time:

"You could have Hamilton, I don't want it, if that meant we could have had a different ending for my daughter."

We include that because the Summit is not in the business of tidy redemption. Nothing was worth it. That can be true at the same time as everything else.

Their session

Kelly and Miguel appear on Love Lives On: What Matters Most After Loss, a Main Stage conversation with the writer, filmmaker and theatre artist Colin Campbell, whose book Finding the Words came out of losing two of his children in a car crash.

Three people who have buried a child, talking about grief as something love keeps doing rather than something that ends. The session covers memory, community, creativity and ritual, and what it takes to go on living when loss has rearranged everything.

In the same hour, Ezekiel Goodwin, an artist and end-of-life doula, talks with Reimagine's Dara Kosberg about moving through one of our group programs and how the people he lost stay present in his work.

Later in the day, Miguel gives a short musical offering.

If this is you

This session is for bereaved parents, and it is not only for bereaved parents.

It is for anyone who has been told, in a hundred well-meaning ways, that it is time. Anyone who suspects that feeling better would mean letting the person get further away. Anyone who has been quietly running the calculation Miguel names out loud, and would trade every good thing that came afterward to have it not have happened.

It is one hour of company with people who are not going to flinch, and who are not going to tell you what stage you should be at.

Kelly puts one more guardrail on it, and we would repeat it to anyone hesitating: there is no grief hierarchy, no ranking system for whether someone's loss is worse than someone else's. If you are carrying something, this room is yours.

Have a look around the schedule · Download the full schedule (PDF)

The Reimagine Summit: Grief in Our Time · Thursday, October 15, 2026 · 10 AM to 3 PM PT · Online · Free to attend, donations welcome