Father personalizes deceased daughter’s gravestone with necklace (exclusive)

• In December 2021, Dawn and Ray Simmons lost three of their children — Kamryn, 15, Christopher, 16, and Lindy, 20 — in a car crash caused by a drunken wrong-way driver in Louisiana.
• Since the fatal accident, Dawn and her daughter Katie DeRouen have been sharing videos about grief on TikTok
• Viewers were moved by Ray’s dedication to the upkeep of his late children’s grave, including how he stuck a stone on their headstone to replicate his daughter’s signature necklace.

Although they share the same heartbreak, Dawn and Ray Simmons have their own way of coping with a devastating family loss.

On December 17, 2021, their children Kamryn, 15, Christopher, 16, and Lindy Simmons, 20, were killed in a head-on car crash caused by a drunk driver. Dawn and Christopher’s girlfriend were also in the stricken vehicle, but Dawn was the only survivor of the crash.

Since the Simmons’ deaths, Dawn and her 34-year-old daughter, Katie DeRouen, have taken to social media to mourn and remember their children and siblings. Most of their TikToks show old videos of Kamryn, Christopher, and Lindy, or more recent footage of Dawn and DeRouen working on Simmons3, their nonprofit that educates people about the dangers of drunk driving.

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When asked in response why Ray rarely appears in the Louisiana-based family’s online content, DeRouen responded with a compilation of clips demonstrating how he copes day to day.

“He grieves very differently than mom and I. He has trouble getting out of bed and getting on with life. All (our) lives were turned upside down by this tragedy,” DeRouen wrote in the caption of her TikTok, which has more than 2.5 million likes on the app.

The video began by explaining that Ray stayed with his wife the entire time she was in the hospital recovering from injuries sustained in the car accident. In a subsequent scene, he attached a bright ruby ​​gemstone to Lindy’s etched portrait on their shared gravestone.

“He made sure Lindy’s Kendra Scott chain was perfectly in place and secure,” DeRouen explained in the overlay text.

Many of the 26.6 million videos pointed to the necklace as a particularly poignant symbol of Ray’s grief.

DeRouen tells PEOPLE that the Kendra Scott piece was a signature part of Lindy’s style. It was included in her original gravestone etching, which was designed by one of DeRouen’s other sisters.

The jewelry brand then sent the Simmons family the exact red stone from their collection, and Ray was able to glue it to the grave the following year for Lindy’s birthday.

“He came with airplane glue and all that stuff. (He) got it on perfectly and coated it,” DeRouen said. “This is how he shows his love.”

The TikTok detailing Ray’s grieving process also included videos Lindy made while she was alive, all of which spoke to her bond of trust with her father.

One shot showed him draping a duvet over Lindy, who captioned the video: “I was laying here with no blanket and I knew my dad would bring one and cover me up.”

In a second clip, the devoted dad was seen inspecting the front of a car. “One thing about Ray is he won’t let us leave until our car is at 10,000,000%,” Lindy wrote.

‘My father, he is different. I’m not super close to him, but I know without a doubt that if I have a flat tire… I can call him about it,” DeRouen tells PEOPLE. “I recognize, like Lindy, that this is his love language.”

In addition to his generally signature “love language,” Dawn adds that his way of grieving their children is vastly different from hers. Although she benefits from getting out of the house and attending support groups, her husband leans on his “homely” nature.

“He has a little study at our house and he likes to go to little garage sales and flea markets. He likes to find things that are broken,” says Dawn. “And he brings them home and fixes them. He can look at something, see how it works and fix it.”

Dawn tells PEOPLE that his “engineer mind” makes it even harder for Ray to cope with Kamryn, Christopher and Lindy’s absence.

“He tells me all the time, he says, ‘I can’t fix this.’ So I think he’s having a lot of trouble with that aspect, and I think it’s just going to take a little more time,” says Dawn.