Get Griefy-Issue 8

ISSUE 8

GET GRIEFY Magazine

NORMALIZING IT! with Dr. Jessica Zucker

THE KIND OF TIRED THAT DOESN’T GO AWAY The realities of caregiving with Lauren Boswell

Talking Grief and Intimacy with Dr. Heather Taylor

the

WOMEN’S issue

PAULA GASPARINISANTOS What Mother Earth teaches us about Grief and Love ALL BLEEDING STOPS EVENTUALLY Veterinary neurosurgeon, Dr. Lauren Rae Talarico, seeks solace in nature as she navigates her journey through widowhood.

At Get Griefy Magazine, our mission is to illuminate the path to healing and hope for those navigating the profound journey of loss. We are dedicated to creating a compassionate and empowering space where individuals living with grief can find solace, inspiration, and a sense of community. Our commitment is to go beyond the conventional narratives surrounding grief and loss, acknowledging that life after loss is not only about mourning but also about embracing the strength to live fully. Get Griefy Magazine seeks to redefine the conversation around grief, providing authentic stories, expert insights, and practical resources that empower our readers to navigate their grief journey with resilience and purpose. We aspire to foster connection and understanding, bridging the gap between those who are grieving and the support they need.

Through a blend of heartfelt narratives, expert advice, and uplifting content, we aim to inspire our readers to not only survive but to thrive in the face of loss. Get Griefy Magazine is more than a publication; it is a lifeline for those on the path of healing. Join us as we navigate grief together, fostering a community that celebrates life, resilience, and the enduring spirit that emerges from the depths of loss.

Disclaimer:

Copyright Statement:

The content presented in this magazine is intended for informational and educational purposes only. The topics discussed, including death and dying, are sensitive and subjective in nature. The information provided is not a substitute for professional advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Readers are encouraged to seek the guidance of qualified professionals in relevant fields for personalized assistance.

All stories in Get Griefy Magazine are protected by copyright and are the intellectual property of Get Griefy, or the respective copyright holders, as indicated. Reproduction, distribution, or any form of unauthorized use of the content without the explicit written permission of Get Griefy is strictly prohibited.

The views expressed in individual articles are those of the respective authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the magazine or its editorial team. While we strive to present accurate and up-todate information, the dynamic nature of topics related to death and dying may lead to changes in understanding over time.

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GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 2

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Editor-In-Chief, Creative Director and Founder Kera Sanchez Issue Visionary Dr. Jessica Zucker

Contributor Sundari Malcolm

Contributing Writer & Designer Anne Levy

Contributor Dr. Christelle Oliver-Dussault

Contributing Writer & Designer Nina Rodriguez

Contributor Lydiah Owiti-Otienoh

Small Business Collective Article Curators Annah Elizabeth & Liz Quinn

Contributor Jess Prudhomme

Contributor Erin Blechman

Contributor Dr. Lauren Rae Talarico

Contributor Rebecca Bloom

Contributor Dr. Kimberly Rich

Contributor Lauren Boswell

Contributor Laing Rikkers

Contributor Camila Crews

Contributor Stacey Stevens

Contributor Angela Croop

Contributor Ali Stevens

Contributor Paula De Oliveira Santos

Contributor Dr. Heather Taylor

Contributor Tia Devincenzo

Contributor Susie Stonefield

Contributor Dr. Tammy Isaac

Contributor Genicca Whitney

Contributor Blair Kaplan Venables

Contributor Jennifer Estelle

Contributor Lisa Keefauver

Contributor Nicole Zettlemoyer GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 3

the

WOMEN’S issue EDITORS LETTER

6

Women’s Issue Mission

By Editor-in-Chief Kera Sanchez

THE UNRECOGNIZED LOSSES

29

The Family Tree That Ends With Me — Reclaiming Legacy as a Childless, Childfree Woman By Nina Rodriguez

PARTNER LOSS

Goodbye to the Body I Knew Before 33 Saying Rape By Tia DeVincenzo

8

My Great Detour—How my Divorce Led Me Back to Myself

By Jess Prudhomme

35

Still His Mom— Living with Ambiguous Loss

By Anne Levy

15

All Bleeding Stops Eventually— The Anatomy of My Crash Dr. Lauren Rae Talarico

38

The Grief of Starting Over in a New Country

By Lydiah Owiti-Otienoh

PREGNANCY & INFANT LOSS

GRIEF & IDENTITY

41

Who am I Now that My Life Has Changed Forever? A SBC Collaborative Exploration on Identity Loss and Introspection with Dr. Parul Dua Makkar, Annah Elizabeth, Katy Parker, Shannon Roane

A SBC Collaboration with Liz Quinn, Shannon Roane and Angela Croop

45

Does Anyone Really Know Who I Am?

By Susie Stonefield

21

Liv Life to the Max

By Ali Stevens

48

The Grief of Becoming

By Angela Croop

25

The Dark Side of the Womb— A letter to my unborn Daughter

By Blair Kaplan Venables

50

Reclaiming Color— Grief, Matrescence, and the Woman I Became By Dr. Christelle OliverDussault

53

The Strong Black Woman and the Grief of Success By Dr. Tammy Issac

Motherhood— 19 Redefining Carrying Love Beyond Presence

GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 4

AGING AND MIDLIFE

56

Outgrowing Ourselves—The Quiet Grief of Midlife By Stacey Stevens

59

Grief is a Full-Body Experience— How my Son’s Death Triggered Menopause By Erin Blechman

BODY AND HEALTH

62

66

The Weight of Grief— How Grief can actually trigger unexpected weight gain and what to do about it. By Camila Crews with expert tips by Nutritional Therapy Practitioner Susan Koursaris

PURPOSE AFTER LOSS

79

The Mission Continues— Loss, Legacy, and the Circle of Hope By Nicole Zettlemoyer

82

A Place to Pause Paws—What Grief Taught Me About Becoming Myself

By Jennifer Estelle

LOGISTICS OF LOSS

85

Do You Have a Succession Plan?

By Dr. Kimberly Rich

88

What My Divorce Revealed About Power, Money, and Identity

By Genicca Whitney

Grief Changes Everything—(Yes, Even That.) Understanding Intimacy and Desire in a Body that is Grieving By Dr. Heather Taylor

COVER FEATURE Normalizing It!

68 Dr. Jessica Zucker and the Art of Speaking Womanhood Above a Whisper

CAREGIVING Kind of Tired That Doesn’t Go 76 The Away By Lauren Boswell

POETRY

91

Automatic Speed Dial

By Laing Rikkers

94

What Cancer Couldn’t Kill

By Lisa Keefauver

FEMININE PERSPECTIVES

96

The Wild Ones By Sundari Malcolm

99

What Mother Earth Teaches Us About Grief and Love By Paula GaspariniSantos

102

Because I Knew Her—On Advocacy, Grief, and the Power of Women’s Stories By Rebecca Bloom

GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 5

EDITOR’S NOTE I was ten days postpartum, sitting on a paper-covered exam table beneath the fluorescent lights of my OB-GYN’s office, when I realized that grief is far more complex than the singular event of losing someone you love.

I even grieved the small, sacred things: my children growing out of their clothes; the baby years I wasn’t fully present for because I was surviving instead of living. For about two years, I felt like a shell of a mother—physically there, emotionally underwater. I grieve the motherhood experience I felt robbed of.

My daughter had been born a full month early via emergency C-section, in a blur of urgency and fear. She was whisked away to the NICU for days of isolation. Because of COVID regulations, my husband wasn’t allowed in the hospital for her birth. And on the day I was finally wheeled down to the NICU to meet and hold my baby for the first time, I received a phone call from my dad: my mom had just died in her hotel room on the first day of what was supposed to be their Italian vacation.

Our recent move to Maryland ushered in yet another layer. An identity crisis wrapped in fresh beginnings. Who am I if I’m not Kera from Chicago? The Dean. The one with her people. The one with a schedule, a rhythm, a life that made sense. The novelty of a new place was tinged with disassociation, with the quiet mourning of a former version of myself. I found myself waiting—patiently, hopefully—for the bulb to push through the soil and bloom again.

Two weeks. That was all it took for my world to split open.

That’s the thing about grief: it shows up in more places than we expect. It threads through womanhood, motherhood, marriage, career, identity. And yet we rarely talk about it unless someone has died.

During my postpartum questionnaire, the nurse—monotone, clinical—asked her questions, unaware of the tidal wave I had just survived.

When I first connected with Dr. Jessica Zucker, we exchanged voice notes and DMs, and she offered to send me her book.

As I learned her story and read the vignettes of stigmatized experiences so many women endure—but rarely name—I realized we had found the center of the Venn diagram between womanhood and grief.

“How often do you find yourself teary?”

“How often do you feel hopeless?”

“How often do you think about dying?”

The losses that don’t get casseroles.

The heartbreaks that don’t get sympathy cards.

The pain that gets minimized because it’s “just part of life.”

I felt like Charlotte York from Sex and the City: “not all day, every day—but every day.”

She gave us permission to speak. So in this issue, we’re taking the mic.

In the weeks, months, and years after my mother’s death, the layers of the grief onion peeled back. With each layer came new realizations, new aches, new understandings of what grief actually is.

Relatively sheltered from profound loss until 35, I had no idea how deeply grief could alter a life—or how it could resurface as secondary losses and quiet moments of mourning that have nothing to do with a funeral.

I grieved watching my brother get married, seeing my mom’s chair empty, a photo of her sunshine smile in its place. I grieved hearing my children cry at night because they missed their dad during his months of military duty. I grieved the reality that my kids have no grandmothers.

Sprinkle in pregnancy loss. Add the slow burn of a career I poured myself into for over a decade, watching the fire fade.

As a classroom teacher and later a Dean of Students, I invested my heart in teens, many of whom faced cycles of poverty and trauma that felt bigger than any intervention. The powerlessness settled into my bones. It was its own kind of grief.

This issue is dedicated to women—women who have experienced it all and sometimes feel confused about why their pain goes unrecognized. Women who are grieving things that don’t have funerals. Women who are becoming, unraveling, rebuilding.

What I’ve learned is this: talking about our grief doesn’t fix it. It doesn’t neatly tie a bow around the ache. But it does build bridges. It offers relief. It reminds us we are not alone in the inbetween.

This one’s for the girls.

And man, I feel like a woman.

Kera Sanchez FOUNDER AND EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Celebrating 8 Issues of Get Griefy Magazine.

Pictured: Kera with Issue 1 back in 2024

GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 6

MORE THAN JUST A MAGAZINE...

A GRIEF ECO-SYSTEM DESIGNED FOR THOSE EXPERIENCING LOSS, AS WELL AS THE PASSIONATE INDIVIDUALS WHO PROVIDE SUPPORT. Join Our Small Business Collective Explore our Marketplace to Shop or List your goods!

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getgriefymagazine.com GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 7

My Great Detour

By Jess Prudhomme

Unraveling Leaves crunched beneath our feet as we walked across the grass. It was late October, and there was a chill in the air. I tightened the belt around my jacket. Exactly six years ago we stood on this very ground, bathed in the soft glow of a stunning fall golden hour as our photographer captured our first moments as husband and wife. Approximately 180 of our family and friends had been a few feet away inside our venue, a beautiful turn-of-the-century Victorian mansion, sipping champagne and sampling passed hors d’oeuvres at our lavish cocktail hour.

Today I looked at my husband in desperation.

Though silent, my eyes implored “Do you feel anything? Tell me there’s still some magic lingering here that might save us.” It was a lastditch attempt to salvage what had become of our happily ever after. But the truth was as chilly as the air: the magic was gone. There was nothing left. Our marriage ended 5 months later.

Our struggles started years before that final anniversary. Our long, drawn-out arguments are seared into my memory. The ones where we’d stay up late into the night circling the same topic, like dingy lather around a shower drain, leaving for work the next morning with puffy eyes and not even a semblance of resolution.

During those fights I’d look at him, mascara streaming down my face, and say words that still haunt me: “I can’t live without you.”

It dragged on for what felt like forever.

Towards the end, it was impossible to hide from those closest to me. I met up with one of my best friends on New Year’s Day that final year. My red, swollen eyes registered on her face as soon as I got out of the car. It was a very mild day for January, so we decided to take a stroll around her neighborhood. Only a few minutes into the walk she turned to me with an expression that carried both concern and frustration and said, “How much longer, Jess?” I looked down at the sidewalk, feeling ashamed and pathetic. “I’m just not ready,” I replied.

How could I be ready? He was the first man I’d ever loved, and I’d quite literally grown up loving him. I had been with him since I was a teenager, seventeen entire years—half of my existence up until that point. How do you just give up on that kind of love story? How do you let go of a future you had always been so certain of? And the biggest question of all: who was I without him? I was about to find out.

I now know that this couldn’t be further from the truth. But at that time fear, anxiety, and anticipatory grief crippled me. People at work started to comment on my weight loss, saying “Hey, you look great, what are you doing?”

“Oh, it’s the Peloton,” I’d lie, crediting my stationary bike. In reality, our marathon fights were not only depriving me of sleep, but my appetite as well.

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Aftermath Those early days after our rupture are a haze of disillusionment, anxiety, and pain that was so soul-shattering that looking back at it now, I can only describe it as exquisite. I was 35 years old and had never experienced heartbreak, and it felt like I was paying penance for so many years of avoidance. I was familiar with the concept of a broken heart from friends’ experiences and what I’d seen portrayed in media, but I was not prepared for how physiological an experience it was. My chest felt like it had been cracked open. Taking deep breaths was an effort. Mornings greeted me with a racing heart. My nose was raw from endless packs of tissues. This is what I’d been hearing about all these years. This was heartbreak. This was grief.

One Saturday afternoon not long after the split, my friend invited me to a brewery with her sister and brotherin-law. Even though it was the last thing I felt like doing, I said yes, knowing it was good for me to be distracted and around others. It was a sunny spring day, and we sat outside at a picnic table with our craft beers.

Normally I would have loved this. But this day, it took a herculean effort to sit and simply exist. To make the smallest of small talk. My head felt achy and foggy, even though I hadn’t yet taken a sip of my beer. When it was time to go, I all but ran to my friend’s Honda. I didn’t even make it inside the passenger side door before I burst into a guttural cry. I laid my head and hands on the dashboard and wept with my whole being. My friend took my hand in hers and with so much love and softness in her voice said, “I know you won’t believe me right now, but you’re not going to feel like this forever.” She was right on both counts. I didn’t believe her.

And my captivity in those depths didn’t last.

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healing When the acute pain of the heartbreak subsided, I realized I could finally exhale.

Those days of cyclical fights, couples therapy, and hopelessness were over. All the blank space in front of me felt daunting at moments. But there was an ember of hope smoldering inside of me.

And as I leaned into, it ignited into a light that shined brighter than anything I had ever experienced.

I went full-in on my healing. Therapy, journaling, books, podcasts, the gamut. It became clear to me how enmeshed I’d been with my husband and how I’d abandoned myself to source love and safety in the relationship, a pattern I’d learned in early childhood. For the first time in my life, I began looking inward for things I’d historically outsourced: love, validation, and security. I started to do things on my own and learned how to enjoy my own company. I joined a kickball team, became part of new communities, cultivated friendships, and traveled abroad (by myself!). I entered the dating scene, sitting across from men with the mindset of “do I like him?” instead of “I hope he likes me.” I tapped into a confidence and light I never knew I had. I learned to trust my intuition, which I had unknowingly dismissed for years. I realized that not only could I live without my husband, I could thrive without him.

Because now I was building something that had been lacking in my marriage all along—a deep connection to, and love for, myself.

The meal was served family-style, and huge plates of grilled fish, octopus, and roasted vegetables were passed by my tripmates. I had come to Croatia alone, joining 13 complete strangers on a group trip, something I’d never done before. I’ll never forget this moment, because I experienced a profound sense of clarity and presence. I looked around the circular table at my new friends, the sun warming my skin and the wind tousling my hair, and with so much peace and contentment in my heart, I thought “I am absolutely, positively happy right now.”

Healing is enigmatic. One moment you’re in the shower, hand against the tile to steady your full-body weep, unsure of how you’ll move forward. And then one day, you just realize… I have. That day came for me about a year and a half after our split. I was sitting at a large wooden table, perfectly situated atop a cliff on the Croatian island of Hvar with the Adriatic sparkling in the late afternoon sun below.

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Expansion Rumi said, “The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” My divorce brought me to my knees and split me wide open. But in that space, so much light entered. And the thing about light is that it can’t be contained. It’s farreaching and expansive. And my light was ready to expand.

In those early days after my divorce, podcasts had been a pivotal part of my healing. I would fall asleep with my AirPods in, dozing off to voices that would come to feel like close friends in the following years. I listened to stories of heartbreak, divorce, and healing, feeling less alone in my own experience.

Perhaps that’s what inspired me to start transitioning my journaling practice to voice notes. I’d always been an avid writer, with bins of old journals tucked away in my closet. However, now, rather than writing my thoughts on a page, I’d open my voice memo app and let my thoughts flow through spoken word.

And it felt really, really good. A few times the thought crossed my mind (which I now know was my intuition), “you could be a podcaster.” But I quickly dismissed it. Me? I didn’t know the first thing about podcasting. No way. My untapped potential kept knocking, though. And the universe is clever.

When I wasn’t fully listening to my intuition, it got my attention through a new friend who asked me to come on the podcast she was launching to share my divorce story. And this time, it was a hell yes from me.

After I did the episode, it felt like something inside of me came alive. It was a high I had never experienced before. And over the next two years, as I continued to heal and grow closer to myself, the call to use my voice and start my own podcast grew even louder.

I don’t remember how or when the concept formed—it feels like it was always in me, waiting to be acknowledged.

I wanted to create a space where others could share stories of how their lives, like mine, didn’t go according to plan, and the lessons and healing that occurred along the way. My pain had catalyzed my growth in ways I didn’t know was possible. I wanted others to know that this was possible for them too.

I finally leaned in and decided I was going to give podcasting a shot. I spent my career in marketing, so I knew if I was going to launch something like this, I needed a title I could get excited about promoting. After a full evening of ideating and not having any ideas that felt quite right, I decided to call it a night. Tired with a headache, I mumbled an irreverent prayer before I closed my eyes: “Look, if you want me to do this, you’ve got to give me a good name.” I woke up in the middle of the night with three words in my head: “The Great Detour.” I launched my first season a few months later.

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Purpose If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my podcast, it’s that my story is not unique. We all have detours and experiences that change us on a fundamental level. But when we lean into loss and the unexpected, when we stare straight into the shadowy eyes of heartbreak and grief and say, “I’ll keep you company for a while. What do you want to teach me?” something magic happens.

Light gets in. Healing begins. Expansion occurs.

Life can be excruciating at times. And though I’m not sure I believe that there’s purpose behind all the painful things we experience, my heartbreak has taught me that we can create purpose from the pain, alchemizing it into something beautiful that can help others who are navigating their own detours.

Jess is the creator and host of The Great Detour, a podcast and online community launched in February 2025. In under a year, the show became an instant Spotify hit—ranking in the top 8% of new podcasts—while reaching listeners across 47 countries. Jess has released 32 episodes with 28 guests and built an engaged Instagram community of over 17K followers.

GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 13

www.thegreatdetour.com @thegreatdetour On all major podcast streaming platforms Photo Credit: B Hull Photography

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ALL

BLEEDING

STOPS

EVENTUALLY: The Anatomy of My Crash Dr. Lauren Rae Talarico “Dr. T! It’s really hemorrhaging! I’m getting nervous! The blood pressure is dropping. You have to stop the bleeding!” I remember countless interns exclaiming this in the operating room when observing surgeries over the years. They may have been nervous but I most certainly was not. I was in complete control of the situation. I knew that in order for me to remove the herniated disc material and allow this animal to walk again, or to get the entire tumor out, some bleeding would have to occur. It’s all part of the process and I was impeccably trained to handle it, because I was in control.

