In February, Samantha Busch stood in victory lane at EchoPark Speedway with Brexton and Lennix, celebrating another Kyle Busch win. Three months later, on May 21, 2026, Kyle was gone at 41, and everything about the family’s racing life looked different. Four months on, one question keeps coming her way. The way she answers it offers a rare look at what life inside that house is like now.

“I will say a lot of people do ask me, like, ‘How are the kids?’ And I said, I feel like, given the situation that we’re in, they are doing really well,” Samantha explained on her podcast Certified Oversharer.

The two-time Cup Series champion died after severe pneumonia progressed into sepsis, and Samantha has been open about the toll since. In a June post, she said she did not feel strong on most days and missed Kyle every second. 

Her reason for pushing on was Brexton and Lennix, who still needed comfort and routine while she carried her own grief. In her words, “Grief doesn’t stop parenting. The morning still comes.”

Her latest answer shows how that approach has hardened into a system. Rather than letting grief disrupt every part of the children’s day, she has put structure at the center.

“I’ve been really strict about keeping routine. You know, I’ve had to learn a lot of, like, boundaries and things during this,” she continued.

Those boundaries are tied to the way she and Kyle ran the house together. Samantha acknowledged that their roles were different when they were parenting as a couple, and she is now trying to keep the rules they set from slipping.

“I always like to say Kyle was the mean one and I got to be the nice one,” she said.

Holding that line means taking on the role of enforcer herself. She wants everyone around the family to follow the same expectations so the children are not thrown by inconsistent rules or routines.

“Like, boundaries in a way of being like, this is how Kyle and I did it, and I need everybody to follow the same rules and routines that we’re doing so that the kids don’t get spun out,” she explained.

From routine to room for joy

Structure, though, is only half of what she is building. The first Father’s Day without Kyle, one month after his death, showed how raw the loss still was. “This still doesn’t feel real at all,” she wrote, adding that she had spent the night awake thinking about how the day should have looked for Kyle and the kids.

That is why she has paired the rules with a deliberate effort to keep life from shrinking around the loss.

“Everybody around us, like, we had, like, a very firm [approach] of, like, keeping a routine and then adding in lots of fun,” she said.

The kids’ own ways of staying connected to their father are visible in everyday moments. Four-year-old Lennix has turned breakfast into a daily check-in, telling Kyle how she slept and what she has planned before asking whether he is having fun in heaven.

Brexton has leaned on the track. He returned to racing at Charlotte Motor Speedway about two weeks after his father’s death, finishing sixth and second in his first races back. Samantha described the experience as both heartbreaking and beautiful, saying she sometimes catches a glimpse of Kyle in her son.

 She also said that racing was the promise she made to Kyle in the hospital: to do everything she could to help their children chase their dreams, which she summed up with “So, we race on.”

The family later had a moment worth celebrating. Brexton won for the first time since Kyle’s death, and Samantha described it as a day with a lot of emotions.

Those moments explain why she is so protective of the story the children will carry forward. She knows the year has brought profound hardship, but she does not want pain to be the only thing they remember.

“My goal is when they look back at this year that they’re like, yes, it was awful and yes, it was a hard time, but Mom made sure we did things and we had good experiences and we still had fun and we found joy in the middle of everything else going on,” she said.

Samantha cannot take away the pain of losing their father. What she can do is build a home where his memory stays part of daily life and happiness still has a place. For the Busch household, moving forward does not mean leaving Kyle behind. It means carrying him into the everyday while making new memories together, in a year the family will never forget.