The mom of a girl who was killed in the 2022 mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, is sharing her idea of the “perfect afterlife” — one in which she finally gets her daughter Lexi the ice cream she promised her just hours before her death.
On May 24, 2022, Kimberly Mata-Rubio’s 10-year-old daughter, Alexandria Aniyah “Lexi” Rubio, made the school honor roll and won the Good Citizen award. Kimberly attended the ceremony honoring Lexi and her son, Julian (who also made the honor roll) and then went back to work. Before she left, Kimberly kissed both her children goodbye and told them their grandmother would pick them up from school and get them ice cream to celebrate their accomplishments.
The ice cream date would never happen, with Lexi being among the 19 students and two teachers who died during the shooting later that day, after a gunman entered the school and opened fire.
Lexi’s teacher, Arnulfo Reyes, was the sole survivor of her classroom on the day of the shooting, and commented on an earlier video posted to Kimberly’s TikTok: “I hope to see them again.”
In a response, Kimberly addresses Reyes’ comment, saying, “I think about that a lot.”
“I hope that when I pass, I’m right back in that cafeteria,” she says. “And I ask for you to pose for a picture with Lexi and this time, afterwards, I get it right, and I stay with her and we get that ice cream.”
She continues: “That’s what the perfect afterlife looks like for me. I know we’re going to see them again.”
Kimberly, an advertising executive at the Uvalde Leader-News, has expressed her grief openly on social media, saying in another video that she is “not religious,” but believes she and Lexi will be “together again in whatever comes next.”
“I do think that our souls will instantly recognize each other,” she says. “We are so intertwined. We belong together. I am not myself without my children.”
Speaking to PEOPLE, Kimberly says she’s typically open about her feelings, but has shared some of her thoughts about grief on TikTok because it feels like a safe space.
“This was my introduction to grief,” she says. “I hadn’t lost anybody prior to Lexi. It’s the worst kind of loss, for a parent to lose a child — and especially in this manner.”
Something she’ll never forget about Lexi, Kimberly says, is her penchant for ice cream — mint chocolate chip, a flavor both mother and daughter loved. She’s even posted about wanting to be buried with a pint of it, captioning that TikTok, “We’ll need a sweet treat while I tell her all the places I’ve taken her and all the people who know her name.”
Remembering that final day of Lexi’s life, Kimberly muses, “I normally take my children home after school events — things like picnics for parents or awards ceremonies … This time, she did stay at school. And that was goodbye.”
Three years later, Kimberly — a mother to four other children, ages 20, 17, 14 and 11 — says she aims to be as present as possible.
“The person I was, the mom I was … everything is completely different,” she admits. “I don’t know how I do it. I just try to show up and be their mom. They need a mom, they need routine and structure. I want to be the mom that Lexi remembers me as.”
Still, she and the rest of the family feel Lexi everywhere.
“That first birthday without her — we went to the cemetery. Just the day before, my oldest daughter had been asking for some sort of sign and at the cemetery, a beautiful butterfly landed on the necklace I had with Lexi’s thumbprint and just kind of curled around,” she says. “It was just a beautiful moment. We’re always looking for her; I feel like she’s always with us.”
It is her final moments with Lexi — with the promise of mint chocolate chip ice cream and the joy of the honor roll hanging in the air — that Kimberly says she hopes to return to one day.
“And I hope that it is as if none of that happened, and I hope Lexi doesn’t know what happened next,” she says. “We had promised her ice cream. I do believe that’s where my afterlife will begin.”
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