Calmly I would respond, “All bleeding stops eventually”— until it doesn’t.

As a veterinary neurosurgeon I spent over two decades of my life “fixing” external wounds. Herniated discs, broken backs and brain tumors. But just like I used to say to my interns “death is permanent; the one thing I can’t fix.”

Marc’s death was something I could not fix. And I lost all control. Having to explain the death of a pet to an owner is one thing, but having to explain the death of a father to three children under the age of 5 was quite another.

This was certainly something their mommy could never fix.

It took me four years and a multi-modal healing journey to realize that Marc’s passing wasn’t an external or physical problem that could be easily “fixed.”

There was no surgical procedure I could perform to bring him back to life, and no procedure I could perform for myself or my children to heal us and make us all whole again. The only way out of this painful darkness and emptiness was for me to transform myself on a deeply soulful level. And for my children to heal, their mother, the womb from which they were born, had to first transform to receive the healing her soul desired. The souls of my three children knew before they were born into this physical world that their time with their father would be short-lived, and they knew they would be raised by a single mother. The lesson here in all of this was for me to transform. From that place, we could all be whole again.

The missing piece in all of this for me was the spiritual realm. I was trained in an Ivy League veterinary school where anything alternative or not backed by double blinded placebo controlled studies was not accepted. My entire life that is how I was trained. My brain was wired to execute a plan based on science. But this was to fix external problems.

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Meet Lauren— an author, veterinary neurosurgeon, widow, mother, and founder of Mama Farmette and Blue Fox Farm. For fifteen years, she performed complex neurosurgical procedures, living a life defined by precision, control, and outward success.

That life unraveled when her husband, Marc, died suddenly, leaving her widowed at forty with three children under the age of five. In the years that followed, Lauren embarked on an intensive four-year journey beyond conventional medicine. Through plant medicine, Kabbalistic astrology, breathwork, and a deep reconnection with animals and the natural world, she learned to quiet her ego and listen to the deeper wisdom of her soul.

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To heal from the inside out, that would require something intangible. My internal soul corrections would need to be identified, excavated, understood and transformed in order for me to become whole again.

I used to think death was permanent. It was not until plant medicine gently opened my heart to receive all of the love Marc had to offer to me and my children from the spiritual realm could I understand death the opposite of permanent. When Marc left, the metaphysical barrier between me and the spiritual world dissolved and my clairvoyant gifts have since flooded in.

They are a bit overwhelming at times, but my connection with plants and animals has never been more clear. Marc’s soul may have left his body in human form; however, he lives on as strong as ever in my heart and in the hearts of my three children. And now that I have created the spiritual space to really listen, I can hear his messaging loud and clear. I am now co-parenting with the divine.

MAMAFARMETTE.COM @MAMAFARMETTE

Lauren’s young Daughter, Gigi, wrote a piece for our online bonus content— find it on our Women’s Issue Page at GetGriefy.com

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GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 18

SPOTIFY

Redefining Motherhood: Carrying Love Beyond Presence

By Liz Quinn with Insights from Shannon Roane and Angela Croop

Motherhood is often imagined as a timeline—first steps, birthdays, school plays, bedtime stories. You picture a child in your arms, a life unfolding the way you imagined. I thought I knew what motherhood meant. Then I met Alivia.

Getting pregnant with her was a complete surprise. I was overjoyed, dreaming of holding her, teaching her, and building a life together. But when she died, everything I imagined about motherhood crumbled. I realized that being a mother isn’t just about the child you can hold. It’s about the child you carry in your heart, every single day, even when the world can’t see them.

I wondered how other mothers living with loss understand this version of motherhood. So I asked a few colleagues from Get Griefy’s Small Business Collective to share their experience—and this is what they shared:

“After losing my daughter Avianna more than ten years ago, I’ve come to understand motherhood after loss as carrying my child into rooms she will never physically enter. It’s saying her name out loud, creating retreats, building communities, and making sure Avianna’s life— however brief—ripples outward to help other grieving families. For me, motherhood isn’t about proximity—it’s about presence. I carry Avianna every day in my routines, my choices, my work, and my words. It is love made visible.”

@angela_avi_rebuilds

Angela Croop

Grief Facilitator and Retreat Leader Founder of Fly Avi Fly Shop

@highlight_your_healing

Shannon Roane

Grief Coach and Facilitator Founder of J&J Journals Highlight your Healing Podcast Host

“Seven years after my loss, I’ve learned that motherhood isn’t defined by what you hold in your arms— it’s about what you carry in your heart. Before my loss, motherhood meant joy, plans, and a future I had always imagined. After loss, it became about honoring the babies I didn’t get to raise here, letting their brief lives shape who I have become. I mother through remembrance, advocacy, and by using my story to create space for other women navigating loss. For me, love doesn’t disappear— it grows in ways you never expect.”

Loss changes how you see the world. Ordinary moments feel heavier, quieter, and more sacred.

Birthdays, anniversaries, even a simple evening at home carry weight. Shannon, Angela, and I have learned that motherhood now is about creating meaning and connection—privately and publicly.

We journal, speak to our children, honor milestones, and also advocate, build community, and break the silence that once made our grief invisible.

There are days when motherhood feels visible— when we speak their names, honor their dates, or create spaces for others to grieve with us. And there are days when it feels invisible—in a world that doesn’t see the children we carry, in questions like “how many kids do you have?” or in the quiet that misunderstands our love. But even in invisibility, the bond is real. The love is real. The devotion is real.

To carry a child is to let them shape your life in ways big and small.

For me, carrying Alivia means she influences how I parent my other children, how I show up in my community, and how I love. Angela carries Avianna in the retreats she runs, the spaces she builds, and the love she pours into families walking similar paths. Shannon carries her babies through her voice, her story, and the ways she nurtures healing and hope for others.

Motherhood after loss is not just about raising a child—it’s about being changed by them.

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Our children shape how we move through the world, how we see time, how we value what matters. Small rituals—a necklace with a date, a quiet conversation, a journal entry—become lifelines, ways to honor them and keep their presence alive.

Motherhood after loss is shared, too. It is advocacy, mentorship, and building community. It’s opening conversations others avoid, creating visibility for what’s often invisible, and letting grief and joy sit in the same space. Saying their names, celebrating milestones, and acknowledging absence doesn’t make us stuck. It keeps our children present and shapes who we are every day.

I am a mother because Alivia existed, and her existence changed me. Angela is a mother because Avianna existed, and her life reshaped everything. Shannon is a mother because her babies existed, and seven years later, she still lives, nurtures, and honors that love every day. Loss doesn’t erase motherhood—it changes it, deepens it, and gives it new forms.

To anyone reading this who has lost a child—you are not alone. Your motherhood is real. Your love endures. Your children, however brief their time here, continue to shape the world through you. Every word, every ritual, every space you hold honors them. Time doesn’t erase them; the way you live, love, and carry them forward keeps them alive.

Motherhood after loss is messy, raw, and beautiful. It is sorrow and joy held together. It is public and private, quiet and loud, visible and invisible. And it is yours—fully, completely, every single day.

Liz Quinn

Healing Hearts Podcast Host Author, Grief Advocate Sharing stories of love, loss and connection

lizquinnheals.com | @lizquinnheals

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WHEN WORDS FEEL FRAGILE, QUESTIONS CAN HELP. GRIEF CHANGES THE WAY WE SPEAK. IT CAN LEAVE US WANTING TO TALK, AND UNSURE HOW TO BEGIN.

The Beyond “I Don’t Know What to Say” Grief Communication Cards were created after the loss of our daughter, Annie Lauren, out of a deep need for something gentle enough to open real conversations —without pressure, fixing, or clichés.

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Grief is complicated, but communication doesn’t have to be.

GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 20

By Ali Stevens

LIV LIFE TO THE MAX

I’M OFTEN ASKED ABOUT SILVER LININGS. I’M SENSITIVE TO THIS TERM BECAUSE THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING POSITIVE ABOUT THEIR DEATHS AND THE DARKNESS THAT FOLLOWED. BUT THOSE EVENTS CHANGED ME, MOSTLY FOR THE BETTER.

My journey to parenthood began with a low AMH count and one functioning fallopian tube. After failed IUI attempts, we moved to IVF and ended up with five genetically perfect embryos.

On November 15, 2019, we transferred two embryos. The doctor said it was “perfect.”

Eight days later: two lines. I just kept saying “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!” Four weeks later, we learned both embryos had implanted. Twins. I couldn’t believe it, after IVF horror stories I’ve heard and read, we were pregnant on our first transfer. (IVF Warriors, IYKYK!) I had no idea what was ahead.

January and February 2020 were wonderful - my body growing, both babies moving inside me. Then COVID hit. I had a picture perfect appointment at a high-risk MFM practice in NYC on April 24, at 26.5 weeks. Everything looked as it should.

The next evening, I had an awful stomachache and began vomiting. I figured it was food poisoning. This continued for about two hours. Then things changed, fast.

GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 21

I felt severe pressure in my vaginal cavity.

We called the hospital, then 911. As the operator was asking questions, something inside felt like it was dropping out of me. I reached my hand down, and a blue waterballoon-like sac came out, fully intact. Then I felt something more solid. Limbs.

“Oh my God! A baby! It’s one of the babies!”

The paramedics arrived, cut my umbilical cord, and rushed us to the nearest hospital.

My body felt like 500 lbs, and I kept reminding them there was another baby still inside me.

Our daughter was whisked to the NICU. They manually broke my water, and our son was born quickly and traumatically silent, not one sound. They began aggressive resuscitation. The looks on everyone’s faces were pure terror.

“Hi Alison, it’s Dr. X. I’m so sorry. As we were getting ready to begin, Max stopped breathing. We tried everything. Max has died.”

I had given birth to twins yesterday. Now I was alone, my son was dead, I was forbidden from seeing my daughter, and my husband couldn’t get through security.

I called Tim and woke him from a deep sleep.

“Love, Max didn’t make it. We lost him.”

I discharged myself the next afternoon. Max had been kept on oxygen after he died, so his body would be warm and soft for us to hold. He was in a bassinet, wrapped in a swaddle with a hat on. Tim walked toward him and said: “He’s beautiful.”

I scooped Max up. I needed him in my arms. I kissed his face, his hands, his forehead. His skin was softer than silk. I touched his lips to mine. My tears wet his tiny, perfect face. This would be the last time I would hold my son.

We said goodbye to one life and knew we had to fight for the other. And that’s what we did.

Receiving congratulations and condolence wishes simultaneously was something I never knew was possible. People showed up with meal trains, flowers, donations in Max’s memory, planted trees, named stars.

We named our son Max Mann Stevens, “the greatest.” Our daughter: Liv Haydon Stevens, “life.” Combined, they meant “the greatest life.”

For five weeks, Liv took one step forward, three steps back. She had a bilateral brain bleed and on May 28, we got the news that the bleeds were resolving. We could see the light.

Max started breathing and was taken to the NICU. I went into emergency surgery, lost an extreme amount of blood, and couldn’t leave the bed for eight-plus hours.

No visitors were allowed due to COVID. Tim left thinking he’d be back, and was forbidden. Restrictions were changing by the hour, and I didn’t feel safe without my partner. I was entirely alone and scared.

She survived Saturday, but needed a second operation Monday. The MRI showed the most severe brain damage possible. Even if she survived, Liv would likely have no cognitive, motor, breathing, or feeding abilities, ever. She had NEC (necrotizing enterocolitis), e-coli, and sepsis.

One day later, everything fell apart. “Liv is very, very, very sick,” the doctors kept saying. The next morning: a call to get to the hospital immediately. Without surgery, her survival rate was less than five percent. We opted for surgery.

On June 13, 2020, we held Liv as she took her last sweet breath. I cradled her with my lips against hers. She started licking my lips; she knew I was her mom.

“Mommy and Daddy love you, sweet girl. We’re right here.”

The NICU doctor explained Liv was seemingly OK at just over one pound, but we were nowhere near out of the woods.

“Now, with Max, we are very, very, very, very, very concerned.”

I bluntly asked: “Is Max going to die?”

He was transferred for emergency surgery.

Around midnight, the surgeon called for my final consent. “Do you, Alison Stevens, mother of Max Stevens, agree to this surgery?”

“Yes.” After hanging up, I cried hysterically and prayed.

My phone rang at 6:20 a.m. Please no, I thought. It’s too soon.

The months following were filled with extreme emotional pain. COVID forced me to sit with my grief, locked inside, seeing only immediate family. My goal every day was to simply get out of bed. And I did. The dark days were unbearable, nothing mattered, and the “fuck everything” phase set in hard. Not all days sucked - we found small pockets of joy as we grieved.

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Six years later, grief still ambushes me in unexpected moments. I cry hysterically in the car, for a good five minutes, when “Fight Song” or “The Bones” or “Carry On” plays.

I’m just waiting to be in the lane next to my kid’s teacher during a grief wave.

Eleven weeks after losing Liv, we were pregnant again. Pregnancy after loss is scary, exciting, overwhelming, beautiful, and ugly. I spent the first twenty-six weeks living in fear. Once I passed twenty-six weeks without going into labor, I finally let myself get excited.

In May 2021, we welcomed our second son, Teddy, “gift from God.” When Teddy was six months old, I was pregnant again. We welcomed our daughter Ava in August 2022. After their two healthy births - I believe in miracles.

In 2020, I lost a son and daughter. By 2022, I had another son and daughter. Every day I look at Teddy and Ava, and at Liv and Max in photos on my dresser and I hold immense gratitude. A gratitude that helps me live a lighter life, despite the heavy grief I carry.

Ali Stevens is a LinkedIn executive, mother of four, and co-author of Maternal Hope. After losing her twins, she writes to ensure no parent walks their grief alone.

I’m often asked about silver linings. I’m sensitive to this term because there is absolutely nothing positive about their deaths and the darkness that followed. But those events changed me, mostly for the better. (I say so humbly, promise.) It’s impossible for me to sweat the small stuff.

My husband and I “Liv life to the Max” because life can change in any given second. We think less and do more. We show up, give, live, explore, and we’re showing Teddy and Ava how to appreciate all of it.

Adapted from Maternal Hope: Stories of Unseen Struggles, Unexpected Resilience, and the Untold Ways Families Are Made, by Camille Seigle and Ali Mann Stevens, published by Alone No More Press (October 21, 2025). Excerpt reprinted with permission from Alone No More Press. Original. All Rights Reserved.

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mymaternalhope.com @mymaternalhope

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GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 24

THE DARK SIDE OF THE WOMB

A letter to my unborn daughter.

This letter is part of Blair Kaplan Venables’ Navigating Grief Framework. rooted in the practice of Emotional Acknowledgment and Expression.

At its core is one belief: Grief must be witnessed to be integrated.

Writing to those we have lost — including unborn children — creates space for emotions often left unnamed. Pregnancy loss and infertility are common, yet too often silent.

This piece is shared to help break that silence — as both a story and an invitation.

To my sweet baby, What a gift it is to be your mother. You are so loved.

You were only with me a short time, but somehow you managed to open a part of my heart I didn’t even know existed. You gave me a glimpse of a future filled with crafting, laughing, skiing, and learning. Dreaming, hiking and exploring. A life where I got to witness you becoming exactly who you were meant to be.

Your life was brief, but I know deep in my bones that you were protecting me. You came at a time when my world was about to collapse. Shortly after you left us, your grandpa died. Then Baba Sharon. Then Zaida Lenny. I whispered your existence to each of them before they passed, and they lit up with joy at the idea of you. You gave Baba the gift of becoming a grandmother, something she longed for.

Being your mom while drowning in that much grief would have fractured the version of motherhood I dreamed of giving you. I think you knew that.

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Are you a girl? I think so. So did Grandma Val and Grandpa Dave.

Would you have inherited my curly golden ringlets?

Absolutely.

Would you have had a choice about loving skiing? Not really. Your dad would have had you on skis before you could talk.

The day you died, we learned Grandpa had cancer. Three weeks later, he was gone too. So I wonder… are you with him? Are you all together? I hope you’re wrapped up in the safest arms imaginable.

I can still feel you. Please don’t stop visiting.

I only knew you for a few weeks, but you’ve lived in my heart ever since. And the guilt I carried about not naming you haunted me. Grief swallowed my mind whole, and I thought it was too late. Four years passed before I realized that love isn’t bound by timelines.

So your dad and I have given you an English and Hebrew name: Davida Sarah Venables. We call you Davie and Vida for short.

Davida, after Grandpa Dave. A name meaning beloved.

Sarah, after Baba Sharon. A name meaning princess.

Vida, meaning life.

Vida, we love you. Thank you for everything you taught us.

Love, Mom

Blair Kaplan Venables is a British Columbia– based and award-winning grief and resilience expert, coach, motivational speaker, and Founder of The Global Resilience Project.

To learn more about her Navigating Grief Framework and her certification program, please visit blairkaplan.ca

GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 26

An afterword We’re told it’s easy to get pregnant. That it’s simple biology. That it will “just happen.”

We spend our younger years terrified of conceiving, only to grow up and discover no one prepared us for the possibility that it might not happen at all or, if it does, it can be hard to stay pregnant.

It wasn’t until my mid-thirties that I realized my womb wasn’t my ally. It was my greatest heartbreak.

The signs were always there. Painful periods that stole entire days. Cramps that felt like something inside me was trying to claw its way out. Cysts and fibroids that caused debilitating pain, at the worst possible moments. Fatigue that no amount of sleep could fix. Pain meds. Heating pads. Pants that hurt to wear. Back pain that made movement feel like punishment. Bloating that made me look pregnant while grieving the fact that I wasn’t.

I was told that I couldn’t get pregnant naturally. So, we stopped trying, and then we got pregnant, and it was a miracle.

And then came the miscarriage.

I told myself I could survive anything. I’ve lived through enough grief to fill several lifetimes. But losing Vida cracked me open in a way I could never articulate. That loss was the moment I realized my womb wasn’t just struggling. It was betraying me.

Years later, during yet another ultrasound, I read the report myself. Tilted uterus.

Retroverted. Backwards. No one had ever told me. I found out at forty. Forty.

Add it to the list: possibly endometriosis.

Fibroids the size of a plum and a blueberry are camping out like they pay rent.

Hormonal chaos. Monthly agony.

There’s something uniquely cruel about having a body part designed for creation that has given me nothing but destruction. My womb could have been a source of beauty, of joy, of new life. Instead, it has been the epicentre of some of my most profound grief. Who knew that I would be better at growing fibroids than humans?

And still, somehow, I’ve learned to navigate it. To sit with the pain. To meet myself in the mess. To ground, to reflect, to reach out for support, to move forward one small step at a time. The Navigating Grief Framework wasn’t developed from theory. It was born out of necessity. Out of survival. Out of moments when all I could do was breathe my way through the next five minutes.

Womb betrayal is not just physical. It’s emotional, spiritual, cellular. It breaks something inside you that you spend years trying to rebuild.

Grief and betrayal don’t get the final word. I do.

I will keep advocating for my body. I will keep asking questions. I will keep fighting for answers. I will keep honouring Vida. And I will keep believing that even a wounded womb doesn’t get to steal the possibility of joy, love, or meaning from my story. I decided to remove everything from my life that no longer serves me or brings me happiness. So, womb, consider this your eviction notice.

I will not let my womb get in the way of my happiness, and I’m taking back control. This is not the ending. This is another beginning, and I’m making womb in my life for my body to be healthy and thriving. d o ve ur l o y h it to tte r u s — w g it a le in h t e t t i t i i r w ubm ow e it t s r a y d h b e to s c a ll y— fe e l ite y o u m o u s l u d o y v in u re If y on fe a t , w e e or an . y e l n s o u m fo r m l r na ym o ur y o u g h th is n o n e G lo b a r t o f o a e a u b h p o l T r l s s i t h a t a w ce ie s ie fy ers sp a le tt u n it G e t G r g s a fe d m e t m n d c o ti n S e le n o u r c c t a to c r e a i r o je w ith e n c e P itm e n t ili m .

