The Human Experience

Faith, Loss, and Finding Home: A Panamanian Woman’s Story of Grief, Resilience, and the God She Argued With | Marina Mendez

⚠️ Content Warning: This episode contains discussions of grief and loss of siblings. Please proceed with care. In this episode, Jennifer sits down with Marina Mendez, a 24-year-old Panamanian educator and woman of deep faith, in Panama City, Panama. Marina’s story begins in the shadow of unimaginable loss: by the time she was twelve years old, she had buried both of her brothers, and she didn’t pretend to be okay about it. What follows is a journey of grief, doubt, determination, and a faith that was tested to its limits. From growing up in Panama West in a large, tight-knit family to earning a full scholarship to study in Pennsylvania, Marina shares what it meant to chase her dreams across hemispheres, and what it cost when those dreams were rerouted. Just two months before her wedding, Marina called it off, leaving her to cancel the venue, make painful phone calls to family, and, ultimately, start over. She did it with prayer, therapy, and grace. This is a conversation about what it looks like to truly trust God when the evidence makes it hard, to be honest about your anger, and to find that your life’s detours might just be pointing you somewhere better than you planned. 📍 This episode was recorded in Panama City, Panama. MEET MARINA MENDEZ Marina Mendez is a 24-year-old Panamanian educator, dancer, and woman of contagious faith from Panama West, Panama. Raised in a deeply Christian household with five sisters and two brothers, Marina’s life was marked by grief early on. Rather than letting that grief define her limits, Marina turned it into fuel, excelling academically and earning a full scholarship to Wilkes-Barre University in Pennsylvania in 2020, where she graduated with a degree in English Education and a Spanish minor, and was named Teacher of the Year. Marina returned to Panama four months before this conversation after a broken engagement upended the life she had carefully planned. Today, she lives with her grandmother in Panama City, serves actively in her church, and carries a clear-eyed dream of seeing Panama invest more in its people - starting with education. KEY TAKEAWAYS Here’s what stayed with us long after this conversation ended: * Grief doesn’t wait until you’re ready. Marina was nine years old when she lost her first brother and twelve when she lost the second. She didn’t have the luxury of being “old enough” to process it. But she also didn’t pretend she was fine, and that honesty became the foundation for everything that followed. * You’re allowed to be mad at God. When Marina’s second brother died, her faith shattered. When her wedding fell apart, she told a church leader to keep the God-advice to himself for a minute. Jennifer and Marina both affirm what many faith traditions quietly know: God is big enough for your anger. You don’t need to perform peace you don’t feel. * Pain with purpose still hurts. Marina believes everything happens for a reason, and she’s honest that she doesn’t yet know the reason her engagement ended. Holding both truths at once - “I trust God” and “I don’t understand this” - is not a contradiction. It’s the real work of faith. * Don’t lead with platitudes, just show up. When Marina was devastated, what helped wasn’t theology. It was her friend Darling, who picked up the phone at any hour and didn’t ask questions. Sometimes the most faithful thing you can do for someone in pain is simply stay. * Healing lives in service, not in solitude. Marina found her way back to herself not by closing the door and crying over photos, but by going back to church, pouring into others, and dancing. Moving toward people was what finally moved her forward. * You can be happy now. In one of the episode’s most memorable moments, Marina breaks down the math of happiness: about 70% of life is ordinary moments - commuting, cooking, school drop-offs. The big celebrations are maybe 20-30%. Joy isn’t something you earn at the Eiffel Tower, it’s a decision you make in the car on the way to work. * Compassion is putting on someone else’s shoes, and meaning it. On her way to this interview, Marina saw a man experiencing homelessness in the midday heat and started crying in the car. That’s her definition of compassion: not a concept, but a gut response. What if that were someone I loved? STAY CONNECTED The Human Experience Podcast [https://www.thehxpod.com/] | Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/thehxpod/] | Facebook [https://www.facebook.com/getthehx] The Human Experience Legacies [https://thehxlegacies.com/] | Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/thehxlegacies/] Connect with Jennifer on Substack [https://jenniferpeterkin.substack.com/?r=3zi6na] | LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-peterkin-04b92b1b/] Support the Podcast [https://ko-fi.com/jenniferpeterkin]

