In a powerful video recently shared to TikTok, Kerriann Connelly Carro captured something she didn’t realize would mean so much to her.
A clip of her divorced parents hugging has taken on new meaning after she realized it was their final time seeing one another before her father’s death. At the time, Carro was just stopping by her mother’s house after taking her dad to a radiation appointment. However, it would turn out to be far more than an ordinary moment. Carro, 37, spoke to Newsweek about the unexpected weight of the footage, and what the moment meant to her.
“My parents were divorced over 25 years ago. Met at 12, had me at 19. This was their last video together before my father passed,” the video’s text overlay reads.
The video was uploaded to TikTok on March 26 and currently has over 18.5 million views.
Carro shared her parents’ background. The pair met in Brooklyn, New York, through her mother’s brother, and her mother had Carro at 19 years old. By the time Carro was in third grade, her parents were divorced—and the impact of the split ran deep.
“This definitely distorted my view on relationships because I was raised by a single mom and a father who never emotionally recovered from losing the love of his life,” Carro said. “He was emotionally broken and she was in hyper-independence mode.”
It wasn’t always easy between them. Carro said she remembers moments as a child where her parents would argue on the phone. “I don’t think I ever had the opportunity of being shown an example of a happy marriage where two people supported each other,” she said.
But in recent years, something had shifted. Her father had moved in with her, her husband and their kids. He even liked her mom’s long-term partner. That day in March, they just happened to be in the same place at the same time.
“After my father passed on April 17th I was scrolling through my camera roll and remembering I had taken this,” Carro said. “The emotions were mixed. I was happy to have caught that moment, but sad and angry that I even had to feel any of those things because I lost my dad when he was only 58.”
Carro’s father only lived for one month following his terminal diagnosis.
‘Grief is Like a Labyrinth’
Still, the video offered Carro something unexpected: closure.
“That moment showed me the love they truly had for each other still; it was like an emotional cleansing of all the turmoil I had seen them put each other through,” she said. “There was closure, my father told my mother that day that he’s going to be ‘very busy up there watching over all of us.’”
The day he was passing, she said, her mother spoke to him on the phone, telling him how much she loved him. For Carro, the moments leading up to his death set her off on an emotional path she is still walking. It shifted something in her own understanding of the people who raised her.
“I’m still processing the loss, grief is like a labyrinth,” she said. “That video exemplifies my mom isn’t just my mom, my dad wasn’t just my dad, I was looking at two people who, for a split second, saw only each other.”
She also remembered her father for who he was beyond just her parent.
“My father, Patrick Paul Connelly was brilliant in his own right,” she said. “He was a proud Local 40 iron worker, could do math in his head like a human calculator. He would track the planes of anyone who he knew was traveling…always concluding with ending the day with his friends in Brooklyn for a nice cold Budweiser.”
As for the video—Carro doesn’t see it as viral content. For her, it’s a symbol of healing.
“As a child of divorced parents, this isn’t just a video for me,” she said. “It’s a reminder that the fighting, animosity and resentment doesn’t mean a thing when it’s all said and done.”
The post Woman Unknowingly Films the Last Time Her Divorced Parents Saw Each Other appeared first on Newsweek.
