This story is featured in the Fall/Winter 2025 issue of ESSENCE.
Last Christmas Eve, Lauren Speed-Hamilton and her family were gathered in her Atlanta home watching the Netflix special Jamie Foxx: What Had Happened Was. Her father, Bill Speed, began to get emotional. “He turned to me and said, ‘Wow, this is making me think about my life, and you guys, and my legacy, and what I’m leaving. I love you guys,’” Speed-Hamilton recalls of what had been a heartwarming evening. “We went up to his bedroom when it was time for bed, and I said, ‘Goodnight, Dad. I love you. See you tomorrow for Christmas!’”
When the Love Is Blind star came downstairs at around 8:30 the next morning and noticed that her dad, typically an early riser, hadn’t woken yet, she immediately “got a drop in the pit of my stomach,” she says. Speed-Hamilton decided to make a smoothie; she hoped the sound of the blender would rouse her father, known as Papa Speed to fans of the Netflix reality dating show on which the 38-year-old met her husband, Cameron Hamilton, seven years ago. When it didn’t, she went to check on him. He had died overnight.
“‘Oh my God, Dad will never get a chance to see me pregnant,’” Speed-Hamilton recalls telling her mother that day. “I was heartbroken, because he couldn’t wait to be a granddad.”
At the time, the Hamiltons, who were in the midst of an in vitro fertilization (IVF) cycle, weren’t certain of their future as parents. The couple, who wed on November 16, 2018—day 38 of the Love Is Blind relationship experiment—first began trying to have a baby in January 2021. After a year of attempting unsuccessfully to conceive, Speed-Hamilton talked to her doctor, who referred her to a fertility specialist. It was recommended that the couple try intrauterine insemination, or IUI—placing Hamilton’s concentrated sperm directly into her uterus. Two implantations were unsuccessful; the third resulted in a miscarriage.
After being diagnosed with unexplained infertility, the couple proceeded with IVF, which involved fertilizing the egg outside of the body. That treatment was also unsuccessful. Three-and-a-half years into their fertility journey, Speed-Hamilton, who had previously been told she had fibroids—yet was advised by White medical professionals that they’d have no bearing on her ability to get pregnant—decided to seek out a Black ob-gyn, Jackie Walters of the Bravo series Married to Medicine. Walters referred her to a Black fertility specialist, with whom Speed-Hamilton began another round of IVF. She also had her fibroids removed. Her first implantation following the removal was a success. The pregnancy was both an answered prayer and an early Christmas wish come true for the mother-to-be—who spoke to ESSENCE while 32 weeks along, expecting a boy.
“I just remember praying—and this may be selfish, but I was like, ‘God, please let me be pregnant so I have a new memory for Christmas next year,’” Speed-Hamilton recalls. She also made a bit of a “deal” with her late father. “When I visited my dad’s grave, I told him, ‘Look, if you’re going to check out of here, it’s only fair that you send down your grandchild.’ I honestly feel like my dad has something to do with it,” she says of her pregnancy. “That was his exchange.”
She describes the time between her father’s death and the conception of her son as grieving “with an asterisk.”
“I like to say that, because I had to remember that I’m preparing my body to receive life,” she explains. “So as much as I would like to be balled up in a corner, crying for hours a day, I knew what that would do to my body and my nervous system.” Speed-Hamilton’s therapist had also encouraged her to shift her perspective, from sadness over the milestones her dad won’t be physically present for to gratitude for the ones that he was. “My dad taught me so much, and we had so much fun,” she says. “Those are memories that I want to share with my child, and recreate those moments with him.”
This past June was the TV personality’s first Father’s Day without her dad; and her husband’s first as a father-to-be. “Cam was really great in allowing me to feel that grief and not being like, ‘Wait, it’s my day,’” she recalls. She spent a portion of the day journaling—and visited her father’s grave for a talk. “One of the things that I miss the most is the conversations we had,” she says, adding that she often writes her dad letters and that she used to text his number before service was cut. For her husband’s first Father’s Day, she celebrated him with a treasure hunt that involved going to an arcade and watching his favorite 80s and 90s movies—allowing him to relive his childhood before stepping into the realities of fatherhood.
Their son was born on October 1, 2025, and during our conversation, she hadn’t decided on holiday plans; but she is certain she wants to start a Christmas tradition to honor her father. “Instead of being like, ‘This is the day that Daddy died,’ it’s like, ‘How can we change this day into a celebration of my dad’s life?’” she says.
Speed-Hamilton went on to name her son Ezra William Hamilton, inheriting the name William from her father. With it, Ezra carries on the family legacy. “I’m just excited to watch this little human being grow, and hopefully contribute to the world in a beautiful way,” she says. “I think about my dad and that word, legacy, and watching that continue from him to me and now to my son. I hope he has a little sliver of my dad’s personality, somewhere in there.”