R es d com s in g ces re s h a ie f p r o gr fo r

GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 27

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THE FAMILY TREE THAT ENDS RECLAIMING LEGACY AS A WITH ME C H I L D L E S S , C H I L D F R E E W O M A N

BY NINA RODRIGUEZ GRIEF AND LIGHT

When my only sibling died, he didn’t leave behind children. Neither do I. Somewhere between the death certificates and the “he’s in a better place”, it dawned on me. I’m the remaining child, therefore, the family tree ends with me.

In the eyes of family-tree logic, I became a dead end. The last branch. The full stop at the end of a sentence nobody asked to end. That felt like a heavy burden to carry.

Society has a very tidy story about what a woman’s life and legacy should look like: children who carry your eyes, grandchildren who carry your recipes, and a family name meant to ripple forward through generations.

It’s a beautiful story.

It’s just not the only one.

And for those of us who are childless or childfree (by circumstance, by health challenges, by loss, by choice, by the strange and winding roads our lives took), the absence of that story can feel less like a different path and more like a verdict.

I’ve been sitting with that verdict. Wondering whether it actually belongs to us, or whether we inherited it from a world that never quite had room for women like us.

But what if legacy was never meant to be measured that way?

We talk about family trees as if growth only counts when it extends into the next generation.

As if continuation must look like replication. As if permanence is the goal.

But permanence has always been an illusion. In time, everything changes and fades. Even today, a lost password, an obsolete platform, a corrupted drive, and there go years of preserved memories. We stream instead of own. We store our memories in corporate clouds. Entire lives now exist in formats that may not be accessible in fifty years.

The promise of being remembered was never as stable as we imagined.

So perhaps the deeper fear isn’t that the family tree ends. Perhaps it’s that we were taught our worth depends on being extended. Women, especially, have been conditioned to equate legacy with reproduction, biological or otherwise. To nurture, to pass down, to ensure continuity. If you do not produce the next branch, the cultural script implies you have opted out of meaning itself, and you are treated as such.

GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 29

But legacy is not the same thing as lineage.

Lineage is biological continuation. Legacy is relational transmission.

One moves downward. The other moves outward.

What if legacy is less about who carries your last name and more about who carries your influence? Less about who inherits your eyes and more about who inherits your courage? Less about being remembered in records and more about being felt in rooms you once entered?

Think about the people who shaped you, who are not related to you by blood. A teacher who changed how you see yourself.

A colleague who modeled leadership without diminishing herself. An aunt, neighbor, or mentor who lived fully in her own skin and, without ever saying so, gave you permission to do the same.

They may not be etched into your genealogy chart. But they live in your behavior, your tone, your decisions. They ripple outward through you. That is legacy.

When I say “the family tree ends with me,” I am speaking in the language of lineage. But when I look at my actual life (the conversations I’ve held, the spaces I’ve created, the humans who have thanked me for helping them through) I see the ripple effect of my existence echoing in eternity.

Grief has a way of clarifying this. When someone dies, what remains isn’t their DNA. It’s the imprint. The way they laughed. The way they showed up. The way they made you braver, or softer, or more honest. You carry them not in your cells but in your choices. And you do the same for others, whether you realize it or not.

The myth of being remembered assumes legacy requires recognition. A name spoken generations from now. A photograph labeled correctly. A story told accurately. But what if being remembered isn’t the point?

What if the real question is: Did my presence alter meaningfully while I was here?

anything

We are living in a time when traditional milestones are shifting. Marriage is no longer guaranteed. Children are no longer inevitable.

The structures that once organized a woman’s life are bending. For some, this feels destabilizing. For others, liberating. For many, both.

LE GA CY

GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 30

But in the absence of a prescribed path, we are being asked to define legacy for ourselves.

The family tree that ends with me can feel heavy to carry.

And yet, the more I sit with it, the more I see that a tree is only one metaphor for continuity. There are also rivers, currents, and fields where seeds scatter without permission or planning. Legacy might be less about extension and more about diffusion. Less about permanence and more about participation.

I’ll likely never be a mother or an auntie. I am the last branch in a particular biological line. And still, I have influenced humans. I have loved and been loved. I have altered conversations. I have witnessed and been witnessed. I have made space in rooms that might otherwise have been smaller.

Maybe the family tree ends with me.

But the energy does not. The influence does not.

The kindness does not.

Long before we diagrammed ancestry, legacy was the ripple effect of a life lived in relationship.

It was never guaranteed to be permanent. It was only ever guaranteed to be shared.

And shared meaningfully, even briefly, is enough.

Nina Rodriguez is a grief-informed guide, producer and host of GRIEF AND LIGHT, a podcast and platform offering space, stories, and support for navigating life after loss.

LEARN MORE AT:

GRIEFANDLIGHT.COM GET GRIEFYGET MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 31 GRIEFY - ISSUE 8 - 2026

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GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 32

Then I was raped. Bummer… I know.

I could get into the details of it all, but why would I give him that much of a spotlight? This is my story.

I remember walking into my house the next morning, feeling a sense of paralysis only those who have experienced a trauma such as this will know. As I looked in the mirror and saw exhaustion staring back, I now recognize it was me noticing the person I once knew ceased to exist.

For a while I couldn’t admit it. I tried to tell myself it was just a bad hookup. That he was just really drunk. That I should have been more careful. That these things don’t happen to girls like me.

saying goodbye to the body I knew before rape

BY TIA DEVINCENZO The summer of my 22nd birthday was as close to a fairytale as 21-year-old Tia could conceive. My relationship with my body before this summer was… not great.

I had struggled with eating disorders for a majority of my life, and around the age of 20, I decided I was done.I wanted to enjoy my life.

I wanted to love my body.

And if I couldn’t love it, I would at least try to respect it and utilize it to experience what life has to offer. So upon graduating college, I flew to Samoa to volunteer my time teaching English.

I lived with an incredible host family only a tenminute walk to crystal-clear beaches. I spent my school days teaching lessons to eager kids, and my weekends exploring uninhabited islands. At night I would sit on the beach and stare at pristine starry skies, wondering how I could be so lucky.

I then flew to Texas and drove cross country with my best friend on an epic month-long adventure that brought me nothing but euphoria.

I finally felt like I was free from the confines of my own mind. I was starting to see the fruits of my labor and the years of internal turmoil were finally releasing; life was good.

I didn’t know how to explain, or even comprehend, that an entire soul inside of me died. One night broke me into two parts—the Tia I was before my rape and the person I was left with after.

I was just starting to love this version and now I was left with a body that felt completely foreign.

My self-hatred returned once again. The thing is, when a part of your soul dies, you can only ignore reality for so long.

A year.

That’s how long I fought my reality. As hard as I tried to push away the memory, on the week of my 23rd birthday, my body decided to remind me what I had been suppressing… through a full-blown panic attack when my boyfriend at the time tried to kiss me.

As I was wrapped in a comforter sitting on my boyfriend’s parents’ porch at two in the morning, I realized this wasn’t something I could ignore any longer. I didn’t want to be fearful of intimacy. I didn’t want to live my life in a cloud of self-loathing over something that happened to me, not because of me.

I had to admit my reality was definitely not ideal but it was also something I needed to face. As I had done many years prior with my eating disorder, I allowed myself to grieve the old version of myself. She may not have had a choice in leaving but she served me well and I could no longer hold anger towards her.

We don’t always have a choice in what happens to us, but when we allow ourselves to heal properly, we do have a choice in how we respond.

After a year, I made a choice to go back to what I knew about learning to love again. I no longer wanted to feel like a victim and let this event dictate my life. Getting back to the old version of myself was never an option.

I had to find a routine that would allow me to focus on the future while releasing the past.

GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 33

Tia DeVincenzo is a Certified Health Coach and Movement Specialist helping women rebuild trust and respect for their bodies through nervous system regulation, nourishing foods, intentional movement, and supportive community.

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M O C . AI T Y L E VI TI U T NI Y T R A P AI T N O T S O B @

So, one day at a time, I made the I now find solace in moments of conscious decision to find gratitude in solitude as well as pure elation in the small moments like I had done moments of absolute chaos. My before while releasing myself of the empathy runs deeper than most mental battle of an eating disorder. I will ever experience in their looked at my family who loved my lifetime. But most importantly, my presence more than my physical confidence within myself to appearance. endure the hardest moments is immeasurable. Something no one Forms of movement that brought me can take from me. joy and home-cooked meals in which I found little specks of appreciation for So whenever someone asks me if my body within. These small I would change anything within moments, although hard to find my life, I know with confidence I sometimes, kept the momentum can say no. moving forward, instead of the stand still I had experienced for a year.

It’s been almost ten years since that fateful night and I understand I reminded myself that although the my worth more than ever now. old version of me that I knew best was gone, the new version still deserved I wouldn’t wish it on my worst these comforts and elation. enemy, but maybe a part of me needed to die that night.

Even as I write this, I never wanted to give him this much attention. But his Because the version of myself actions did force me to find a different that was discovered is by far, my version of myself. favorite one yet.

Still His Mom

by Anne Levy

Living With Ambiguous Loss

I always wanted to be a mom. There was never any question. My own mother made parenting look joyful and meaningful and spoke often about how much she loved it. One of the few arguments I remember between my parents was about having more children. My mother wanted more; my father felt three was enough. My father won.

Between 2009 and 2018, I experienced loss upon loss. For much of that time, I moved in a fog, placing one foot in front of the other. My mom was diagnosed with dementia. One brother died. I was diagnosed and treated for breast cancer. My other brother died. My father died. My 21-year marriage ended. Hardest of all, though, was my son’s suffering and the estrangement that followed, and continues.

The Child I Knew Both of my children are adopted. After infertility and miscarriage, adoption felt like the right path for us. We learned about our son, Rob, when he was one day old and met him just hours later. He was wide-eyed, and full of energy from the beginning. I was thrilled to be a mom and deeply grateful for my beautiful baby boy.

Rob barely slept. He took short naps at night and stayed wakeful all day. Developmentally, he hit every milestone in advance — holding his head up, rolling over, sitting independently. He was walking at nine months and speaking in full sentences well before two. He never stopped moving and I was perpetually exhausted but also quite content. His loving, affectionate, and engaging energy kept me going.

Those early years flew by in a blur of vigilance and joy.

Three years later, Rob’s sister, Marisa, was born. Her temperament was the opposite. She slept so much as an infant that I called the pediatrician alarmed. It turns out most infants do sleep most of the time. I just hadn’t known that with Rob. Marisa’s calm, steady spirit can still bring me back to my center.

From early on, I knew Rob experienced the world differently. He struggled to sit still and focus and was eventually diagnosed with ADHD in first grade. Rob was bright, athletic, artistic, and deeply intuitive. When teachers appreciated his gifts and adapted for his energy, he thrived.

When he felt disliked or mistreated by a teacher, he would act out. School rarely felt like a safe place for him. When

Rob was misunderstood and unfairly disciplined, I was his advocate.

Rob encouraged me through cancer treatments despite how frightened he felt over my illness. He shared music, hugs, and humor when I lost each brother. We were each other’s champion, loving and protective, light in dark times. We shared a close bond until his teen years. I assumed hormones and school stress were responsible for the rupture between us, but it was so much more. I believed my steady love would eventually bring him back.

Negative peers, older kids, and drugs used to calm anxiety and “take the edge off” took priority over family life. We tried everything: medication, homeopathic remedies, therapy, outpatient programs. Nothing lasted. At 15, he was staying out all night and skipping school. We enrolled Rob in a residential treatment program, believing the structure and support would help him return home ready to finish high school. Within a week of returning, he reconnected with old friends and was back to substance misuse.

This cycle repeated. Program after program. Rob completed his GED early. Instead of pursuing college or work, he chose the streets again.

Rob is now 25. He has moved in and out of homelessness, incarceration, and short-lived jobs. He has attended numerous rehab programs but has not sustained sobriety.

He struggles with substance use disorder and undiagnosed mental health challenges.

GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 35

Given the stigma surrounding addiction and mental illness, I rarely talk about Rob. Friends almost never ask. They don’t know what to say. Honestly, even writing about it here feels risky. Grieving in silence can feel so isolating.

conversation shifts and Rob asks for money. I offer to order takeout instead. When frustration enters his voice, I say, “Goodbye, Rob. I love you no matter what,” and gently end the call before words are spoken that cannot be unsaid.

Naming the Loss

I don’t answer the next few calls. Eventually, they stop. I have learned this rhythm through painful experience. Engaging with Rob’s addiction once cost me my health. I cannot allow that again.

I first heard the term ambiguous loss in 2020 while listening to a podcast interview with Pauline Boss, who coined the term. The words stopped me. They gave language to what I had been living for years.

Boss describes two types of ambiguous loss. The first is physical absence with psychological presence — when someone is physically missing and their whereabouts are unknown or unconfirmed. The second is physical presence with psychological absence — when someone is physically here but not emotionally available or not the person we once knew. My experience with Rob is the second type.

Ambiguous loss carries unique stress. There is a lack of clarity.

No ritual. The grief is complicated...

Ambiguous loss carries unique stress. There is a lack of clarity. No ritual. The grief is complicated and ongoing because the loss is complicated and ongoing.

I have experienced ambiguous loss with three close family members, two of which continue today. When I was in high school, an accident left my oldest brother severely brain injured after he spent a year in a coma. Seventeen years ago, my mother was diagnosed with dementia. I’ve been losing her gradually; she no longer knows who I am.

And then there’s Rob. Losing him feels the most destabilizing. He’s alive somewhere and yet absent from my daily life. I grieve Rob all the time. I miss him. I miss who I was with him. I miss our unique and precious bond.

Pauline Boss suggests that coping with ambiguous loss requires “both-and thinking” — holding contradictory truths at the same time. For me, this means loving Rob fiercely while acknowledging he may never recover. It means grieving him while he’s still alive, holding hope while standing in painful truths.

This is not the motherhood I once dreamed of. Parenting Rob has brought extraordinary suffering. It has also shaped me in ways I could not have imagined. It has taught me courage and deepened my compassion for myself and others. It has expanded my capacity to sit with uncertainty. It has brought me a deep, quiet faith.

Ambiguous loss has stripped away illusions of control. It reminds me to live in the present moment. It has taught me that love remains when deep connections are built. That our primary purpose here is to love.

I still consider myself Rob’s mother in every sense of the word. Not because the story unfolded as I hoped, but because my love for him endures.

Names have been changed to protect privacy.

Anne Levy, MSOD, ACC, is an ICF-certified coach and certified grief educator. She supports individuals and groups through some of life’s most profound

Both-And

transitions, helping them find clarity

I believe Rob knows I love him. In a recent letter, he thanked me for doing my best as a parent. Those words brought a moment of peace.

When he calls after months of silence, the conversations begin the same way : “How are you, Mom?” followed by “I love you” and “I miss you.” His warmth is still there, and I hear the kid I remember. After a few calls like this, the

and embrace who they are becoming.

A trusted companion through sorrow and possibility, she guides clients in developing their own grief practices. Anne also facilitates workshops and speaks to organizations about loss and grief, creating spaces where people feel accepted as they are and less alone. thelevycollective.com

GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 36

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GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 37

THE GRIEF OF STARTING OVER IN OVER IN A A NEW NEW COUNTRY COUNTRY THE GRIEF OF STARTING

By Lydiah Owiti-Otienoh The first time I realized I had disappeared, I was standing in a grocery store aisle.

I had degrees. I had built a career.

I had opinions people once asked for.

And yet, there I was, Googling how to convert Celsius to Fahrenheit while trying not to cry over yogurt brands.

Grief doesn’t always look like death. Sometimes it looks like immigration. Sometimes it looks like becoming “the spouse.”

Sometimes it looks like smiling while your credentials sit in a folder no one recognizes.

When I moved to the United States, I thought I was stepping into opportunity. What I didn’t anticipate was the quiet erosion of identity that comes with starting over, especially as a foreign-born military spouse. No one prepares you for the unmaking.

1. GROUND

2. NAME

Before rebuilding anything, you must stabilize. Grounding is not productivity. It is regulation. It is reconnecting to your body, your values, your internal compass.

Grief that remains unnamed becomes shame. I had to name what I had lost: status, familiarity, proximity to family, autonomy. I had to say out loud, “This is harder than I thought.”

When I was at my lowest, grounding looked like therapy. It looked like long walks. It looked like admitting I was not okay.

You cannot build a new life from panic.

You lose language nuance. You lose professional standing. You lose community. You lose the shorthand of belonging.

And when you marry into the military, you layer that grief with mobility, isolation, deployments, and systems that often assume citizenship.

You are expected to be resilient.

But resilience without grounding feels like floating untethered.

Out of that fracture, I began developing what I now call the Grounded Transition Frameworka four-pillar process that has guided both my own reinvention and the women I now support.

GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 38

Naming disrupts silence. It returns language to experiences that culture often dismisses- especially for women and immigrants.

When we name the loss, we reclaim authorship.

3. INTEGRATE Integration is the most misunderstood phase.

It is not assimilation. It is not erasure. It is the weaving together of who you were with who you are becoming.

For me, integration meant honoring my Kenyan roots while learning American systems. It meant refusing to shrink my accent. It meant blending my global perspective with military community realities.

Integration allows identity to expand instead of split.

4. MOVE Only after grounding, naming, and integrating can you move. Movement is not frantic action. It is aligned action.

Grief, I have learned, is not the opposite of strength. It is evidence of attachment. Evidence of identity. Evidence of love.

Starting over will always involve loss.

But when we move through transition intentionally, especially women, especially immigrants- that loss becomes foundation instead of fracture. Because becoming someone new should not require disappearing first.

IF THIS IS YOUR STORY If you’re navigating reinvention and it feels disorienting, you’re not weak — you’re in transition.

If you’re a foreign-born military spouse rebuilding in silence, a community is waiting for you. Through the Foreign-Born Military Spouse Network (FMSN), we offer advocacy, culturally informed resources, and connection for immigrant spouses navigating military life.

Through the Grounded Transition Framework, women and immigrant leaders are supported while rebuilding identity after major life shifts, with practical tools for grounding, integration, and aligned movement. You don’t have to disappear to begin again.

It was in this stage that the Foreign-Born Military Spouse Network (FMSN) was founded - because I realized my grief was not individual. It was systemic.

Foreign-born military spouses sit at the intersection of immigration systems and military structures, and too often, neither fully sees them.

We were watching talented women lose careers due to credential barriers. We were seeing families destabilized by shifting immigration policies.

We were hearing stories of isolation so profound it bordered on invisibility. Moving meant building what I once needed.

Today, through FMSN, we serve a community of more than 6,000 spouses from over 100 countriesproviding legal education, workforce integration support, advocacy, and belonging so immigrant military spouses can become self-sufficient and fully integrated members of both the military and American communities.

But beneath the advocacy, beneath the programming, beneath the policy conversations- the work is still about transition.

It is about helping a woman ground after relocation.

Name her grief without apology. Integrate her past without erasure. Move forward without abandoning herself.

Lydiah Owiti-Otienoh is a Kenyan-born lawyer and international development consultant, and the Founder & CEO of the Foreign-Born Military Spouse Network (FMSN), a national nonprofit advancing military readiness by empowering immigrant spouses of U.S. service members. After navigating immigration challenges, unrecognized credentials, and career disruption herself, she authored the Foreign-Born Military Spouse Playbook, a practical guide to military life, American systems, and career reinvention.

She now leads a network of 6,000+ spouses from 100+ countries, driving advocacy, workforce integration, and culturally informed programming that strengthens belonging and economic mobility. Lydiah is a graduate of the Stand-To Leadership Program at the George W. Bush Institute.

