Kristin Cavallari sees signs of her late brother Michael that helped her get over his sudden loss nearly a decade ago.
The Laguna Beach alum’s brother died unexpectedly in 2015 after being missing for nearly two weeks in Utah, and Cavallari spoke out this week about her experiences with grief.
“Grief is a wild thing and I actually feel like it’s like a drug,” the jewelry designer, 37, said on her podcast Let’s be honest with Kristin Cavallari. “And it’s a roller coaster. It comes in waves, you know. You finally think you’re fine, and then it’s like, bam, it hits you again.”
But the many “signs” they see that remind them of Michael, who was only 30 when he died, have comforted her and her parents after their loss. Cavallari said the gold coins especially reminded her of her brother.
“I find so much peace in that because I just feel like he’s okay, I know I’ll see him again and that makes me really happy and gives me a lot of peace. I think my brother dying and me, like, really diving into the spiritual side of things, made me really comfortable with death and really comfortable with life and really comfortable with hard times because I really think we’ll all see each other again when we die . I really want to.”
Kristin Cavallari pays tribute to her late brother: ‘I’d just like to hug him one more time’
Her belief in “reincarnation” also comforts her that she will see her brother again.
“I think we have a soul tribe. So I think all of our main people in our lives are our people in every life,” she explained. “And because I believe that, I say, ‘Cool, OK, Mike’s good.’ We know Mike is good because we got all these signs. He’s out of pain and out of pain.”
She continued: »And so I will see him again. I know I will see him again and we will have many lives together. And so this current period is without him.”
Kristin Cavallari and her brother Michael Cavallari.
Kristin Cavallari’s Instagram
Inside Kristin Cavallari’s childhood with her brother Michael
In the podcast, Cavallari also addressed the sequence of events leading up to her brother’s death, which included a two-week period in which he was reported missing, during which she welcomed her third child, Saylor, with ex-husband Jay Cutler.
“So my brother had a lot of drug and alcohol problems and was after a bender and was driving from Southern California to Chicago. This was thanksgiving week 2015. And he didn’t sleep and he was driving through Utah, he pulled over, he crashed the car and because he was so out of it, he – the airbag went off, he got out of the car, left the car on, left his cell phone in the car “, she explained.
“This is in the middle of nowhere in Utah. And what we think happened is he went out and went very far – because we went out and we actually retraced his steps and we did a little thing for him out there, my family and I – but [he] he got lost, he didn’t know where he was, he couldn’t find his way back. And then he ended up dying of hypothermia.”
Hills alum continued, “But there was a two-week period where we didn’t know where he was. We knew he crashed the car, they were looking for him, but no one knew where he was.”
Cavallari called the time when Mike went missing “the craziest time of my life honestly, because I had this newborn baby and I felt like I was on one of those, like, unsolved mystery TV shows trying to find my brother, who just crazy.”
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In the weeks that followed the news of her brother’s death, she thought about the time of her daughter’s birth, which happened just four days before Mike’s death.
“My little angel, Saylor. She has been my light through this whole thing and has given me so much strength,” Cavallari wrote on Instagram about how her newborn helped her through her grief. “Thank you little girl for coming when you did. 💜”
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Kristin Cavallari and her brother Michael Cavallari.
Kristin Cavallari’s Instagram
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Cavallari also shared on Wednesday’s episode of the podcast that Mike’s death didn’t become “real” until three years after the fact.
“The three-year anniversary was the hardest, and I remember my mom saying, ‘That’s because at three it becomes real. That’s when you think he’s not coming back. Like, Mike’s not coming back.’ And that was really hard where, like, the first year like, you’re definitely in a fog and it’s – you know, you can go a year without seeing somebody. But yeah, three years was really hard for me.”
She continued, “And the thing about grief is that it just takes time. It just takes time. And I think you have to really allow yourself to feel every emotion — and that’s every single emotion.”
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