Kellie Bullard did not expect to still be standing five years later. When her husband Alex Paulsen Bullard was killed in an automobile accident on June 10, 2021, she was a mother to a two-year-old and a seven-week-old baby. She had no roadmap. She had no guarantee she would survive the weight of what she had just lost.
But she did survive. And this past week, she sat down to mark five years without the man she married in Princeton, Illinois, on June 22, 2018, sharing a post that has since resonated with thousands of grieving people across the country.
“Time is so strange when you’re grieving,” Kellie wrote. “Five years somehow feels like a lifetime ago and yesterday all at the same time.”
Alex was 27 years old when he died in Cornell, Illinois. A 2017 graduate of Illinois State University with a degree in Agriculture Business, he had built a career doing what he loved most. He served as farm manager and lead herdsman of Bullard Cattle Company, a role that touched nearly every part of ranch operations.
He had been active in 4H and FFA growing up, played baseball at the collegiate level, and was known by those around him as someone who gave everything he had to everything he did.
He left behind his wife, Kellie, their daughter Halle, who was just two years old, and their son Krew, who had only been born seven weeks before the accident.
The Words That Stopped Thousands of Scrollers
In her anniversary post, Kellie did not sugarcoat the reality of rebuilding a life after devastating loss. She acknowledged the joy that has come in the years since and did not shy away from naming something that many grieving people rarely hear spoken out loud.
“The life we’re living is only possible because you’re gone,” she wrote. “That’s the part grief never stops reminding me of.”
That single line appeared to be what hit people hardest. The comments flooded in from strangers sharing their own stories. A mother who lost her only son in December.
A widow who said she lost her husband nine years ago and had quietly watched Kellie’s family as a source of strength through her own grief. A woman not yet two years out from losing her husband, who said she misses him every single second of every day.
One commenter captured what many seemed to feel when they came across the post. People who have never experienced this kind of grief, they wrote, simply cannot understand it. And that is something those who are living it carry quietly, often alone.
Kellie ended her post the same way she has carried every day of the past five years, holding both the love and the loss in the same breath.
“Not a day goes by that I don’t think about you, see pieces of you in our kids, or wish you were here to witness all they’re accomplishing,” she wrote to Alex. “Forever missing you and always loving you.”