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Exploring Identity Changes in the Wake of Grief— Reflections from the Get Griefy Small Business Collective GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 41

I understand that a life can fracture—and still expand. I’ve always been a helper. As a little girl, I was the one sitting beside the hurting kid on the playground, asking questions adults didn’t think to ask, trying to make sense of what felt unfair. Helping wasn’t something I chose; it’s how I’m wired.

DR. PARUL DUA MAKKAR

But a seven-year string of significant life loss events altered my internal and external landscapes. Child loss. Depression. Infidelity.

The kind of losses that don’t just interrupt your plans—they upend entire lives, altering how you view the world, love, lead yourself and others, relate, and make meaning of your own existence.

Before, I understood loss intellectually. After, I understood it in my body and across the span of my mortal existence. It moved from concept to lived reality—from something I could explain to something I had to navigate and learn to heal.

I learned that grief is not confined to death. It follows broken trust, vanished futures, and the collapse of who you thought you’d be. It alters how you see yourself—and how you move through the world.

My unraveling revealed the greater depths of who I am. My losses did not make me a helper. They forged deeper wisdom within me.

Today, I use what I learned to help others navigate conflict, confusion, and chaos with greater clarity and compassion—for themselves and others. When we understand how life’s hardest moments interact with who we intrinsically are, we stop asking questions like, “Will I ever feel like myself again?” and start asking, “What is seeking to be understood? To be healed?”

My life changed forever. As did my understanding of healing. And in that intersection, I found what I believe is a new frontier—where grief, identity, and human potential meet.

ANNAH ELIZABETH

SPEAKER | COACH | ARCHITECT OF THE FIVE FACETS® PHILOSOPHY ON HEALING | ADVANCING HUMAN HEALING, IDENTITY & POTENTIAL

@annahelizabethheals

GENERAL DENTIST | SPEAKER | AUTHOR | GRIEF COACH @duagoodjob

When my younger brother, Manu, died. I didn’t just lose him. I lost the version of myself that existed with him. I didn’t have language for it at first—I just felt untethered. Like a role I never questioned had been taken away without warning. It was unnatural, this is not the way it was supposed to happen. He was meant to tell my stories when I died to my children, not the other way round.

Manu was a part of my timeline, my proof of where I came from. When he was gone, pieces of my past felt suddenly fragile, like they could disappear too. It was my job to protect him, and now there was no-one. In the present of March 2021, I lost the keeper of my past and part of my future.

There’s a loneliness in sibling loss that’s hard to explain. Manu was the one who remembered the same childhood, the same moments, the same family in the same way. Now those memories live only in me. I carry them alone, and some days they feel heavy. When I cremated my dad, I was very angry at Manu. It was his job to share the little nuances, inside jokes, instead I was left alone planning another funeral, writing another eulogy. I wasn't my father's only child, I had a sibling, and yet I found myself lost, alone without a compass.

Grief didn’t just break my heart—it reshaped my identity. I am not who I was before, and I don’t try to be. I am learning to live as someone who holds love and absence at the same time.

Holding on to a new identity that I never imagined could ever be. Losing an identity to be an aunt, have more family, build new memories.

Those that I have will have to suffice. Manu no longer walks beside me, but he lives in how deeply I feel, how much I notice, and how carefully I hold the people I love. I don’t have a living sibling, but I will always have a brother.

A note to him: “Then I carried you in my arms, now I carry you in my heart. I love you Manu and I will see you again soon.”

GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 42

For many women, identity is stitched together through roles. We are daughters, partners, mothers, professionals, carers. We are the dependable ones. The strong ones. The ones who hold everything together. So, when life changes—through illness, accident, loss—it doesn’t just disrupt our routine. It unsettles who we believe ourselves to be.

When my life shifted, I didn’t only grieve my health. I grieved the woman I used to be. The one who said yes without hesitation. The one who pushed through exhaustion. The one who believed her worth was proven by how much she could carry.

So much of my identity had been built on usefulness. On being needed. On performing well—at work, in relationships, even in faith. I didn’t realize how tightly I had fused who I was with what I did. When my capacity changed, I felt exposed. If I couldn’t produce, support, or endure in the same way, I wondered: Who was I?

KATY PARKER

AUTHOR | GRIEF EDUCATOR | MENTAL HEALTH ADVOCATE | FOUNDER OF THE GRIEF STORIES SERIES @journeyofsmiley

There is a quiet grief in no longer recognizing yourself. In needing help when you’ve always been the helper. In slowing down when the world rewards speed.

Women are rarely taught how to exist outside of performance. We are praised for coping, admired for resilience, and valued for selflessness. But what happens when our bodies or circumstances no longer allow us to meet those expectations?

The question becomes deeply personal: Am I still worthy? Over time, I have begun to ask a different question: What remains? Beneath the roles. Beneath the productivity. Beneath the strength.

When life changes forever, perhaps identity is not lost—it is redefined. And perhaps we are more than what we do. Perhaps we are enough, simply because we are here.

There was a version of me that existed before everything changed.

She had plans and a clear idea of how life would go. She moved through life without constantly measuring joy against loss. I remember her well. And for a long time, I believed my healing meant finding my way back to her.

But grief has a way of reshaping you. It doesn’t just take people or moments; it can take the identity you once wore so confidently. After loss entered my life, I found myself asking a question that echoed louder than anything else: Who am I now?

At first, I didn’t even recognize it as grief. I thought I was just tired, overwhelmed, or trying to adjust. It took time to understand that what I was feeling wasn’t weakness. It was loss reshaping my identity.

After experiencing pregnancy loss and later losing my aunt, I realized grief wasn’t just something I went through. It quietly changed how I saw myself, my faith, and my future.

I am no longer the woman who believes life will always unfold as expected. But I am also no longer the woman who doesn’t understand resilience, faith, or the quiet strength that comes from surviving what you never thought you could.

I am a woman who has learned to carry both grief and gratitude in the same heart. A woman who understands that healing doesn’t erase what happened. It teaches you how to live forward anyway.

A woman who is still becoming.

There are days I miss who I used to be. But I am learning to meet the woman I am today with compassion instead of comparison. I may not be who I once was, but I am growing into someone wiser and more intentional with the life I have now.

GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 43

SHANNON ROANE FOUNDER, HIGHLIGHT YOUR HEALING & J & J JOURNALS CERTIFIED GRIEF COACH | PODCAST HOST | SPEAKER @highlight_your_healing

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WRITING AND ART BY SUSIE STONEFIELD

At age 56 I came out of the closet, ended my 30 year pretty-damn-good marriage, and surprised everyone, especially myself.

I’d avoided looking myself in the eye for over two decades of questioning. I’d pushed away my fantasies, curiosity, and longings. I’d suffered from persistent insomnia, digestive issues, and stressrelated adrenal fatigue.

Despite the fact that for 22 years I’d had a smattering of secret crushes on queer women in my life, I was sure I was not a lesbian.

These thoughts were disquieting, confusing, and inconvenient. I didn’t know what to make of them. But I surely wasn’t about to believe them!

And yet, for years I watched The L Word when my husband traveled.

For years I searched for memoirs by women who left their husbands for women—and then erased my history, afraid my son would see it.

For years I’d think about women and lose sleep thinking about what I would lose if I followed up on those thoughts.

It felt extremely selfish to yearn for something that would likely spell the end of everything I knew and loved, everything I’d built, everything that was safe and solid in my life.

This was my secret, a very BIG secret.

And for someone who is generally an open book, the sad truth was I barely allowed anyone who knew me to know anything about this.

For 22 years I was like Wile E. Coyote paddling backwards as I was swept towards the edge of the waterfall, terrified of going over. I didn’t know who I was anymore. I only knew that this desire was growing, not fading, despite my efforts to submerge and ignore it.

One day, on a drive to the coast to take a meditative beach walk I heard famed therapist Esther Perel talking about her book, The State of Affairs.

GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 45

I felt my grief welling up and spilling over as she said, “Sometimes it’s not about wanting a different partner.

Sometimes what we are looking for is a version of ourselves that we’ve suppressed.”

What version of me had I suppressed?

And why had I done it?

As I walked the shore that afternoon I went over and over my history. In my teens and twenties I’d always dated boys. I’d had a couple passionate male lovers. I had queer friends, but that was because I was safe and an ally, right?

Not because I was queer myself.

And what did this mean about my marriage and my practically pictureperfect life? Was it all a figment of my imagination?

My fears found their footing as my grief bloomed: My husband was a good guy.

A better husband than most of the men my friends were stuck with. Why would I throw that away?

How could I hurt someone who supported me as he did? What would people think of me? Would they all turn against me? How could I be so selfish?

But what I knew for sure was that Esther’s words were true for me. I shared the podcast with my husband later that week hoping he would understand and finally see this me. He didn’t relate to it, didn’t understand my takeaway. I finally told him, obtusely, “I think about women,” and after a beat he said, “Alright, do that.”

But thinking was all I’d been doing. I knew that ultimately I needed to act on these thoughts, however I could not imagine how I could do that without blowing up my life.

Surprisingly, I wasn’t at all prepared when, in late 2018, the Universe decided it was done waiting for me to do something about it. Romantic and fantastical as this sounds, a woman with pale hazel eyes looked across a room and deep into my soul and I felt the Universe push me out into the space between us, urging me on. “It’s time to feed this part of your story,” it said. “Get on with your life.” And I said yes.

2019 was a year of excruciating vulnerability as I came out to everyone in my life. It was a year of fear, exhilaration, curiosity, and grief as I did what I could to lovingly deconstruct a 30 year marriage to a generous and heart-broken man.

I didn’t lose everyone, but I did lose some. Thirty years of sweet connection didn’t stop my mother-in-law and much of my husband’s family from shutting me out.

Friends who said, “I just don’t understand,” then kept their distance. But the people who mattered—my mom, my siblings, my closest friends, my kids, and even my husband—did not reject me for living my truth.

Deconstructing my marriage was only one part of the metamorphosis I had begun. As 2019 unfolded and I entered more and more spaces as a “late-in-life lesbian,” I realized that I had no idea who that was or how to be her. I was a menopausal 56 year old and a horny 16 year old folded into one. I was messy and reckless and passionate. It was thrilling and humbling to be her.

A few months after I’d begun this transformation, my husband and I took a walk on my favorite beach. We held hands. We sat beneath gray skies watching the crashing waves and talked about what we should do now that we knew we had to unstitch ourselves from each other. We were deeply sad, but also deeply grateful for our years together, our sons, our shared creative life. “We had a good run,” he said ruefully.

That night I moved out of our bedroom and into the guest room. I sat on the edge of the bed and sobbed. For months I had been carried by discovery, but that night I felt the fabric of the life we’d so intentionally built pull apart, and it hurt us both.

The next morning, however, I awoke feeling lighter, knowing this was the right move, the right step. Finally, I was going in the right direction.

GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 46

All art original content © Susie Stonefield 2019.

SUSIE STONEFIELD IS A CREATIVITY AND GRIEF COACH, TRANSFORMATIONAL ART GUIDE, AND CERTIFIED GRIEF CARE PROFESSIONAL LIVING IN CHICO, CA WITH HER WIFE. SHE OFFERS 1:1 COACHING, GROUP PROGRAMS, AND RETREATS TO HELP PEOPLE NAVIGATE LIFE’S TRANSITIONS THROUGH CREATIVITY AND REFLECTION. HER THREE ADULT CHILDREN AND WASBAND, JOYFULLY ATTENDED HER WEDDING LAST APRIL. SUSIESTONEFIELD.COM @CREATIVITY_MIDWIFE

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As a society, we often talk about grief as something that follows loss. We assume grief is only associated with a death, a breakup, a diagnosis, or additional losses. It’s easy to feel as though grief must accompany something visible, tangible, and undeniable, often viewing grief as something that earns sympathy, casseroles and outdated language.

THE GRIEF OF

BECOMING

By Angela Croop

We don’t talk about grief when nothing has been lost (at least not in the way people recognize). We don’t talk about grief when the change is growth.

Over the past six months, my life has been expanding in ways I once only imagined. My boundaries have sharpened, and my time has become more valuable, and intentional. My identity has stretched into spaces I used to believe were reserved for other people.

I am more careful with my energy, more selective with my commitments, and more honest about what I want and what I don’t. I hold boundaries in order to keep myself accountable with the life I want to live.

From the outside, this looks like progress.

However, from the inside, it feels like something is breaking. Why? Because growth doesn’t just change our schedules. It changes our relationships. Growth changes the roles we play, the dynamics we once understood, and the invisible agreements we didn’t know we made.

Growth then changes what we tolerate, what we notice, and what we can no longer ignore.

The kicker? Once we see those things, we cannot unsee them.

For women, growth often comes hand-inhand with grief. We are expected to carry multiple roles (daughter, partner, mother, friend) and when we begin to prioritize our own evolution, something inevitably shifts. Often with that shift comes loss: the loss of familiar dynamics, the comfort of predictability, and the relationships that no longer fit the version of us that is emerging.

This grief doesn’t announce itself with fanfare.

It shows up as tension in conversations with people who once knew us well, and discomfort in spaces that once felt safe. There might even be a subtle resistance from the people we love the most.

Recently, my partner and I were driving in the car, talking about life and business while discussing future plans.

Photograph By Amanda Swiger

The conversation was the type of conversation that lives somewhere between routine and intimacy. It wasn’t an interrogation. It wasn’t a trap. It was the kind that naturally grows when your own life starts expanding and you want to bring the people you love along with you.

Then in an instant, a switch flipped. At first he became defensive, and then accusatory. Then, almost without warning, he began to question whether or not I had ulterior motives, and “accused” me of changing.

It’s true. I have changed. I am in a growth phase and I am leveling up my business and my identity as a human, and suddenly my own efforts were the problem. My own business was “not going anywhere” and I didn’t have “anything to show for the money spent” in which I used to fund my passion and dream.

My goals, my time, my focus, my work, and my growth were all laid out like evidence in a case I didn’t know we were arguing.

I remember the exact feeling in my body when the shift happened. My stomach dropped and tears began to build up in the corners of my eyes. I felt misunderstood, and alone. I also felt anger along with relief. What I was experiencing was a quiet confusion.

I sensed that I stepped into a moment I did not necessarily recognize, yet somehow understood immediately.

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The conversation ended, but that feeling didn’t.

For days afterward, something sat heavy in my chest. I couldn’t yet name it, but it was there. I kept trying to “explain it away” as stress, miscommunication, a bad night, and a complete misunderstanding.

But the feeling lingered, and then grew larger.

Then the realization landed with a quiet kind of clarity that felt both obvious and devastating.

I am outgrowing parts of my life that once fit perfectly. Nothing dramatic had happened, nothing had ended, and no one had left. But something had shifted, and I found myself grieving.

My expansion was creating friction. My growth was no longer happening quietly in the background. It was changing the shape of the relationship itself.

Growth is often framed as empowering, exciting, and transformational. No one talks about how lonely it can feel.

We don’t seem to recognize that growth changes the version of us that people learned how to love. It changes the version of us they learned how to interact with and the version of us that fits neatly into existing dynamics. That version of us is predictable, and there is a level of comfort in familiarity. This is true even when that familiarity is limiting.

When we begin to grow, the relationships in our lives don’t automatically grow with us.

Some stretch while some resist, and some quietly pull back. Hell, some reveal tensions that were always there but never activated. It is here, we begin to realize that growth is not just an individual journey. It is a relational one and sometimes we are the first to change.

There is a particular kind of loneliness found here as well as an immense amount of grief.

One of the hardest parts is that no one prepares us for the grief, and most people cannot understand why we are in fact grieving.

“You should be happy” they say. “You have all that you have wanted. How can you possibly be upset?”

Meanwhile we are engulfed in the guilt of wanting more; the guilt of needing different conversations; the guilt of protecting our time and energy; and the guilt of pulling away from dynamics that once felt normal.

Then comes the monster guilt of realizing we can no longer shrink back into the version of ourselves that fits more comfortably in the spaces around us.

In moments like these, there is a temptation to make ourselves smaller again. We may want to soften our boundaries, quiet our ambitions, and return to familiar patterns. It is incredibly easy to choose belonging over becoming because staying small keeps the peace.

Growth disrupts it.

We celebrate leveling up as if it only brings confidence, clarity, and success. We rarely talk about what it asks us to release: Old identities. Old dynamics. Old expectations.

Old versions of yourself that once made life feel “simpler.”

Growth is not just about reaching new heights. It is about letting go. It is about letting go of what no longer fits, what no longer serves, and what no longer reflects the person we are becoming.

For women, this accompanying grief is often silent, misunderstood, and often judged. But this is also real, and necessary. Why? Because every boundary we hold, every ambition we pursue, and every old pattern we release is a step toward living a life that we are meant to live.

To grieve growth is not weakness. Instead, it is proof that we are evolving. Furthermore, in honoring that grief, we find the courage to become the women we were meant to be, unapologetically and without shrinking for anyone else.

Growth asks us to grieve, but it also asks us to rise, and it is in that rise that we finally claim ourselves.

Angela Croop is a speech pathologist turned grief mentor, writer, and retreat leader. After losing her daughter Avianna to SIDS, she founded Fly Avi Fly in her honor — a small shop that keeps Avianna’s name alive and funds retreat scholarships for bereaved parents.

Blending her professional expertise with lived experience, Angela incorporates neuroscience into her grief mentorship, helping parents understand how loss impacts the brain and how tools like thought retraining and accountability can support healing. Her mission is to show that while grief never disappears, it can be carried in a way that makes room for love, resilience, and even joy.

ANGELAAVI.COM @ANGELA_AVI_REBUILDS @FLYAVIFLY

GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 49

Grief, Matrescence, and the Woman I Became DR. CHRISTELLE OLIVER-DUSSAULT, MD B. SC., BM BS, DOWH, MICGP, CCFP Being a mother can be hard, but it can also be deeply rewarding. It refracts life through a different lens. It reveals tenderness and strength you did not know you possessed. It expands your heart and, at times, stretches your nervous system beyond what feels sustainable.

My days were spent caring for patients and reassuring them through uncertainty. My evenings were consumed by meetings as medical guidance changed rapidly. My nights were restless, filled with worry and overwhelm. I lost myself in my work, used up my empathy tank on my patients and had very little left for my family.

My first daughter was born in Ireland in 2019, just weeks before a major relocation. When she was four weeks old, we moved out of our apartment and into my mother in law’s home. Two weeks later, my husband left for Vancouver to begin a new job. I followed four weeks later with our infant. In the midst of all of that, my grandmother passed away.

In 2021, we relocated again, starting over once more. I tried searching for a more sustainable rhythm between medicine and motherhood.

It was a lot of change in a very small space of time, with little room to process any of it.

When I arrived in Vancouver, my maternity leave did not resemble rest. I carried my newborn from appointment to appointment, navigating immigration paperwork, transferring my medical license, and attending job interviews because childcare was nearly impossible to secure.

I never anticipated the guilt I would feel between trying to be a present mother and a polished professional. I never realised how much fear I would feel trusting someone I barely knew to care for my daughter.

Eventually, I found childcare and opened my practice in early 2020, only weeks before the world shifted under the weight of a global pandemic.

Our second daughter was born in 2022. I took more time and asked for help, something that has never come easily to me. Yet, slowly, I slipped back into familiar patterns of trying to do it all, constantly feeling like I was running, not stopping to take a breath.

Part of me longed for my former self. I mourned the confident, independent woman I had once been while ignoring the ways I had changed. When my youngest was nine months old, my body intervened.

It began with a few hives across my abdomen. They faded within twenty four hours. I dismissed them but they kept returning, and spreading. Soon, I was covered from head to toe, with severe lip swelling despite taking high doses of antihistamines.

As a physician, knowledge can be both a gift and a burden. I found lymph nodes under my left arm and my mind spiralled.

GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 50

Early in my career, I had cared for a thirty four year old mother who presented similarly and was later diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer. I could not unsee her story.

