Influencer Melissa Mae Carlton Navigates Unimaginable Grief After Losing Two Daughters
She added, “But when we lose someone, we are constantly losing them in various ways, and we ‘lay them to rest’ repeatedly. Some days I don’t desire to wake up in this body and feel this pain again.”
Melissa and her husband, Tom Carlton, announced in April 2024 that Abi died at the age of 9.
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“I am incredibly blessed with much in my life,” Melissa added in her post shared earlier this month. “I believe we truly experience a taste of Heaven here on earth with friends and family. But it just isn’t fully complete until we are with them all 💔.”
Melissa later revealed that she didn’t want to have an “aesthetically pleasing” Christmas celebration without Abi.
“One thing losing a child has taught me is that I’m finished wanting my house to feel like a display home,” she wrote in a since-deleted Instagram post on December 11. “I want it cozy. Lived in. With clear signs that children live here. I regret ever having two Christmas trees. One for us and one for the kids. From now on, the tree is the kids’ tree. All of their ornaments. Everything they’ve made for it.”
To honor Abi, Melissa and Tom had their other children create “Abi angels” for the Christmas tree and even framed their late daughter’s holiday pajamas for the wall.
On Christmas morning 2025, the couple’s youngest daughter, Molly, died following an unspecified medical complication and brief hospitalization. (Melissa and Tom also share kids Lily and Harry.)
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“I hesitate to share a medical update so soon because we still don’t have a definitive diagnosis, but I do feel it’s important to let people know that we have some answers this time,” Melissa wrote on Saturday, December 27. “The doctors suspect Molly had a genetic heart condition and believe this may have also been the case with Abi.”
She continued, “This understanding came about because Molly was able to be monitored in the hospital, which we were not able to do with Abi. I’ve never felt satisfied with the explanations we were given for her. [With] this type of condition, we’ve been told that even a minor illness could potentially trigger a sudden cardiac event.”
According to Melissa, Molly’s “little body fought so hard” against the currently unknown illness.
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“We’ve been told that this type of cardiac event is, in most cases, not survivable,” she continued. “I hope we will get more answers soon and will be doing more genetic investigation for our family now we have possibly a clearer path to explore.”
While addressing Molly’s death, Melissa further acknowledged that she was still processing her grief over losing Abi.
“I have not been very active on here lately because, truthfully, I’ve been in a very heavy place with my grief and have been feeling uninspired,” she noted on Saturday. “The reason I shared our situation [with Molly] is because I believe in the power of prayer. We were on our way to the hospital, and at that point we thought she was already gone. And yet, I still believed God could grant a miracle if it was His will. I held onto that faith right to the very end.”