Walking On: A Father's Story of Loss, Legacy, and Choosing Hope After the Unthinkable | Stephen Panus

⚠️ Content Warning: This episode contains discussions of the loss of a child, grief, and traumatic death. Listener discretion is advised. In this episode, Jennifer sits down with Stephen Panus - author, speaker, and bereaved father - to hear the story of August 9, 2020: the day his 16-year-old son Jake was killed as a passenger in a reckless car crash that changed everything. Stephen shares, with extraordinary candor and vulnerability, what it means to lose a child suddenly and without warning, from the out-of-body shock and the long months of survival mode, to the slow, deliberate work of learning to walk on. Together, he and Jennifer explore the nature of grief as a life sentence rather than a finish line, the spiritual transformation that emerged from his darkest years, and the breathtaking way Jake's legacy has continued to live - through scholarships for Lakota youth in South Dakota, a football scholarship at the University of South Carolina, and the arrival of April, the daughter Stephen believes Jake always knew was coming. This is a conversation about love that doesn't end, hope that refuses to surrender, and what it truly means to show up, for both the people we've lost and the ones still here. 📍 This episode was recorded in Fairfield, Connecticut. MEET STEPHEN PANUS Stephen Panus is an author, storyteller, mentor, and coach driven by purpose, resilience, and the unwavering belief that we can turn pain into positive change. As the author of the best-selling book Walk On, he shares his deeply personal journey following the tragic loss of his 16-year-old son, Jake, who was a passenger in a vehicle tragically killed in a reckless and senseless car crash in the summer of 2020. Through telling his story, inspirational speaking, and leadership development training, Stephen inspires others to find strength, create meaning, and hold tightly onto hope in life’s most difficult moments. His debut novel, The Circles We Carry, will be published on December 4, 2026. CONNECT WITH STEPHEN Website: www.stephenpanus.com [https://www.stephenpanus.com/] Facebook / X / LinkedIn: @stephenpanus Instagram: @stephenbpanus Book: Walk On [https://www.amazon.com/Walk-Stephen-Panus/dp/B0CTDDQR6X/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.mb5L9BaGsNHNJRwR4svovFalfktHSI58XJJYhjKN69w.N6C2uZ1oJargUvQTnU0mYsIxWvhYDLddtKMSOYpINoc&qid=1710194734&sr=8-1] KEY TAKEAWAYS Here is what stayed with us long after this conversation ended: * Grief is a life sentence, not a phase. Stephen doesn't offer false comfort around timelines. Five years out, grief still rears up - at football games, in grocery store aisles, in quiet moments that catch him off guard. What changes isn't the loss; it's the capacity to carry it. * Vulnerability is a strength, not a weakness. Raised to get up and move on, Stephen discovered that his willingness to speak openly about his grief - to cry, to say he wasn’t okay - became the very thing that helped others find their own way through. * Helping others was his path back to purpose. When meaning felt impossible, Stephen found it first at a scholarship ceremony at the University of South Carolina, looking into a young man’s face and feeling joy for the first time. Service became the bridge between survival and living. * Jake’s legacy didn't end with his death, it grew. Three scholarships now carry Jake's name: for Lakota children in South Dakota, walk-on football players at USC, and inner-city youth in Bridgeport, CT. Each recipient carries a piece of Jake forward. For a bereaved parent, Stephen says, that is everything. * The arrival of April felt like a message from Jake. Since age three, Jake had insisted he had a sister, drawing her in crayon family portraits before she existed. When April arrived at their door years after Jake’s death, with curly hair and a left-handed swing just like his, the family felt something undeniable: Jake had always known. * You can't say the right thing, so just show up. When asked how to support someone in grief, Stephen’s answer was simple: don’t worry about finding words. Show up. Mow their lawn. Sit in silence. Cry with them. Presence is the only gift that actually helps. * We all carry invisible backpacks of suffering. Stephen’s framework for extending grace in a fragmented world: imagine everyone you meet is carrying an invisible backpack filled with their own pain. That reframe alone, he says, is enough to move from judgment to compassion. STAY CONNECTED The Human Experience Podcast [https://www.thehxpod.com/] | Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/thehxpod/] | Facebook [https://www.facebook.com/getthehx] The Human Experience Legacies [https://thehxlegacies.com/] | Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/thehxlegacies/] Connect with Jennifer on Substack [https://jenniferpeterkin.substack.com/?r=3zi6na] | LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-peterkin-04b92b1b/] Support the Podcast [https://ko-fi.com/jenniferpeterkin]