Thankfully, every investigation returned normal.

That was when the realization landed.

Nothing catastrophic was wrong. My body was not betraying me. It was signaling me.

Motherhood had cracked me open. It revealed how uncomfortable I was with boundaries, how difficult I found it to say no, and how easily I placed myself last. The hives were not random. They were an embodied expression of chronic depletion.

With support and intentional changes, I began to recalibrate. As I addressed stressors in my life and made space for rest and self awareness, the hives eased, as did the chest pain and palpitations I had ignored for months.

What I was experiencing was not simply burnout. It was grief.

The Grief We Rarely Name We tend to associate grief with death. Yet grief also lives in transitions, identity shifts, and changing bodies.

Motherhood carries joy and profound loss in the same breath. Loss of autonomy. Loss of uninterrupted time. Loss of the version of yourself who once moved through the world with different priorities.

What makes this season particularly vulnerable is that it is not only logistical. It is biological.

Matrescence describes the psychological, emotional, physical, hormonal, and social transformation that occurs when a woman enters motherhood. First coined by anthropologist Dana Raphael in the 1970s, it has only recently begun to receive deeper attention in medicine. It is not a minor adjustment. It is a developmental stage and a complete identity shift.

Motherhood is a major biosocial life event. Neuroimaging studies demonstrate that the maternal brain undergoes significant structural and functional neuroplasticity across the peripartum period. Regions associated with empathy, emotional regulation, and threat detection are reshaped.

The brain is transformed.

This heightened awareness is adaptive. It primes a mother to detect subtle cues, respond quickly, and anticipate needs. The neuroplasticity of matrescence resembles other sensitive developmental periods in life, when the brain is especially receptive to experience dependent learning.

But heightened vigilance has a cost.

When the brain is rewiring itself for caregiving, many women describe feeling hyperaware, emotionally raw, and easily overstimulated. At the same time, they may feel disconnected from their pre motherhood roles, relationships, and interests. In a culture that idealizes self sacrifice and rarely validates ambivalence, it is easy to become consumed by the role of mother.

The existential shift can be profound. Who am I now? What parts of me remain? Which parts have softened or been set aside?

When identity feels destabilized, the risk of postpartum depression and anxiety increases. Not because women are fragile, but because identity disruption is destabilizing.

Protective factors such as social support and maintaining pre-existing relationships matter deeply. Yet many women relocate, step back from careers, or lose touch with community precisely when support is most needed.

We celebrate the baby. We rarely prepare women for the neurological and psychological rewiring that accompanies becoming a mother.

In that vulnerable space, grief can surface. Grief for independence, for spontaneity, for the woman you once were.

The Fading and the Return Around the time I began to understand this more fully, I heard of a phenomenon that occurs to female flamingos when rearing their young.

Flamingos are not born pink. Their colour comes from nourishment. During periods of raising their young, they often lose their vibrant colour as their nutrients are diverted outward.Once their own needs are replenished, the pink returns.

GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 51

Women are no different. Many women slowly give away their reserves. Time, energy, emotional presence, identity.

When I reflected on my own experience, I realised that I had been giving every reserve I had. Emotional, cognitive, physical. My days were structured around everyone else’s needs. I had not been nourishing myself in return.

The fading I had experienced was not weakness. It was devotion without replenishment. It was matrescence without adequate support. It was a nervous system on high alert for too long.

Reclaiming pink, for me, became a metaphor. Not a return to who I was before, but an integration of who I had become. It meant acknowledging that caregiving requires restoration. That grief and gratitude can coexist. That identity evolves rather than disappears.

Creating Space In my clinical work, I now listen differently. When a woman tells me she is exhausted despite normal blood work, I consider the invisible labour she carries. When she feels flat or disconnected, I think about unprocessed grief and chronic self neglect.

These are not pathologies. They are human responses to transition. Grief woven into womanhood does not mean something is wrong. It means something has changed.

When we make space to acknowledge that change, to mourn what was, and to nourish what is emerging, colour can return.

Not the same pink as before. A deeper, wiser shade, shaped by everything we have lived.

DR. CHRISTELLE OLIVER-DUSSAULT IS A FAMILY PHYSICIAN SPECIALIZING IN WOMEN’S HEALTH AND PSYCHOEDUCATION. SHE FOUNDED RECLAIM THE PINK WITHIN TO HELP WOMEN RECONNECT WITH THEMSELVES BEYOND MOTHERHOOD AND REBUILD COMMUNITY — ONE STORY AT A TIME. CHECK OUT HER PODCAST AT RECLAIMTHEPINKWITHIN.COM @DRCHRISTELLEMD | @RECLAIMTHEPINKWITHIN

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THE STRONG BLACK WOMAN AND THE GRIEF OF SUCCESS

BY REV. DR. TAMMY ISAAC

We do not usually associate success with grief.

We expect grief to follow funerals, diagnoses, or endings that are visible and shared. We understand mourning when a life is lost, but not always when a hope quietly disappears. Yet many African American women discover that achievement and grief can exist at the same time.

There is a particular kind of loss that does not come from death. It comes from absence. The absence of recognition. The absence of opportunity. The absence of being chosen in spaces where you have already shown yourself capable.

You do the work. You prepare. You show up consistently.

You are dependable. People trust you, rely on you, and praise you. They call you strong. They call you a leader.

But when the moment comes for advancement, decisionmaking, or elevation, your name is missing.

It is difficult to explain why that hurts as deeply as it does, because nothing visible has been taken away. On paper, everything looks fine. You are still employed. You are still respected. You are still needed. Yet internally, something registers as loss.

This is the grief of success.

It is the experience of being appreciated but not advanced, supported but not selected, relied upon but not fully recognized. The work continues and the expectations remain, but the affirmation never quite arrives.

Many African American women struggle to name this as grief. We often interpret it as disappointment, frustration, or simply the reality of professional life. We tell ourselves to be grateful, to keep working, and to remain faithful. We push forward.

But grief is not only the response to death. Grief is the emotional response to loss, and loss includes what never materializes despite effort, preparation, and dedication.

Part of what complicates this experience is the identity many Black women have carried for generations. The Strong Black Woman is admired for endurance, reliability, and perseverance. She handles responsibility and stabilizes environments even when she is tired.

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Because she continues, others assume she is unaffected.

For many, the Strong Black Woman identity does more than describe personality. It shapes how others respond to their pain. Strength becomes both affirmation and expectation. She is seen as capable and emotionally steady, which often means she becomes the one others lean on—even while carrying her own disappointments.

Within workplace environments, this can create a quiet imbalance. She mentors, supports, and sustains the culture around her. She is asked to lead informally long before she is formally recognized. She comforts colleagues and keeps things steady, yet when advancement decisions are made, her emotional labor is rarely considered leadership.

Because she is perceived as strong, people assume she does not need care.

Because she is composed, they assume she is not hurting. And because she continues showing up, they assume she has not been affected.

The result is a particular kind of isolation. The disappointment is real, but there is little room to express it.

Speaking about it can be interpreted as ingratitude or weakness, so many learn to carry it quietly. They keep producing, keep helping, and keep supporting others while privately processing the ache of being overlooked.

This is what makes the grief of success different. The loss is not only the missed opportunity. It is also the absence of permission to openly grieve it.

In leadership spaces, many women carry both visibility and invisibility at the same time. They are visible enough to be relied upon but invisible when opportunity arises. Their contributions matter, but their advancement stalls.

Their labor is essential, but their presence in decision-making rooms remains limited.

This creates a quiet emotional conflict.

You love what you do. You believe in the work. You are committed to serving with integrity and purpose. So you keep showing up. At the same time, you watch doors open for others while you remain waiting outside them.

This grief is rarely acknowledged because it does not look like sorrow.

She is still functioning and helping others succeed, yet internally she may be questioning her value, her belonging, and whether she is truly seen.

There is fatigue in constantly proving worth. There is weariness in excellence without reward. There is confusion when qualifications are clear, but opportunities are not.

For African American women, this experience is layered. It is not only professional. It touches identity. It intersects with history. Progress exists, but access does not always follow progress.

Because of this, the grief can feel difficult to claim. Nothing catastrophic happened. There is no ritual to mark it, no public acknowledgment, and often no language to describe it. Instead, the ache is carried privately while professionalism continues publicly.

Outwardly, there is composure. Inwardly, there is disappointment that feels risky to admit.

Over time, this unspoken grief does not disappear. It can become emotional exhaustion, shortened patience, or a quiet questioning of self.

Some call it burnout. Others call it stress. But underneath, there is mourning — mourning the opportunities that never arrived and the affirmation that never came.

For a long time, I spoke about this experience from what I observed in others. I listened to women describe their weariness, their confusion, and their quiet disappointment, and I recognized the pattern. What I did not immediately recognize was how much of it I was living myself.

I love the work I have been called to do and remain committed to showing up with integrity. I have been trusted, relied upon, and affirmed in many ways. Yet I have also watched opportunities pass by, watched doors open for others while I remained waiting, and felt the quiet ache of being appreciated but not fully seen.

Nothing catastrophic happened. I am still standing. I am still working. I am still serving. From the outside, everything appears steady. But internally, I have had to acknowledge that I, too, am grieving.

I am grieving not a person, but a possibility. Not a failure, but an absence. I am grieving the space between what I have poured out and what has been returned. Naming it has not made me bitter. It has made me honest.

The Strong Black Woman continues to show up. She continues to lead, to help, and to build. But she also needs permission to admit when something hurts. Strength does not mean the absence of emotion. It means allowing truth alongside perseverance.

If you recognize yourself here, you are not weak for feeling it. You are responding to a real loss, even if no one marked it as one. Grief does not only follow death. Sometimes it follows effort, faithfulness, and waiting.

Acknowledging that does not diminish your strength.

It finally makes room for your humanity.

REV. DR. TAMMY ISAAC IS A HOSPITAL CHAPLAIN, GRIEF EDUCATOR, AUTHOR, AND SPEAKER CENTERING EMOTIONAL CARE AND EVERYDAY LOSS. FOUNDER OF BREATHE COUNSELING CENTER AND HOST OF THE PERMISSION TO BREATHE PODCAST.

DRTAMMYISAAC.COM | @DRTAMMYISAAC

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g n i w o r g t Ou s e v l e s r Ou THE

IFE L D I OF M F E I T GR QUIE

BY STACEY STEVENS

GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 56

There is a particular kind of grief that no one prepares women for. It is not the grief of death, though it carries a similar ache.

It is the grief of identity.

Perimenopause begins as a whisper and then becomes a presence. Children leave home. Marriages shift, or unravel.

Careers that once felt like triumphs begin to feel like roles we memorized too well.

And layered over all of it is a cultural hum that suggests we are somehow “past our prime.” We are encouraged to age gracefully, which often means quietly. Be grateful. Be smaller. Want less.

But midlife is not the end of a story. It is the moment we realize we have outgrown the one we have been living.

I often say, “We outgrow our stories just like our older sibling’s hand-me-downs.”

They fit once. They were necessary once.

But eventually, they feel tight across the shoulders.

Restrictive.

No longer reflective of who we are becoming.

The grief of midlife is not really about wrinkles or hormone shifts. It is about letting go of the woman we had to be in order to survive.

For high-performing women, identity has been built in layers. We were the good daughter.

The overachiever.

The dependable partner. The present mother.

The one who holds everything together.

Many of us learned early that love, validation, and acceptance were tied to performance. We became exceptional at meeting expectations. We excelled in classrooms, boardrooms, and homes. We endured. We adapted. We delivered.

Then midlife asks a destabilizing question: If I am no longer actively proving, pleasing, climbing, or caretaking, who am I? This is where the grief begins.

Because when the roles shift, the scaffolding that held our identity in place begins to loosen. And women are rarely given language or permission to mourn that loss.

Instead, we are offered anti-aging creams and inspirational slogans.

We are told this is empowerment.

But empowerment without introspection is just another performance.

The greatest barrier in this season is not societal messaging.

It is the internal narrative that echoes it.

As Daniel Goleman reminds us, “It’s not the chatter of people around us that is the most powerful distractor, but rather the chatter of our own minds.” The outside world may whisper that we are less relevant. Our own mind turns it into a verdict.

I should be further along. It’s too late to pivot. I shouldn’t want more at this stage. Maybe this is just how it is now.

These thoughts feel factual. They are not. They are stories.

And most of them were written decades ago.

In my work with high-achieving women, I see this turning point often. Success on paper does not quiet the inner critic.

In fact, it can amplify it. Because when you have achieved everything you once set out to prove, and still feel a quiet disconnect, you can no longer blame circumstance. You are forced to confront the story.

This is where the FIRE Framework becomes more than theory. It becomes a reclamation.

Fulfilled means aligning your work and life with your current values, not the ones you inherited at twenty-two. Inspired means reconnecting with purpose that is not rooted in proving yourself to anyone. Resilient means building capacity to adapt without destroying yourself in the process.

Empowered means taking ownership of your narrative instead of unconsciously accepting the one culture hands you.

Midlife is not about declining. It is about refining. And refinement requires shedding.

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Shedding the belief that your worth is tied to productivity. Shedding the idea that your desirability determines your relevance.

Shedding the myth that ambition has an expiration date.

There is grief in this shedding. You may grieve the younger body that felt predictable. The earlier version of your marriage. The certainty you once carried. The roles that once defined you. But grief is not weakness. It is awareness. It is the recognition that something has ended so that something more aligned can begin.

Resilience in midlife is not whiteknuckling through exhaustion. It is not tolerating more than you should.

It is adapting consciously. It is noticing the pattern before it runs you. It is choosing alignment over approval.

The crossroads is clear. You can accept the messaging that you are past your prime. Or you can decide that midlife is the prime of selfauthorship.

You can continue wearing the handme-down identity that once protected you. Or you can choose something that fits who you are now.

Midlife is not the quiet exit. It is the bold rewrite.

The question is not whether you are aging. You are. We all are. The real question is whether you will age inside a story that diminishes you or one that expands you.

You are not past your prime. You are past your conditioning.

Stacey Stevens is an awardwinning legal expert, speaker, and mentor helping high-achieving women succeed without burnout.

Named one of Canada’s Best Personal Injury Lawyers, she brings credibility and authenticity to every stage and platform. She is the creator of the FIRE Framework, helping women break patterns of people-pleasing and perfectionism to lead with clarity and purpose. After more than 20 years in law, Stacey understands the true cost of success—and how to redefine it on your own terms. @staceylstevens

And there is a profound difference.

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e: nc

Gr ie

o d B y Ex l l u F pe a ri Is e f

How my son’s death triggered menopause

By: Erin Blechman

Grief doesn’t just live in the heart or the mind. It takes up residence in the body.

Have you ever experienced an event so earthshattering and traumatic that it changed you profoundly—mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and even physically?

In June 2020, our eldest son, Max, died by suicide after a six-year battle with depression.

Although we feared that we might lose him to suicide, the reality was a completely different animal. In those first few days and weeks, I was numb, in shock, and sliding into a deep depression that made getting out of bed difficult.

I knew my grief would impact me mentally and emotionally, but I was completely unprepared for the physical side effects of grief. First came intense insomnia. I simply couldn’t sleep. If I did fall asleep, I would wake after a couple of hours and be unable to get back to sleep. My heart raced, my stomach churned, I couldn’t take a deep breath, my thoughts swirled, and my yearning to be with Max was intense, and frankly a little frightening to me and those around me. What I didn’t realize at the time was that my response wasn’t unusual, it was a predictable reaction to profound loss and trauma that our grief-illiterate culture rarely acknowledges.

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After a few months, I noticed I was no longer getting my period. It had been irregular for about a year, so it took some time to register. Then other menopause symptoms began. I experienced debilitating hot flashes (ten or more each day) and night sweats. Often, I had to change my pajamas multiple times a night. The night sweats combined with the insomnia made me feel like I was losing my mind.

I also felt as though I gained weight overnight, literally. I couldn’t understand how weight gain could happen so suddenly and so significantly.

My husband and I were each struggling to deal with the grief in our own ways, which created feelings of worry, resentment, pressure, and more. Coupled with these emotional dynamics, intimacy became difficult, painful, and unfulfilling. At a time when we could have offered comfort and love to one another, I bristled whenever he approached, and our marriage floundered.

One bereaved mom I know told me about her physical symptoms which included high blood pressure, intense body aches, significant weight gain followed by weight loss, and serious digestive problems. Her physician ran multiple tests for autoimmune diseases and leukemia because he was convinced that her symptoms “must have a real cause.” What an uninformed and unkind thing for a medical practitioner to say.

After nine months, I finally consulted my gynecologist about medication to help manage my symptoms. I remember her saying, “The loss of your son has pushed your body into menopause. You might have been on your way, but this event triggered it. It’s like the perfect storm.”

We live in a grief-illiterate culture where discussion of loss and its impact on us is limited and insufficient.

As a result, we are left to muddle through on our own, often suffering in silence and loneliness.

I had no idea that a traumatic event could trigger such a profound physical response. I thought grief was emotional and mental. I didn’t realize it could impact me so dramatically in a physical way as well.

Research shows that grief triggers a stress response that can lead to physical symptoms such as chest tightness, fatigue, insomnia, digestive issues (nausea, appetite changes, stomach pain), headaches, body aches, and weakened immunity. These physical changes make a person more vulnerable to illness. In extreme cases, severe stress from grief can even lead to “broken heart syndrome” (Takotsubo cardiomyopathy).

Looking back, I see that my response to Max’s death was a tangled web. We tend to think of our bodies as separate pieces rather than as one cohesive system. If something profoundly impacts us mentally and emotionally, it stands to reason that it will also affect us physically.

Since losing Max, I’ve spoken with many other parents who have lost children, and most have experienced some kind of physical symptoms and/or ailments including vision issues, weight gain/loss, insulin resistance, heart problems like arrythmia, high blood pressure, thyroid issues, and even cancer. This grief thing is no joke.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

If you’ve experienced a profound loss, please know that it can, and likely will, affect you physically. For this reason, many clinicians recommend a full physical exam in the months following a significant death. Grieving the loss of a loved one requires tremendous work and care. May I gently encourage you to tend to both your physical and emotional health as you navigate your grief journey. In early grief, self-care can feel like an oxymoron, but it is a critical part of both grieving and learning how to live in the aftermath of devastating loss.

We need to do better as a culture. We must expand how we understand grief, talk about it honestly, and support grieving people in whole-body ways. Because when grief is ignored in the body, it doesn’t disappear. It simply finds another way to speak.

Erin Blechman is a speaker, Certified Grief Educator, and author of My Unexpected Journey: Reflections After Losing My Son to Suicide. She offers online grief support, and talks about grief, mental illness, and suicide loss. erinblechman.com @erin.blechman

GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 60

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THE WEIGHT OF GRIEF How Grief can actually trigger unexpected weight gain and what to do about it.

By Camila Crews with expert tips by Nutritional Therapy Practitioner Susan Koursaris

About a year after losing my dad, I gained twenty pounds, which was confusing and frustrating because my eating was clean, my workouts were consistent, and I was doing all the “right” things, yet my body was still changing in ways I didn’t recognize.

After countless doctor visits where I had to advocate for myself again and again, I knew something else was happening, but the moment that finally forced me to stop minimizing it was July 4, 2024, when I landed in urgent care with an unquenchable thirst that no amount of water could satisfy. That experience led me to an endocrinologist, more comprehensive testing, and finally an answer: insulin resistance.

At first, I chalked it up to the horror stories we’re fed about turning forty, the idea of a nonexistent metabolism and hormones going rogue, just part of the deal. But I had just entered a new era as a certified yoga sculpt instructor, I was actually in the best shape of my adult life, and all of my labs came back normal, which left me with no red flags and no clear explanation.

In simple terms, insulin resistance means your body struggles to use insulin properly. Insulin is the hormone responsible for moving sugar from your bloodstream into your cells so you can use it for energy, and when your cells stop responding effectively, sugar stays in the blood longer while your body produces more insulin to compensate.

