Six months after James Van Der Beek died, his wife opened her phone and shared a few family photographs.

One showed Kimberly Van Der Beek beside her husband and their children on an outing. Another captured the couple together. A final image focused on one of their sons.

Across the pictures, Kimberly added a short update about what the past half-year had taught her.

She still loved James.

More than that, she was beginning to understand that part of him remained visible every day in the six children they raised together.

Kimberly, 44, shared the Instagram Stories on Aug. 17. James, the Dawson’s Creek star, died at 48 after being diagnosed with stage 3 colorectal cancer. The couple had four daughters, Olivia, Annabel, Emilia and Gwendolyn, and two sons, Joshua and Jeremiah.

Six Months Changed the Calendar, Not the Feeling

The new posts were simple.

There was no long account of the months since James’ death. Instead, Kimberly wrote directly over the photograph of the two of them, as first reported by PEOPLE.

“Update… it’s been six months,” she wrote.

Then she put into words what hadn’t changed.

“I’m still in love,” Kimberly wrote. “And realizing I always will be.”

Those words came after months in which she had already been marking family milestones without James physically beside them.

In June, Kimberly faced the family’s first Father’s Day since his death. For that tribute, she posted more than a dozen photographs, including pictures of James with all six children and others showing him spending time with them one-on-one.

She wrote then about how much she missed him and how she was thinking about the father he had been.

But she also described his role in the family as something that hadn’t simply stopped.

“Somehow, from the other side? You continue to parent,” Kimberly wrote.

The Children Became the Place She Could Still Find Him

By the six-month mark, Kimberly had found another way to describe that feeling.

It was in the children themselves.

Over the family images she shared on Aug. 17, she wrote that she was “Grateful I get to see him live through these cuties.”

That line connected the newest tribute to nearly two decades of family history.

James and Kimberly first met during a trip to Israel in 2009. They married the following year and eventually welcomed six children together.

Their family grew to include daughters Olivia, Annabel, Emilia and Gwendolyn, along with sons Joshua and Jeremiah.

Years later, when James became ill, those same children became central to the way he spoke about what mattered to him.

He first revealed his colorectal cancer diagnosis to PEOPLE in November 2024. The cancer had been found after a routine colonoscopy in August 2023, and at the time of his announcement, James said his focus was on his health and his family.

The months that followed would bring treatment, more time with his wife and children, and eventually his death earlier this year.

Kimberly was the one who announced it.

Her First Announcement Was About How He Left

When James died, Kimberly shared a professional photograph of her husband and told followers that “Our beloved James David Van Der Beek passed peacefully this morning.”

She said his final days had been met with “courage, faith, and grace.”

The post marked the end of his life, but it didn’t end Kimberly’s habit of sharing photographs that showed him as a husband and father.

Father’s Day brought one set of images.

Six months brought another.

In both, James appeared alongside the children.

That was the part Kimberly seemed to keep returning to: family photographs taken before his death now sat beside pictures of the children who continued growing after it.

On Father’s Day, she wrote that James somehow continued to parent.

In August, she gave that thought a more visible shape.

She could look at their children and see him.

Their Family Photos Now Carry a Different Weight

Kimberly’s latest Instagram Stories did not try to summarize all six months since James died.

She chose a few photographs instead.

One held the whole family together in a single frame. Another centered on the couple themselves. Then came the image of their son.

The sequence moved between the life Kimberly had shared with James and the part of that life still moving forward around her.

For years, those photographs documented ordinary family time.

Now, they also gave Kimberly a way to put words around absence.

She had already said she missed James. She had already written about the kind of father he had been. At six months, her update focused on something else: love hadn’t shifted into the past tense.

“I’m still in love,” she wrote.

James and Kimberly had met in 2009, married in 2010 and built a family of eight.

The six children in those old and new photographs now carry pieces of the man Kimberly spent those years beside.

That was the image she chose to leave with followers on Aug. 17.

A family picture.

A son.

And one sentence about what she can still see when she looks at them:

“Grateful I get to see him live through these cuties.”