McCaffrey and Culpo announced their daughter, Colette Annalise’s birth on July 13.
Mom Tara Stilwell took to TikTok in July to share a beautifully emotional story about her late son, 6-year-old Wilder.
“Do you guys want to hear a story about how I asked my six-year-old deceased son for a sign that he could still hear me and how he responded,” she asked the social media platform. “It's pretty good story if you want to hear it.”
“I had just read that book called ‘Signs,’” Stilwell began, referring to the 2019 book by Laura Lynne Jackson titled “Signs: The Secret Language of the Universe. “It's pretty common book that people read directly losing someone they love,” Stilwell explained.
“But in that book, it talks about being very specific in the sign that you ask for,” Stilwell continued. “And so I was thinking about what could be a symbol for my son that I felt like resonated with him. And he was only six when he died, so that means it would have to be something that kind of catered to a six year old.”
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Stilwell then asked herself, “what do most six year old boys love?” “Legos,” she answered.
And so Stilwell asked Wilder “to let me see a Lego in a place where it didn't belong.”
“So not in my house, not in a friend's house that had kids. A Lego in a place where it didn't belong. Specifically, a red Lego.”
Stilwell continued saying that after asking her son for the red Lego, she went about her day almost forgetting about the conversation she just had with Wilder.
“I kind of forgot about it, and later that day, I was at my daughter's ballet class, and in like the viewing slash waiting room, I was observing this family I had never seen before,” Stilwell explained. “I was kind of watching the little boy because he was wearing a shirt that my son had owned.
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Stilwell said that she “was already thinking about Wilder, and, you know, kind of watching my daughter's class and just keeping to myself and the mom and I struck a conversation.”
The mom had told Stilwell “that they weren't normally there that day. They were just doing a makeup class, and it was just by some off chance that we were in the same place at the same time.”
As Stilwell and this other mom talked, the little boy wearing the same shirt Wilder once wore “was kind of just quietly playing with cars on the floor,” before “he got up and he walked over to me.”
And that’s when Wilder sent his mom the sign she had asked for.
“He looked me directly in my eyes, and he put one singular red Lego in my hands. And even when I think about it, I get chills, because what are the chances of that? There's no such thing as a coincidence that big, right?”
“And obviously, I immediately started to cry,” Stilwell continued, “because how could you not in a moment like that? But I choked it up as fast as I could, and I tried not to let him or his mom see because how do you even begin to explain that to a stranger?”
Stilwell said that it was after that interaction “that I never doubted again that he could hear me, even if it's not in the way that I would prefer.”
In the comments section, other parents who have lost children shared the signs they received from their loved ones as well.
“I lost my first child, a daughter, mid pregnancy and we named her Violet. We’ve owned three houses since losing her and at every single one, including a new build with literally no grass or landscaping for the first 12+ months, wild violets have bloomed every single year,” one fellow mom wrote.
“My dad would always say ring twice when you get home. After he passed, my sister said ring twice if you got there ok. Her phone rang twice with an unknown # - when she picked up, it was dead air,” another commenter shared.
Stilwell revealed in the comments that she did keep the Lego the little boy put into her hand.