Grief weighed me down literally and figuratively.

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Together, we unpacked cortisol, blood sugar, the gut grief connection, and what healing actually looks like from the inside out, not perfection and not restriction, but regulation.

Susan explained that a huge piece of this puzzle has to do with our autonomic nervous system, which has two modes: Parasympathetic (rest + digest state) and Sympathetic (fight or flight state). Grief puts us into that fight or flight state, which is fine as long as you know how to get back to the rest + digest state. That Sympathetic state is where cortisol reigns. It is meant to be a quick, and short lived process. We want to be in the Parasympathetic state far more often than the fight or flight one. For grievers, we tend to struggle with all the things like getting quality sleep, proper nutrient intake, daily movement, and optimal hydration. Any combination of these deficiencies, while in a fight or flight (ie. cortisol expressive) state, can result in chronic dysfunction or imbalance in our bodies.

But there is hope!

Over time, that cycle can lead to weight gain, constant fatigue, intense cravings, and eventually prediabetes or type 2 diabetes if it goes unchecked.

Between chronic work stress, managing my dad’s estate, running a business, and surviving on very little sleep, my body was tapped out, even though I didn’t fully realize it at the time. Looking back, I can see that I was a walking red flag.

Susan reminded me that we could engage the rest + digest state, and support these body foundations, by cutting out sugar, optimizing digestion, prioritizing sleep, and addressing daily stress with calming exercises. It was then our bodies responded with miraculous healing and recovery!

That diagnosis forced me to make real lifestyle changes because I didn’t want it to turn into something more serious, which meant adding strength training back into my routine, walking after meals, reducing my sugar intake, prioritizing sleep, and actively working to lower my stress.

Once I understood what was actually going on, I committed to getting back to my previous weight, but along the way I had to confront something harder to accept: mentally and physically, I will never be the same woman I was before. I’m still grappling with that truth and what it means for me.

That realization is what prompted me to have a conversation with Nutritional Therapy Practitioner Susan Koursaris, who is also no stranger to grief. Susan lost her sister in 2018 and both of her parents in 2021, and she understands how loss rewires the nervous system, the gut, and the way we learn to care for ourselves.

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Here are some easy tips you can incorporate today: Get enough sleep. The average human body demands 7-9 hours per night to reach REM stage 5, the deepest level of sleep, to accomplish reparative processes and cellular maintenance.

When falling asleep or staying asleep is elusive, homeopathy aides and CNS-calming herbs can help bridge the gap until the body can do this on its own.

Practice eating mindfully. This includes sitting down at mealtime, with no screens or distractions. Observe the food by scent and practice deliberate gratitude for the meal.

“Saying grace” is one example that engages your brain, which then engages digestive organs to work properly. Focus on consuming nutrientdense foods, like healthy fats, and bone broth for times when there is a low-appetite.

Grieve with others. Humans were meant to heal from the emotional pain of grief in a community!

I can attest to the sense of fulfillment at sharing that support with others. Grieving in a community setting reduces feelings of isolation, as well as empowers the person with information and advice in a peer environment.

Grief groups also provide social interaction, a place to open up about complex feelings, a sense of normalization for grief responses, and the sharing of coping strategies among those with similar experiences.

To learn more about Camila Crews and Sorry For Your Loss (Cards), visit SorryForYourLossCards.com or follow along on Instagram at @SorryForYourLossCards.

Stay hydrated! Our daily water intake goal is half our ideal body weight, in ounces. If you’re bored with the taste of water, jazz it up with a squeeze of lemon, fresh cucumber + mint leaves, splash of coconut water or pineapple juice, and a pinch of unrefined salt for electrolytes!

Grief doesn’t just live in our hearts. It lives in our bodies.

This isn’t about fixing yourself or chasing an old version of you. It’s about slowing down, listening, and rebuilding trust with your body after loss. Healing is regulation, support, and compassion, not perfection.

GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 64

To learn more about Susan Koursaris and Wholly Heart Nutrition, visit www.whollyheartnutrition.com or follow along on Instagram at @whollyheartnutrition.

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Hard-Fought Lessons

FOR WHEN LIFE DOESN’T GO AS PLANNED

Poignant, delightful and slightly irreverent, You’re So Strong captures the messy, hilarious, and heartfelt journey of life after loss. Leslie Harter-Berg’s story offers a fresh perspective on grief, while proving there’s no magic prayer for moving on.

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GRIEF CHANGES EVERYTHING.

(yes, even that.)

Understanding Intimacy and Desire in a Body That Is Grieving

By Dr. Heather Taylor

Both responses are normal.

One of the most helpful frameworks I bring into this conversation comes from Emily Nagoski’s book Come As You Are. She explains that sexual desire is shaped by two systems, accelerators and brakes. Accelerators respond to sexually relevant cues. Brakes respond to stress, threat, and distraction.

Grief activates the brakes.

When we talk about grief, we often focus on the emotional experience, the sadness, the longing, the memories. What we rarely name is how deeply grief changes the body. And one of the quiet shifts that does not get enough attention is how it impacts intimacy and sexuality.

Grief lives in the nervous system. It reshapes our sense of safety, our capacity for connection, and how we experience desire and touch.

If you have ever found yourself wondering, Why do I not feel like myself sexually anymore? Is it strange that I want sex right now? Is it strange that I do not want it at all?

Will my desire ever return? You are not alone.

And you are not broken.

Grief is not just emotional. It is physiological. It alters hormones. It disrupts sleep. It floods the body with stress chemistry. When your body is your vehicle for intimacy and pleasure, of course grief will influence your sexual self.

For some people, grief shows up as a loss of desire. Touch feels overwhelming. Numbness sets in. The things that once felt comforting no longer soothe in the same way.

For others, desire increases. There can be a pull toward closeness, toward sensation, toward feeling alive inside a body that otherwise feels heavy. Sex can become grounding. Or distracting. Or a way to access connection when words feel impossible.

When your world has been shaken, when your nervous system is flooded with stress chemistry, when you feel emotionally raw or emotionally shut down, your body prioritizes safety. Sexual desire often quiets during that process. Not because you are broken. Because your system is protecting you.

Nagoski also describes the difference between spontaneous desire and responsive desire. Spontaneous desire is wanting sex out of the blue. Responsive desire emerges in context, after emotional closeness, after touch, after feeling safe.

Grief often dampens spontaneous desire. But that does not mean desire is gone. It may simply need different conditions.

More safety. More patience. More emotional connection.

There is no timeline for when it should return.

This is where shame often creeps in.

People feel guilty for not wanting sex. Or for wanting it sooner than others think they should. They worry they are using sex to cope. They worry they are failing their partner.

They feel disconnected during intimacy and interpret it as something being wrong with them.

Grief and sexuality can exist in the same body. They often do.

Navigating grief and desire without judgement If you are navigating intimacy during grief, consider asking yourself: What does my body need in order to feel safe right now?

When I imagine closeness, what feels comforting and what feels overwhelming?

Am I craving physical touch, emotional connection, space, reassurance, or something else entirely?

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What activates my brakes at the moment? Exhaustion. Stress. Fear.

Emotional overload. If my desire feels quiet, can I meet that with curiosity instead of judgment?

These questions are not meant to push you toward action. They are meant to bring you back into relationship with your body.

Rebuilding Intimacy with Curiosity If you want to gently reconnect with your sensual self, start small.

Touch without agenda. Notice sensation through lotion on your skin, warm water in the shower, the weight of a blanket. No goal. No performance.

Pay attention to what feels good and what does not. Grief may have shifted your relationship with pleasure. You are allowed to change.

Allow grief and pleasure to coexist. This is often the hardest part. Many people struggle with feeling desire while still mourning their person. But the body is capable of holding more than one truth. You can feel sadness and connection. Longing and pleasure.

Loss and aliveness.

There is no return to a pre grief self. There is integration. Your identity reorganizes around loss.

That includes your sexuality.

Your libido may look different. Your pacing may shift.

You may need more reassurance. Or more solitude.

These are not signs of dysfunction. They are signs that your nervous system is recalibrating in a changed world.

When You Have a Partner If you are partnered, honest conversation can feel vulnerable and relieving at the same time. You do not need a script that solves everything. You need language that opens the door. You might say: “I am grieving and my body feels different right now. I still care about our connection and I may need us to move more slowly.”

“I want closeness with you and I am still figuring out what that looks like in this season.”

“Sometimes I want touch and sometimes I do not. It would help me if we could check in before assuming.”

“My desire has shifted. It does not mean I am not attracted to you. It means my nervous system is overwhelmed.”

Closeness might mean holding hands.

Lying next to each other.

Slow touch without expectation.

Emotional intimacy without physical intensity. Grief changes context. And context matters deeply for arousal.

Instead of asking, What is wrong with me? consider asking, What support would help my body feel safer right now?

So here is where I invite you to begin.

Ask your body what feels good. Not necessarily sexually. Just good.

What feels safe. What feels calming. What feels real.

Reconnection begins with safety. And safety begins with listening.

Grief changes us. And intimacy lives in the body. So of course grief impacts our sexual selves. You are not broken. You are navigating a season. Your nervous system is doing exactly what it was designed to do.

Your sexual self is still there. It may just need gentleness, space, and new context.

And when pleasure returns, in whatever form it does, you are allowed to receive it without shame.

Dr. Heather Taylor is a clinical psychologist specializing in grief. She is the host of the Grief is the New Normal podcast and a passionate speaker and advocate for grief education, dedicated to helping people navigate loss with understanding and compassion.

To learn more about Heather, follow her at @grief_is_the_new_normal

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Normalizing It Normalizing It Normalizing It Normalizing It Normalizing It Normalizing It DR. JESSICA ZUCKER AND THE ART OF SPEAKING WOMANHOOD ABOVE A WHISPER

Over 40 years ago, a pigtailed, vibrant-eyed Jessica Zucker thoughtfully arranged her stuffed animals in a circle for a make believe group therapy session. As she sat them down to read stories and talk through their day, she, without knowing it, practiced the art of healing. Even then, her calling was clear.

Following, in her own way, in the formidable footsteps of her father, a psychiatrist who found meaning in his work based in large part due to its emotional gravity, Jessica’s future was, quite literally, written in the stars (or perhaps, in her playroom).

Raised in a home where purpose and empathy were core family values, Jessica grew up believing that the work we do should matter— and that service to others was the highest form of fulfillment. A classic case of nature and nurture, she was destined for a life in psychology long before she knew what the word (let alone the nuanced concepts) meant.

Still, she found a way to make the path distinctly her own.

As an emerging adult, Jessica found herself deeply moved by the groundbreaking work of Dr. Carol Gilligan. In a Different Voice—Gilligan’s landmark study—exposed how much of psychological research had been shaped by men, then generalized to women for decades. The revelation cracked something open in Jessica. The work of Dr. Gillian investigated many questions, specifically, how girls and women come to know what they know—and when, and why, they first begin to silence their truths for the comfort of others (consciously or not)?

Gilligan’s work revealed a culture that rendered girls' and women’s experiences sequestered, stigmatized, and misunderstood. Those salient questions would stay with Jessica for years— shaping the budding psychologist, writer, advocate, and woman she would ultimately become.

After college, during a social service project abroad, Jessica not only physically stamped her passport but experientially as well. The opportunity expanded her understanding of women’s health issues on a global scale.

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Amid surveying other countries, she realized her career would mirror her father’s compassion but carry her own imprint: a blend of psychology, public health advocacy, and storytelling that brings forward the complex, often unspoken realities of women everywhere.

Years later, after completing master’s degrees in public health and human development (with Dr. Gilligan, no less!) as well as a PhD in clinical psychology, specializing in reproductive and maternal mental health, and guiding countless women through the pain of pregnancy loss, Jessica suddenly found herself on the other side of the therapy couch. On an otherwise unremarkable cloudless October afternoon in 2012, she became intimately aware of the anguish her patients had shared with her for years.

At 16-weeks along in her second pregnancy, she had a miscarriage at home alone.

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While the book’s success was monumental, it was quickly eclipsed by a breast cancer diagnosis just a few weeks after its launch. The timing felt surreal—public celebration colliding with private terror. Once again, Jessica was forced into a role she knew well but hadn’t chosen for herself: patient, uncertain, bracing.

This diagnosis unearthed another layer of grief entirely—not just the fear of mortality, but the destabilization of identity. A changed body. A newfound examination of the meaning of her life.

All the while she was navigating surgeries, treatment, and recovery while mothering young children, holding space for others while her own body became a site of medical urgency. Illness introduced Jessica to a new type of silence—one shaped by expectations of resilience, being an unflappable “warrior” in the face of cancer, and by the cultural discomfort with being vulnerable.

Now, Jessica amplifies her relentless mission to break the silence, stigma, and shame woven into women’s lives with Normalize It. This is her latest multiple award-winning work in which she expands her lens to span the full arc of womanhood—puberty, fertility, motherhood, menopause—and the hush hush requirements that bind them together.

Her philosophy is simple: normalizing replacing silence with storytelling isn’t necessarily about shouting from rooftops; it’s about authentic expression in whatever form feels true. For some, that’s journaling. For others, therapy, whispering in the ear of a neighbor, group sharing, or speaking openly online, or under a pen name. “There’s no singular way to process,” she says. “What matters is allowing the experience to move through the body—to be felt, not buried.”

At its heart, Normalize It is a highly digestible, vignette-style exploration of women’s issues— grounded in science yet rooted in story. It’s about transforming stigma into solidarity, shame into self-knowledge. In her work, Jessica often refers to a “Strident Trifecta” of silence, stigma, and shame—a cultural zeitgeist where too many women, and too many grievers, get sidelined. Feel abandoned. Numb. Alone.

Discombobulated. Her mission is to guide them toward something well-deserved—to connection, to conversation, to community.

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One in four pregnancies result in miscarriage. She knew this. Jessica had read every book on the topic, had attended the conferences, and gone to the consultation groups. Nevertheless, she still felt whiplashed and emotionally unprepared when it happened to her. The experience was no longer theoretical—it was visceral, it was corporeal. She found herself in survival mode, cutting the umbilical cord of this foreshortened pregnancy, guided by her OB-GYN’s voice on the phone.

As her husband darted through Los Angeles traffic to get to her, Jessica waited— hemorrhaging, gobsmacked, suspended between life and loss.

In the quiet that followed, she faced a grief that felt both foreign and achingly familiar.

The language she had used to comfort others now echoed back at her, hollow and thin. The empathy she had offered patients was suddenly being tested by her own raw humanity.

From that devastation, something began to take shape. Jessica realized her experience could either silence her (as culture beckons) or deepen her voice. Choosing the latter, she began to speak publicly about her loss— challenging the antiquated secrecy surrounding miscarriage and transforming her private grief into a collective dialogue.

What began as confounding survival evolved into a mission: to make conversations about pregnancy loss visible, normative, and deeply human. A viral Instagram campaign, a New York Times’ essay and countless published articles on the topic turned into her first award-winning book I Had a Miscarriage, amplifying a movement that was long overdue.

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When we talk openly about the tough stuff, our vulnerability has the potential to change everything.

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Because grief doesn’t only define itself to the loss of human life—it lives in the loss of expectations, the body’s vulnerabilities, and the quiet transitions that define womanhood. And silence, she reminds us, can be as isolating as grief itself.

Today, as messages flood in from women around the world who finally feel seen, Jessica’s story feels like it has come full circle. The carefully curated stuffed animals at the foot of her bed have long been replaced by real people, real stories, and real healing. “The profundity is overwhelming,” she says softly, “in the best possible way.”

And as for the future? Jessica hopes the next generation of women — her own daughter included — will grow up not knowing the ache of silence. That they’ll enter a world where conversations about bodies, loss, and change aren’t brave, they’re simply normal. A world where openness is the baseline, not the exception.

DR. JESSICA ZUCKER IS A PSYCHOLOGIST AND AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR SPECIALIZING IN REPRODUCTIVE AND MATERNAL MENTAL HEALTH. TO LEARN MORE VISIT HER WEBSITE AT DRJESSICAZUCKER.COM AND FOLLOW HER ON INSTAGRAM @IHADAMISCARRIAGE

Through her voice, Dr. Zucker reminds us of a simple truth: the unsaid doesn’t disappear—it waits. It may even fester. And when we finally name it, it becomes something else entirely— connection, compassion, and the courage to begin again.

GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 73

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! ay

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Looking to get a copy of Dr. Zucker’s award-winning book?

Get Griefy and Dr. Jessica Zucker are giving away some copies of her book and Magazine! Simply fill out this form and follow both @ihadamiscarriage and @getgriefymagazine on Instagram to be eligable.

Winners will be announced and contacted on 4/16

Can’t wait and want a copy now?

Order it today!

GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 74

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tired

The Kind of That Doesn't Go Away

By Lauren Boswell

There’s a kind of tiredness that has nothing to do with sleep. It’s not the exhaustion you fix with an early night or a weekend off or even a vacation you planned months in advance because you knew you were overdue. It doesn’t respond to rest because it isn’t caused by exertion. It comes from being responsible, for too long, for things that felt like they might fall apart if you looked away.

For a stretch of my life, I lived in that kind of vigilance. I was my mother’s primary caregiver throughout her battle with cancer, and my days filled with the constant work of tracking, remembering, anticipating, and holding steady.

There were appointments to manage, information to absorb, decisions to help make, emotions to carry, some of them mine, many of them hers.

I didn’t think of it as a transformation at the time, it just felt like doing what needed to be done, the way people do every day in families, in relationships, while in crisis.

You step in, you think you can’t carry more, but then you adjust. You tell yourself you’re hopeful, that it’s all temporary, even though somewhere you understand it likely isn’t.

And then one day she dies, and the crisis, per se, passes.

In a technical sense, it was temporary, but you don’t yet understand how much of it will linger. The person you were caring for no longer needs you, or is no longer there at all. The calendar empties in ways you once longed for, because when it was full, that meant she was here. You are, by all visible measures, free to resume your life.

Except your body doesn’t seem to know that.

You wake early, alert before you mean to be. You feel a hum of urgency even on days when nothing is required of you.

You forget how to measure time without scanning for what might go wrong.

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People suggest rest, self-care, even a larger reset. They mean well, but it’s hard to explain that rest doesn’t undo years of learning how not to rest. We don’t talk much about this phase.

We’re good at naming acute grief, the sharp edges of loss, and the very identifiable before and after.

We’re less comfortable with the duller aftermath, the way responsibility lingers in the muscles, the way your mind keeps rehearsing scenarios that no longer apply.

Part of the disorientation is that the world expects you to bounce back, because once the obvious hardship has ended, the assumption is that you return to yourself.

But which self is that?

The one from before, who had never practiced this level of attention? Or the one who now knows, intimately, how fragile things can be?

In my case, the season that shaped this fatigue was tied to illness and loss, but I’ve come to recognize versions of this exhaustion everywhere.

Pictured: A childhood Photo with Lauren and her mother

New parents, long past the sleepless nights, describe a similar alertness that never quite switches off. Death is death, and it carries its own particular finality and gravity, so it is not the same but I notice that people who haven’t experienced it still encounter, in their own lives, stretches of sustained responsibility or fear or love that alter them in ways that feel strangely adjacent.

The details differ, but the imprint is recognizable. It’s the tiredness of having been “on call” for life itself, this kind of fatigue doesn’t announce itself dramatically.

It shows up in small ways, an inability to fully relax, a tendency to overprepare, a strange guilt when things are calm. You find yourself waiting for the next disruption, even if none is coming.

You miss, in an almost disorienting way, the clarity of having something urgent to do.

There can even be grief in that, the loss of a role that, while heavy, gave your days structure and meaning.

When it’s gone, you’re left not only with relief, but with the question of what to do with all the attention you once directed outward. Over time, I’ve stopped trying to cure this tiredness. Instead, I’ve begun to understand it as a record, evidence of care given, of endurance practiced, of a period when staying alert was the most loving thing I could offer.

