As a therapist specializing in maternal mental health, certain stories don’t just stay in the news cycle; they live in the room with us.

The Lindsay Clancy case is one of those. It became a cultural touchstone for the conversation around postpartum psychosis, the systemic failures in maternal care, and the unfathomable weight of maternal mental health struggles.

We’ve spent months discussing the clinical realities of her illness and the tragedy of three young lives lost.

But recently, the narrative took a turn that sparked a different kind of conversation—one that isn’t about clinical diagnoses, but about our human, visceral reactions to how people move forward after a tragedy.

I want to share a personal reflection on the recent news regarding Patrick Clancy. It’s been reported that he is moving on and is now in a relationship with someone new.

While the act of moving on is a natural, if difficult, part of the human experience, the specific details of this transition have struck a chord with many in the maternal mental health community.

And then, separate from everything else, I’m sorry but I find it incredibly cringe that he’s now with someone new who happens to be a reproductive endocrinologist/fertility specialist.

I know logically that has nothing to do with whether Lindsay was sick or what happened that night, and obviously he’s allowed to move on with his life. But given the entire context of this case—motherhood, postpartum mental health, three children dying—there’s just something about it that gives me the ick.

Maybe that’s not fair, but it does.

Including that “maybe that’s not fair” is important because it highlights the tension we often feel as observers of public grief.

Logically, we know that Patrick Clancy has suffered an unimaginable loss and has every right to seek happiness and companionship.

Professionally, I advocate for the idea that there is no “correct” timeline for grief. Yet, the optics of this specific pairing feel jarringly ironic. To move from a tragedy defined by the most harrowing possible outcome of childbirth and postpartum illness to a partner whose entire career is dedicated to the creation of life and the assistance of reproduction feels like a narrative whiplash.

It’s an emotional reaction to the optics, not evidence that he did something “wrong.” It’s the “ick” that comes when the symbols of a story don’t seem to align in a way that feels comfortable to us.

For those of us who have spent years advocating for moms who feel invisible in their postpartum struggles, seeing the “other side” of this story move toward a symbol of fertility feels like a sharp contrast to the reality Lindsay was living.

This case has always been more than just a legal battle; it’s been a mirror for our society’s fears and misunderstandings about motherhood. When we react to news like this, we are often reacting to our own discomfort with how neatly—or un-neatly—tragedy is packaged.

We want stories of grief to follow a certain aesthetic or logic, and when they don’t, it triggers a visceral response.

As we continue to support parents navigating their own versions of “surviving to thriving,” we have to acknowledge these messy, “unfair” feelings.

Therapy is often the place where we reconcile the logical “he’s allowed to move on” with the emotional “this feels wrong.” Both things can be true at once. We can hold space for Patrick Clancy’s right to find peace while also acknowledging the collective sigh of discomfort felt by a community still mourning the context of what was lost.

Grief isn’t linear, and it certainly isn’t always fair.

Sometimes, the most honest thing we can say is that the optics give us the ick, and that’s okay.

It’s part of being human in a world where some tragedies are simply too large to ever feel “right.”