The body, it turns out, keeps its own history.

We tend to imagine that difficult seasons end cleanly, that we close the chapter and move forward unchanged except for the wisdom we claim to have gained. But some experiences don’t resolve that way. They follow us around, shaping how we move through ordinary days long after the extraordinary ones have passed.

If there’s a resolution, it’s not in returning to who we were, it’s in learning to live alongside the residue, to recognize that this, too, is a form of aftermath, one that doesn’t need fixing so much as acknowledging.

Sometimes the tiredness isn’t a problem to solve, it’s just what remains after you’ve carried more than you ever knew you could.

LAURENBOSWELL.COM @LSWELL WRITER LAUREN BOSWELL IS WORKING ON A MEMOIR ABOUT SERVING AS HER MOTHER’S PRIMARY CAREGIVER THROUGHOUT HER TWENTIES AND NAVIGATING ADULTHOOD—AND BECOMING A MOTHER HERSELF—AFTER HER MOTHER’S DEATH. SHE IS ALSO WRITING A CHILDREN’S PICTURE BOOK INSPIRED BY ONE OF HER FAVORITE DAILY RITUALS WITH HER TODDLER. PREVIOUSLY, SHE WORKED AT AN ATHLETIC APPAREL COMPANY MANAGING RELATIONSHIPS WITH PROFESSIONAL ATHLETES AND SPENT TIME AS A FLORIST. HER WRITING HAS APPEARED IN VOGUE, MARIE CLAIRE, SPREAD THE JELLY, AND ELSEWHERE. SHE LIVES IN VANCOUVER, BC, WITH HER HUSBAND AND SON.

GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 77

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PODCAST & COMMUNITY Education, support, and practical tools for navigating grief.

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For people who want support, tools, and connection after loss

Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 78

eM h T

A Marine & Air Force Veteran Shares her Story of Loss, Legacy, and the Circle of Hope

BY NICOLE ZETTLEMOYER

Conti

o i n s s i

My story is one of resiliency. Walking through trauma and coming out on the other side, as well as finding a really unique way to continue honoring loved ones who have passed.

December 28, 2019, might have been the hardest day of my life. It was the day we found out my mother was diagnosed with stage four ovarian cancer. The diagnosis hit me like a ton of bricks, but my mother, the optimist, kept living her life to the fullest.

In July of 2020, while home on leave from the Air Force, I wanted to create a wreath from my old military fatigues. My mother and I came up with a pattern and unintentionally created the prototype for my future business. After making a few for my friends and colleagues “under the table,” my wreaths became a national sensation in December of 2020. I remember going home on leave that Christmas and celebrating my newfound business and fame with my family. My mother immediately ran upstairs, grabbed all her red, white, and blue fabric, and helped me cut squares for the whole week I was home.

nues

Watching her diagnosis get worse and worse while I was 1,500 miles away was one of the hardest things I had to endure. My mother was celebrating my wins through daily phone calls and FaceTime. In January of 2021, my husband proposed to me, and in March of 2021, we were married (quickly, so my mother could attend the ceremony).

In July of 2021, the inevitable happened, and my mother passed away. I was right there by her bedside as it happened, and something immediately changed in me. I couldn’t handle my grief, so I buried myself in tasks, setting up the funeral arrangements and ridding the house of her clothes.

When I got back to work, I worked feverishly hard, earning many military awards and accolades. I was also still making wreaths due to the backlog of orders from my virality. I soon developed skin rashes, my hair began falling out, and I was having incredible mood swings. Little did I know that my grief was slowly trying to come to the surface. I was placed on anti-anxiety medication and sought out therapy.

The only constant that was keeping me close to my mom was my business. Not only was it something we started together, but it also honors veterans and their families—a cause I am certain my mother would approve of. In her final days, she pleaded with us to continue living our lives—to keep being good people, keep doing good things, and to not let her passing affect us negatively.

People handle grief in many ways. Soon after my mother’s passing, I became pregnant with my first child. The idea that my son would not get to meet my mother crushed me, and still does to this day.

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I wept daily - the military life kept me far from any family, and knowing that my mother would have been the first person on the plane to come help with whatever motherhood struggles I had was a hard pill to swallow. I can proudly say that I am not on medication anymore. I still continue to go to therapy, and I highly recommend anyone who has suffered a traumatic loss to do the same.

Now, five years after my virality, I have hand crafted 3,600 wreaths, shipped to all 50 states, and continue to thrive as a business. Each wreath I ship out is a constant positive reminder of the unconditional love I was given from my mother, and I hope to continue this business for a long time in her memory.

A wreath is a circle — a symbol of connection, continuity, and hope. In many ways, it reflects the legacy my mother left behind. Though she is no longer physically here, the mission we started together continues — woven into every ribbon, every fold of fabric, and every home my wreaths reach.

It is my circle of hope.

Nicole is a former Marine and Air Force musician turned San Antonio-based mom, veteran, and creator, blending a love of music, service, and crafting while supporting her active-duty husband and raising two kids.

To learn more visit wreathsbynicolep.com and follow her at @wreathsbynicolep

GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 80

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A place to pause

Paws

What Grief Taught Me About Becoming Myself

By Jennifer Estelle

Three years ago, I thought I understood resilience. I had spent more than a decade in corporate America — a multibillion‑dollar healthcare company that preached innovation, mental‑health awareness, and “care without limits.” I sold the very ultrasound systems that detected the cancer I would one day be diagnosed with. I played the game, climbed the ladder, sacrificed holidays, weekends, and pieces of myself because that’s what ambitious women are taught to do. We push. We perform. We prove.

And then life delivered a truth I couldn’t outwork: a bilateral mastectomy, a body I no longer recognized, and a grief so heavy it hollowed out the center of my world.

I expected compassion. I expected the company I had given everything to would stand beside me. Instead, I returned from disability to a new team, a new segment, and expectations I was never trained for.

I was marked “disabled” on paper but treated as disposable in practice. When I struggled — silently, because grief is still taboo in corporate America — I was met with resistance, not support. When I advocated for myself, I was put on a plan. And after twelve years of loyalty, I was asked to step away.

I celebrated my comeback alone. I fought my battles alone. And in that loneliness, something shifted. The addiction I once had to the job, the identity, the title — it evaporated. What remained was the truth I had been whispering to myself for years: I didn’t belong there anymore.

Thankfully, I had already planted the seeds of my Plan B. In the middle of my unraveling, I bought a vineyard in the Endless Mountains — a place that felt like exhaling after years of holding my breath. I founded a nonprofit born from grief, love, and the belief that healing should be communal, not hidden. I envisioned a holistic wellness center that bridged human and animal welfare, a place where people could talk about grief without shame — grief for pets, for people, for relationships, for jobs, for the versions of ourselves we’ve had to bury.

Walking away from corporate America wasn’t the ending I imagined, but it was the liberation I needed.

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Today, my Vineyards are more than a property. It is a sanctuary. A home for our nonprofit. A space where grief is not something to “get over” but something to move with. Our healing gardens invite visitors to slow down, breathe, and reconnect with the parts of themselves they’ve abandoned. Our memorial walkway winds through stories of loved ones who never truly leave us — reminders that love doesn’t disappear; it transforms.

We’ve built a community rooted in wellness, advocacy, and honest conversation. Through workshops and weekend‑long retreats and experiences, we create space for both humans and animals to be seen, supported, and understood.

Every gathering is designed to honor the heavy and celebrate the light, giving people permission to feel, to remember, and to heal in their own time and in their own way.

What I’ve learned as a woman navigating grief is this: Grief doesn’t end your life. It hands you back the pieces of it that were never meant to be compromised.

I’m proud of the woman who once thrived in the corporate world. I’m even prouder of the woman who listened to the whisper that said, “There is more for you than this.” Because that whisper became a vineyard, a nonprofit, a mission, and a legacy.

And now, standing on the land that saved me, I know this truth with absolute clarity: Purpose doesn’t arrive when life is easy. It arrives when everything falls apart — and you choose to build something beautiful anyway.

B & Let Liv Project and Endless Mountains Vineyards were founded and envisioned by Jennifer Estelle — a leader dedicated to bringing healing, community, and purpose together.

Born from profound grief and a search for peace, her work began as a promise to herself: to transform loss into something that could uplift others. In the quiet of the Endless Mountains, she found the clarity to build a mission that bridges human and animal welfare, one meaningful connection at a time.

Through the B & Let Liv Project, Jennifer and her team advocate for compassionate care, community support, and the belief that healing is possible when people show up for one another. At Endless Mountains Vineyards, they are creating a lasting legacy through the development of healing gardens — intentional spaces where visitors can slow down, breathe, and reconnect with themselves, nature, and the animals who share the land.

TO LEARN MORE VISIT ENDLESSMOUNTAINSVINEYARDS.COM AND BANDLETLIVPROJECT.ORG

Her life’s work is rooted in the belief that love, service, and community can change the world. The vineyard and nonprofit stand as living proof that even in the hardest seasons, something beautiful can grow.

GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 83

Sometimes grief stays heavy far longer than expected.

Even years after a loss, the sadness can still feel close — living in the body, in thoughts, and in everyday moments.

IADC Grief Therapy is a focused, EMDR-based intensive designed to help people gently process unresolved grief.

Many clients experience a softening of their pain and, for some, a renewed sense of connection with the loved one they carry.

Healing doesn’t mean letting go.

It means finding a gentler way to hold the love and the loss.

Amanda Dishner, LMFT Castell Therapy

Scan to learn more about IADC

castelltherapy.com/iadc-grief-therapy

Lived through the trauma.

Got the shirt. www.theglobalresilienceproject.com/shop

GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 84

Do You Have a Succession

PLAN?

By Dr. Kimberly Rich

Women are often the cruise directors— the leaders—of their families, quietly coordinating schedules, smoothing over conflicts, planning celebrations, and keeping everyone moving in the same direction. They anticipate needs before they’re spoken, juggle logistics behind the scenes, and somehow make the complex look effortless. While the rest of the family enjoys the journey, a strong, graceful woman is usually the one checking the map, adjusting the course, and making sure everyone feels included along the way.

Every effective leader needs a succession plan. CEOs have them. Presidents have them. Even supervillains have a carefully groomed protégé. And yet women—the undisputed Supreme Commanders of the Household—are somehow expected to run a domestic empire indefinitely, defying natural lifespan, fueled by lukewarm coffee and sheer willpower.

A woman’s job description includes, but is not limited to: Chief Logistics Officer (Who has a birthday this month? Who is hosting the holidays this year?), Director of Health & Human Services (Is everyone up to date on vaccinations?), Minister of Finance (No, we cannot take two European trips this year), Head of Intelligence (I know who took the last cookie), and Supreme Court Justice.

Any organizational leader with that many portfolios requires continuity planning.

Why? Imagine if you were suddenly unavailable for 48 hours—or, God forbid, if you were to die (which, one day, you will).

Every household is different, but some version of the following would likely be true:

The household markets would crash.

Laundry would pile up like a textile-based monument to postponed decision-making.

Someone would attempt a “quick marinade experiment” and substitute maple syrup for honey.

The dog would begin lobbying every available human for food — successfully.

This is why a succession plan is critical. As a death doula, I can tell you that not having one is a strategic oversight. One day, you are going to be gone, and your people will be left scrambling to figure out who hosts Thanksgiving, where the dog food is actually purchased, and what the login and password are for the electric company account.

This adds unnecessary stress to a time when your loved ones should be focusing on their grief, hibernating, and sharing stories. Instead, they are decoding your systems. It also often leads to arguments, misunderstandings, and shifting relationships.

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I may have convinced you this is a good idea. But how?

Where do you start?

STEP TWO: Cross-train. The successor must know the location of important documents, where to find the secret stash of emergency chocolate, and the actual difference between “machine wash cold” and “dry clean only.” They must also master advanced negotiations, particularly the ancient art of holiday planning and execution.

STEP ONE: Identify potential successors. Promising candidates may include the eldest child (shows early signs of bossiness and strong communication skills), your partner (may require a period of extensive training), a sibling, or even the highly organized middle child who color-codes their planner for fun.

STEP THREE: Establish core values.

These include: Who should be included in communications?

What are some of the tasks that fall to you month after month, year after year?

What are the things the successor must continue and what things are negotiable?

Of course, the real punchline is this: no succession plan ever fully works. Because the true power of the household leader lies not in systems, but in an almost mystical awareness of who is about to cry, where the missing shoe is, and how to stretch one leftover chicken into three separate meals.

But I firmly believe that having a plan helps.

Still, it doesn’t hurt to prepare the next generation. After all, one day the supreme commander may wish to take a well-earned sabbatical. And when that day comes, the empire should stand firm - laundry folded, snacks rationed, and no one wishing that they could text, “Mom, where’s the…”

Leadership, after all, is about legacy. And death doulas spend a lot of time working on legacy projects. Making sure that you both have a presence after you are gone, and that your family is able to move forward with confidence when you are gone.

Dr. Kimberly Rich is the owner of Tomorrow Mourning and a grief educator, death doula, and end-of-life companion dedicated to improving how we approach death and bereavement. With 24 years in education and a doctorate from Creighton University focused on organizational support of the bereaved, her work is shaped by both scholarship and the personal loss of her mother in 2021. She completed her death doula training with Deathwives in 2024 and believes that because we will all experience death and grief, everyone deserves compassionate, inclusive support.

tomorrowmourningllc.com @tomorrowmourningllc

GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 86

A Mother's World Shattered Twice...

Venetta has survived, the worst life has to offer, in her unimaginable, heartwrenching story of the sudden deaths of her only two children, just six months apart.

Suffering excruciating pain, and grappling with complicated grief and guilt, led her to dark places.

Available on Amazo n!

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Then, in the throes of grief, she was completely blindsided by a cruel twist that shocked people around the world.

Suspicions surrounding the investigation into Brandon's death, left Venetta on a path seeking justice for years. Devon's death also sparked mysterious lingering questions.

Writing this book and sharing her story has been an overwhelmingly cathartic experience. Healing is a choice Venetta had to make. Despite grief being a lifelong journey, Venetta has learned how to navigate grief and has integrated the loss of her sons into her life as she continues on her healing journey.

V

INNING W D R A W

BY A AUTHOR NCZYK Y L M X O ENETTA C RSGRIEFJ @MOTHE

Her remarkable resilience offers hope and comfort to other families experiencing the unimaginable.

Venetta's story will break your heart but leave you amazed and inspired!.

GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 87

OURNEY

What My Divorce Revealed About Power, Money, and Identity

Many women carry a silent anxiety about what life would look like if they suddenly had to stand alone.

Some remain in relationships longer than they should because the financial unknown feels too overwhelming to confront. Others find themselves widowed, separated, or navigating unexpected transitions with little preparation for the economic realities that follow.

The data confirms what many experience privately.

Research consistently shows that women are disproportionately affected financially after divorce. Statistics Canada reports that women’s household income can drop by 20 to 30 percent following separation.

Single mothers face significantly higher risks of financial instability compared to partnered households. These realities are rarely discussed openly, yet they quietly influence decisions women make every day.

When money feels fragile, every decision feels heavier. Every fear grows louder. And forward motion can feel impossible.

By: GENICCA WHITNEY There is a particular kind of grief that comes with realizing the life you built is no longer the life you are meant to live.

That was the reality I faced while running an online business that required me to show up publicly— leading clients, creating content, holding space for others—all while privately navigating heartbreak, separation, sleepless nights, and the responsibility of raising two young daughters as a single parent.

I remember the moment I admitted to myself that my marriage had reached its expiration date. It wasn’t a dramatic explosion. It was a quiet, devastating knowing—the kind that settles into your bones long before you say it out loud.

I grieved everything at once: the love story I believed in, the dream home I had worked my entire life toward, the vision of raising my daughters in a united family, and the identity I had built as a wife. Beneath that grief lived something even deeper: fear. The fear of starting over. The fear of telling my six- and eight-year-old daughters that Mommy and Daddy were going separate ways. The fear of whether I could emotionally—and financially —hold our world together on my own.

Divorce didn’t just feel like the end of a relationship. It felt like the collapse of the life I thought I was supposed to have.

While my story is personal, the fear beneath it is universal.

GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 88

Some mornings were paralyzing. Many nights were long and restless. But within the chaos, I recognized a truth that would change my life: If I was going to rebuild, I needed to create financial safety first.

I needed what I now call a Freedom Fund—a financial foundation that would allow me to make empowered decisions instead of fear-based ones.

During one of the most emotionally fragile seasons of my life, I made a choice many wouldn’t expect. Instead of shrinking, hiding, or pausing my business, I became more visible, more intentional, and more disciplined than ever before.

I replaced survival habits with empowerment rituals. My mornings became solo dance parties that reminded me I was still alive and capable of joy. My Friday nights became self-care celebrations instead of loneliness. On my hardest days, I focused on building income. On my saddest days, I committed to strengthening my physical and emotional resilience.

I consciously shifted from victim energy to hero energy because I knew my daughters were watching how I navigated adversity. I wasn’t just rebuilding my life—I was modeling resilience for theirs.

In that season, I met a version of myself I had never known. A woman who could hold heartbreak and determination in the same breath. A woman who tripled her income, built financial independence, and found peace in letting go of what was no longer aligned.

What I now understand—and what I wish more women were taught earlier— is that emotional strength and financial preparedness are deeply connected.

We cannot always predict life’s most painful transitions. But we can prepare ourselves so that money is never the reason we feel trapped, powerless, or unable to choose peace.

If my journey has taught me anything, it is this: 1. Build Financial Independence Before You Need It Financial independence is not about expecting relationships to fail. It is about ensuring your choices are rooted in empowerment, not dependency. Multiple income streams, thoughtful investment strategies, and emergency savings create options. And options create freedom.

2. Create Your Personal Freedom Fund A Freedom Fund is more than a savings account. It is emotional security stored in financial form. Knowing you have resources to support yourself and your children during life transitions reduces panic, improves decisionmaking, and creates breathing room in moments of crisis.

3. Maintain Your Identity and Skillset One of the greatest risks many women face is losing connection to their own earning power while prioritizing family and partnership. Protecting your skills, business ventures, career growth, and professional network is not selfish. It is self-leadership.

4. Normalize Conversations About Financial Preparedness Women are taught to talk about love, commitment, and family planning—but rarely about financial contingency planning. True partnership includes transparency, education, and preparation for life’s unpredictable chapters.

Today, when I reflect on the audacity it took to start over, I no longer see a story of loss. I see a story of reclamation.

Because sometimes lighter, more peaceful, Today, when I reflectlife on becomes the audacity it took to start over, and infinitely more liberating the moment we loosen I no longer see a story of loss. I see a storyour of grip on what no longer serves us—and begin honoring the reclamation. quiet whispers of who we meant to become.

Because sometimes life are becomes lighter, more peaceful, and infinitely more liberating the moment we loosen our Financial independence is not about leaving relationships.

It grip on what no longer serves us—and begin honoring isthe about never havingoftowho abandon yourself. quiet whispers we are meant to become.

Genicca Whitney is a Holistic Financial Strategist and Independent Financial Planner dedicated to transforming the financial culture of families and communities by helping high-performing individuals and entrepreneurs optimize, protect, and multiply their wealth. With nearly two decades of entrepreneurial experience — beginning with purchasing her first real estate investment at 19 for her parents and growing into a sixproperty portfolio — she combines lived experience with strategic precision.

Independent of financial institutions, Genicca designs cohesive wealth strategies that integrate tax-efficiency coordination, risk management, wealth automation, and legacy planning, ensuring her clients build wealth that is protected, positioned, and built to endure.

GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 89

WWW.GENICCA.COM @GENICCADOTCOM

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www.youareherlegacy.com

THE DAY SHE DIES

you become her legacy

About this book

Losing your mother means

gaining a n ew companion—grief.

Chelsea Ohlemiller shares her journey of loss to help you with yours. Her honest reflections on heartbreak, love, and hope can give you words when you're speechless. This book is for anyone facing the loss of a mother, offering a compassionate friend for the journey ahead.

GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 90

AUTOMATIC SPEED DIAL

By Laing Rikkers

I used to call my sister from the car.

I guess you’d call it automatic.

Long drives, traffic crawling, hands on the wheel, mind half elsewhere. I’d reach for the phone without thinking and hit the speed dial. Sometimes she picked up right away.

Sometimes she didn’t. Sometimes we talked for five minutes, sometimes for forty. It didn’t matter.

We’d catch up on our kids, our parents, work. What we were having for dinner. Who was driving whom crazy.

Everything and anything was fair game. The conversations weren’t profound, but they were constant. A running thread through our lives.

Even now, when I get in the car, I think, I should call her.

For a moment, I forget.

Then I remember.

The surprise hasn’t left me.

That’s how sudden it was.

How completely everything changed.

One day she was here laughing, busy, planning, mothering, living her life and the next she wasn’t. There was no long illness that gave us time to prepare. No careful goodbyes.

No easing into the reality. Her heart stopped, and the world shifted.

Sibling loss is out of order. They are meant to be with you.

They are the witnesses to your childhood, the keepers of shared memories. The ones who remember the forts, the Halloween costumes, the rescued bunny, the crazy teachers, the family reunions.

My grandmother used to scold us when we bickered as little girls.

“Blood is thicker than water,” she’d say.

“You will always be best friends.”

The one who spoke at her service.

The one who tries to help our parents.

There were responsibilities that arrived with the loss.

Tasks. Decisions. Organizing. Scheduling. Being the steady one. The one who is still here.

Some days I feel grounded.

Some days I feel angry.

Some days I feel gutted.

Many days I feel a bit of everything, all at once.

Loss teaches you how little control you actually have.

How fragile the ordinary is.

I think about all the things we assume will keep coming.

More calls.

More time.

More chances.

How often we wait. For the right moment. For things to calm down. For life to be less busy. Grief makes you rethink that waiting. It sharpens your awareness of how temporary everything is.

Nothing is promised. Not tomorrow. Not later. Not even the next phone call.

At the time, it sounded like something adults said to stop the fighting. Now I wonder.

As women, we carry so much—families, emotions, care, expectations. We are often the ones holding things together, smoothing the edges, keeping the wheels turning. After loss, that weight doesn’t disappear.

After my sister died, it was just me.

It becomes clearer.

GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 91

I learned that caring for others is important, but it is not everything.

I had to learn how to care for myself. Really care for myself.

To look honestly at who I was and what I needed. To ask questions I hadn’t slowed down enough to ask before.

What matters now?

What no longer does?

What am I willing to let go of?

@morning_leaves_and_poetry www.laingrikkers.com

I had to invest in myself and in the things that made me feel alive. Not productive, not impressive, but alive.

I’ve also learned that choosing joy is a decision.

Seeing the cup as half full doesn’t erase the loss. It doesn’t soften the ache or fill the empty space she left behind. But noticing the small things, and allowing myself to feel grateful for them, is something I can choose.

A walk in the sun.

A beautiful flower growing where I didn’t expect it.

A class at the gym where I can metabolize my stress.

Creating something just because it feels good.

Some days, when I get in the car, I still think I should call her.

It’s strange that my heart hasn’t caught up to reality yet.

It’s been more than six years. You’d think I’d know by now.

But I don’t.

Grief doesn’t move in straight lines. It loops and doubles back. It hides in habits and muscle memory. It lives in the automatic reach for a phone, the half-formed thought, the split second before remembering.

I still talk to her.

Some days I tell her how mad I am that she left me.

How unfair it feels.

How much I miss her.

Some days I tell her about my kids, about something funny or frustrating or beautiful. Some days I tell her I need her help, her perspective, her reassurance that I’m on the right path.

And some days I just talk, the way we always did about nothing and everything.

So, if you’re ever in Southern California and you see a woman talking to herself in the car, that might be me— chatting away to my sister, keeping her close, still dialing her number on automatic speed dial.

Laing F. Rikkers is an executive coach, board leader, author, and grief workshop facilitator focused on the intersection of loss and leadership. She began her career in human resources at Hess and The Walt Disney Company, then spent two decades in private equity at HealthpointCapital in investment, operational, and board roles. She later founded and served as Executive Chair of ProSomnus Sleep Technologies.

Laing is the author of Morning Leaves: Cultivating a Life of Beauty, Meaning and Joy and leads workshops that help individuals and organizations navigate loss and change with clarity, resilience, and purpose. She lives in Southern California with her family.

GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 92

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WHAT CANCER COULDN’T KILL

A Poem by Lisa Keefauver

Exhausting what seemed to be every last ounce of energy that remained, she tugged on the mask that protected her war-torn body, revealing a familiar steroid-swollen face.

She inhaled sharply, as if shocked by her unencumbered breath, and with shoulders gently bouncing, she began weeping silently, her tears curiously illuminated by the florescent lights of the infusion center waiting room.

Her right hand quivered as she repeatedly reached for her scalp, fingers curling as she touched gingerly each of the eight or so purplish red sores scattered across her newly bald head.

Her whole body shuddered on contact.

Each time as if an electric current ran through her body.

Each time as if a bolt of lightening struck me from across the room and reverberated down my own spine.

And then without apparent pause, she jumped up, or perhaps more accurately, slowly lifted herself up when another cancer patient entered the room to find no empty seats.

@lisakeefauvermsw When the nurse called her name she sighed heavily. With a mix of resignation and anticipation she peeled herself off the wall then bent down with care to pick up the soft-sided cooler laying by the seat she’d abandoned earlier.

Our eyes met briefly as she made her pilgrimage to the other chair.

The chair that comes with busying nurses, beeping machines, needles, tubes, steroids, chemotherapy drugs, frozen hands, frozen feet, nausea, pain, and a brain fog that makes the world disappear.

In that quick unspoken exchange I desperately wanted her to know, that although her generous act may not cure her, it was evidence that even cancer couldn’t kill her kindness.

About the Poet:

Cancer has taken much from Lisa Keefauver. In 2011, she held her young husband Eric as he died just 2.5 weeks after a brain cancer diagnosis, following a year of searching for answers. In 2023, after advocating for herself, Lisa was diagnosed with triple-positive breast cancer, undergoing surgery, chemotherapy, immunotherapy, radiation, and years of hormone therapy.

The grief, loss, and medical trauma she has endured have affected her body, her sense of safety, and her sense of self. There were times she did not recognize herself, physically or emotionally.

Here, I heard her say, please take this seat, as she gestured to where she had just been resting.

There was no hesitation in her instinct, even if her body couldn’t move as fast as her heart.

What Cancer Couldn’t Kill grew from a workshop prompt by poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: to write in the third person about a recent difficult time with compassion toward the subject.

And then, as if she’d just run up a flight of stairs, she fell back with a thud onto the wall next to the bathroom door, out of breath from her efforts and appearing stunned that it was there to catch her.

Lisa Keefauver is a narrative-therapy trained social worker, widow, and cancer survivor turned grief activist, as well as a critically acclaimed author, podcast host, and speaker. Her work has appeared on TEDx and Endwell stages, and she helps us center aliveness in a world full of loss. Learn more at lisakeefauver.com

GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 94

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T HE WILD ONES

By Sundari Malcolm

There’s a shift happening. You can feel it in conversations, in headlines, in the way people hesitate before saying, “I’m fine.”

The Power Within

Something is cracking open. And while some are scrambling to steady the ground, others are standing still—recognizing the tremor like an old, unwelcome friend.

The power that dwells inside women has been sold back to us as compliance.

We’re living in a moment where a lot feels like it’s wobbling. The systems that once looked permanent are showing cracks. The old guarantees don’t guarantee quite like they used to and stability is feeling real negotiable these days.

For some people, this feels new and overwhelming. But for women who have walked with loss? Much of it feels familiar.

You see there are a few things I’ve learned as I approach my 46th birthday…Women are very good at carrying things.

A fantastic bag. Other people’s secrets. The endless mental to do list.

And grief. Especially grief.

We know what it means to watch something we depended on collapse before our eyes. A marriage. A body. A friendship. A sense of certainty about how life was “supposed” to unfold.

Let’s talk about the scam.

Be agreeable. Don’t be hysterical. Keep the peace. Smile through it.

Age “gracefully”—aka, shrink softly into quiet, polite invisibility so that no one has to confront your depth. Hard pass.

Because our real power?

It’s the ability to hold joy and sorrow in the same body. We can laugh until we cry and cry until we laugh and sometimes all within the same five-minute window. We can celebrate a friend’s success while quietly mourning our own timeline. We can build a new life while honoring the one that ended.

When you’ve walked through real loss—you develop a different skill set than the rest of the world.

You learn how to sit in uncertainty without immediately panicking. You learn that you can be shattered and still functional. Devastated and still loving. Exhausted and still capable.You learn how to rebuild without a blueprint and that while endings are brutal they are usually survivable.

And this capacity—to hold contradictions without collapsing—is exactly what times of upheaval require.

We are the midwives of transformation—inside our homes, inside our communities, and inside ourselves.

We know the sound of something cracking, the silence that follows and then the long stretch of figuring it out anyway.

Unleash Her

So here’s the part I want to underline in hot pink for you my friend: Women who have grieved deeply are made for times like this. Not because we enjoy collapse. And not because we are unbreakable. But because we have already practiced rebuilding.

And my answer to you is…

So now that we’ve been reminded of just how dope we are, how do we move forward?

We become the wild ones baby.

Wild doesn’t mean reckless. It means untamed by expectations that were never built with your humanity in mind.

GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 96

It means letting your grief have a voice and letting your rage draw a line. It means building new systems where the old ones no longer fit. In your relationships. In your work. In your own nervous system. It means showing the world what truth looks like: messy, layered, emotional, and free.

To be wild means to remind the world—healing was never meant to be a solo project. The crones— those wise, weathered women who’ve seen some things—didn’t heal alone. They healed in community. They gathered. They told stories. They named what hurt.

They laughed at the absurdity of being human.

Don’t grievers do the same things now?

In late-night talks. On long walks with friends. In voice notes sent from parked cars. In text threads that hold both existential dread and memes about perimenopause.

Because we know that there is something ancient that activates when we gather. Shame loosens.

Isolation thins. Laughter sneaks back in. And joy—unexpected, defiant joy —rises. And make no mistake: Joy in a grieving body is rebellion.

Joy after betrayal, after loss, after becoming someone you never planned to be—that is holy defiance.

You see, you are not here to be ornamental. You are here to be honest. And honesty, in times like these, is radical.

Because when we do that—when we stop pretending, when we stop performing, when we stop apologizing —We change the atmosphere.

And in a world that feels uncertain, unstable, and negotiable at best?

That kind of woman is exactly what this world needs.

So be louder.

Be bolder.

Be wildly tender.

Be wildly unwilling to shrink.

Be wild in your grief, woman.

We were made for this.

SUNDARI IS A BIRTH, GRIEF & DEATH DOULA AND SPIRITUAL GUIDE. SHE IS THE AUTHOR OF THE BOOK GRIEF GEMS. FOUNDER OF A HEALING DOULA ACADEMY AND MOST RECENTLY THE 2025 TALKDEATH AWARD WINNER FOR “DOULA WHO MADE NOTABLE CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD.” HER WORK BRIDGES ANCIENT WISDOM, CONTEMPORARY CARE, AND PRACTICAL TOOLS FOR TODAY’S COMPLEX SOCIAL LANDSCAPE. @SUNDARIBLISS | @AHEALINGDOULAACADEMY | AHEALINGDOULA.COM

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WHAT MOTHER EARTH TEACHES US ABOUT GRIEF AND LOVE

By Paula Gasparini-Santos

GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 99

We were never taught how to grieve. We were taught how to survive loss, how to stay functional, how to move on. But grief was never meant to be something we “get through.” It was meant to be something we enter—like soil, like water, like night. When we listen closely, Mother Earth has been teaching us this all along.

Everything we find beautiful in nature, embraces impermanence, and is intimate with grief.

We tend to think of grief as something that only arrives with death—with the loss of a person, a relationship, a life we thought we would have.

But grief meets us any time we encounter the unknown. Any time certainty dissolves. Any time life changes faster than our nervous systems can keep up. Grief is what happens inside us when the world no longer matches the story we were living inside.

And nature understands this intimately.

Nothing in the natural world clings to form the way we do. Trees do not apologize when they shed their leaves. The ocean does not grieve each wave as it breaks. Seasons do not resist their own endings. And yet—nothing loves more fully than what is impermanent. The flower blooms because it will wilt. The fruit ripens because it will fall. Life does not try to escape loss; it metabolizes it.

We were meant to do the same.

Grief is not an interruption to life—it is one of life’s most intelligent movements. It is how love learns to keep flowing when what it was attached to no longer exists in the same way.

When we resist grief, we do not become stronger; we become harder. We build riverbanks around our hearts and call it protection. But protection is not the same as aliveness.

Mother Earth does not protect herself from change. She participates in it.

In nature, decay is not shameful—it is necessary. Forests rely on rot to regenerate. Soil is made from what has broken down. Without death, ecosystems collapse. Our inner ecosystems follow the same law. When grief is suppressed, unexpressed, or rushed, something stagnates inside us. When grief is allowed—when it is composted—it becomes nourishment.

We are not broken because we grieve. We grieve because we are alive.

So many of us learned early that grief was dangerous. That tears made us weak. That longing meant we were too much. That emptiness signaled failure. But often what we were taught to fear was not grief itself—it was the vulnerability of needing, loving, and not knowing how things would turn out. We learned to close where we were meant to soften.

Grief asks us to reopen.

It asks us to sit with emptiness without filling it too quickly. To allow the ache without rushing toward meaning. To let the ground fall out long enough to discover that there is another kind of ground beneath it—one that does not come from certainty, but from belonging.

Mother Earth teaches us that emptiness is not absence. It is space.

A field after harvest is not barren; it is resting. Winter is not lifeless; it is gestating.

Darkness is not the enemy of growth; it is the condition for roots. When we allow grief to bring us into this kind of emptiness, something remarkable happens. The fear of the unknown begins to loosen. We stop bracing against life and start listening to it again.

Grief restores our tenderness.

It undresses us of the identities we built to stay safe. It dissolves the illusion that we were ever in control. It brings us back into contact with what is real—with our bodies, our breath, our longing, our love. It is not comfortable work, but it is honest work. And honesty is what reconnects us to life.

We often ask why grief hurts so much. But the deeper question may be: what if grief hurts because it is touching something sacred?

What if grief is the place where love refuses to abandon us?

Mother Earth does not withhold love when things die. She transforms it. The nutrients return to the soil. The energy changes form. Nothing is wasted. Grief invites us into the same wisdom. When we stop treating grief as something to fix or escape, it becomes a teacher—showing us how to love without clinging, how to stay open without guarantees, how to belong to life even when it breaks our hearts.

We are not meant to be impermeable. We are meant to be permeable—like soil, like skin, like the shoreline where water meets land.

Grief is not asking us to collapse. It is asking us to participate more fully. To feel again.

To risk loving again. To remember that life is not something we secure—it is something we enter. Grief reminds us life lends us everything.

And perhaps this is Mother Earth’s deepest teaching: unconditional love does not mean nothing is lost. It means nothing is exiled. Not the pain. Not the fear. Not the tenderness. Not the love that no longer has a place to land.

Grief is the place where all of it is allowed.

When we let grief move through us—when we stop fighting its currents—we find ourselves returned to something ancient and steady. A sense of belonging that does not depend on outcomes. A love that does not disappear when form changes. A presence that can hold both joy and sorrow without closing.

Grief is not the opposite of love.

It is love, remembering how to live in a world that will never stay the same.

And Mother Earth, patient and unyielding, keeps showing us the way—every time something falls, every time something decays, every time something new grows from what was lost. nn theconsciousco

ection.org |

@paulagdos

Paula Gasparini-Santos is a licensed therapist and transpersonal psychology practitioner whose work integrates clinical psychology, art therapy, spirituality, and embodied experience.

She works internationally with individuals navigating grief, trauma, and existential transition. Her writing bridges professional depth with poetic clarity, offering psychologically rigorous yet accessible frameworks for healing and integration.

She currently lives in Portugal and maintains a private practice.

GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 100

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GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 101

Because I Knew Her On Advocacy, Grief, and the Power of Women’s Stories

By: Rebecca Bloom

When I was talking with literary agents about my book – and make no mistake, I was so lucky to be having conversations at all—there were a few who wondered about the need for the stories of women I’ve supported over 26 years. They thought I should stick to sharing the valuable and practical information I’d learned as a women’s health advocate.

As much as I wanted to please and impress agents and increase the chances of getting the learnings out to as many women as possible, this was not something I felt comfortable yielding on. Women’s health advocacy is my life’s work, and I know that women need stories. We learn and grow from sharing and listening to one another. Finding community together is a huge aspect of healing. I’m so glad I was patient and found an agent and publisher who agreed.

One woman who I wrote about in my book has been on my mind recently and I’m thrilled to be able to share a bit more here than I could in my book, including visuals.

Her name was Karen, and when we met, she was dealing with an ovarian cancer recurrence and trying desperately to get our local teaching hospital to accept her Medicare so that she could get the treatment she needed quickly from the best doctors in the field.

We had much in common and hit it off immediately, the kind of connection you wake up in the morning hoping for. We were two native New Yorkers in the Silicon Valley, urbanites in the land of innovation. She was a creative producer for film and TV, a nonprofit leader, a poet, and a painter. After college, she studied languages and art. We hoped to work together on something more creative once we got through what she was facing because we recognized a kinship. But first, we had a challenge, and we knew every minute was precious. Through targeted joint effort and energy, we made the calls, wrote the emails, and got her seen and treated inside of a week. We made it happen together.

We experienced joy. Unadulterated joy despite a difficult prognosis. It was so pure.

GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 102

In January of 2016, I got this email from her: New Message

I received her book soon after with this gorgeous inscription:

From: Karen Subject: Thinking of you, friend

Dear Rebecca, I hope that you feel the love coming through this email. For the first time in a long time you gave me hope that I can get the proper care, I cannot thank you enough.

I am hopeful that I am moving in the right direction to finally get the care needed to breathe, to live.

Please forward me your address, I would like to send you my poetry & art book. I know that we will meet soon but wanted to send anyway. Can’t wait to meet you. . .

Karen lived until October of that year. I treasure the book she sent me and the meaningful interchange that we had.

People ask me how I can handle getting my heart broken in this way. My answer is this: why would I miss knowing amazing women when I have the opportunity?

There is no question, I would rather have known Karen than missed out on her amazing light. I try to emanate it however I can and tell her story.

When I work with someone like Karen, my resolve becomes stronger. I get wild-eyed.

I want to help every woman I possibly can.

Something in me cannot abide the way things are, how they have been for way too long.

I keep Karen’s gorgeous book of painting and poetry on my desk and read it often.

I will give her the last word:

When the time is right You will emerge whole With all gifts open And told Rebecca Bloom is a women’s health, workplace and benefits advocate, storytelling coach, editor and content strategist and author of “When Women Get Sick: An Empowering Approach for Getting the Support You Need” (Broadleaf Books 2025). whenwomengetsick.com @whenwomengetsick

GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 103

WANT MORE OF THIS GRIEFY GIRL GOODNESS? Women’s Issue Bonus Content is now live!

We’re proud to share even more powerful stories and reflections from women around the world in the latest release from Get Griefy Magazine.

Explore the bonus content and celebrate the voices shaping this global conversation.

Visit:

getgriefymagazine.com/the-womens-issue

GET GRIEFY MAGAZINE | ISSUE 8 | PAGE 104

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