Grieving Twice: One Woman's Journey Through Suicide Loss, Truth, and the Power of Advocacy | Lisa Sugarman

⚠️ Content Warning: This episode contains discussions of suicide, suicide loss, grief, and mental health. Please proceed with care. What happens when the story you've built your grief around turns out to be a different story entirely? In this deeply moving episode, Jennifer sits down with Lisa Sugarman, author, mental health advocate, crisis counselor, and suicide loss survivor, in Salem, Massachusetts, to talk about one of the most profound and disorienting experiences a person can face: learning, decades later, that her father had died by suicide. Lisa was ten years old when she lost her father - the person she describes as her best friend and her whole world. For 35 years, she grieved him and his sudden death. Then, at 45, the same age her father was when he died, she learned the truth. What followed was not just a second wave of grief, but an entirely new kind of reckoning, one that forced her to revisit every memory, every conversation, and every piece of the story she had carried inside her for a lifetime. Lisa and Jennifer explore what it means to grieve someone twice, the particular and layered weight of suicide loss, the courage it took Lisa's mother to carry this secret alone for 35 years, and how Lisa ultimately transformed her pain into a life of advocacy - becoming a crisis counselor with the Trevor Project, a facilitator with Samaritans, and the creator of the Help Hub, one of the most comprehensive mental health resource platforms available today. This is a conversation about truth, compassion, and what it looks like to turn the heaviest thing you carry into something that helps others carry theirs. 📍 This episode was recorded in Salem, Massachusetts. MEET LISA SUGARMAN Lisa Sugarman is an author and three-time survivor of suicide loss. A passionate mental health advocate, she serves as a crisis counselor with The Trevor Project and as a storyteller with the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), where she uses her lived experience to help others find healing through connection and community. She's the Founder of The HelpHUB™, the most inclusive and comprehensive free online destination for mental health resources, tools, treatment options, crisis hotlines, and content designed to support the diverse needs of every community. Lisa is the author of Surviving: Finding Hope After Suicide Loss (2026), How to Raise Perfectly Imperfect Kids and Be OK With It (2019), Untying Parent Anxiety (2017), and LIFE: It Is What It Is (2014). She also cohosts The Survivors Podcast, a show that provides candid conversations and real stories of survival for anyone impacted by suicide or mental illness. Lisa is also a facilitator for Safe Place, a virtual support group for survivors of suicide loss hosted by Samaritans Southcoast in Boston, where she also serves as a board member. She is a contributor to the Mental Health Television Network (MHTN), and her writing has appeared in Calmerry, Healthline Parenthood, Grown & Flown, TODAY Parents, Thrive Global, LittleThings, The Washington Post, and Psychology Today. A former nationally syndicated columnist, Lisa continues to write widely on topics of suicide, grief & loss, and mental health and wellness. Lisa lives and writes just north of Boston. Learn more at TheHepHUB.co [https://www.thehelphub.co/]. CONNECT WITH LISA 🌐 Website: TheHelpHUB.co [https://thehelphub.co/] 📘 Facebook: facebook.com/thelisasugarman [https://facebook.com/thelisasugarman] 📹 YouTube: youtube.com/@thehelphubonyoutube [https://youtube.com/@thehelphubonyoutube] 📱TikTok: tiktok.com/@thehelphubontiktok [https://tiktok.com/@thehelphubontiktok] 📸 Instagram: instagram.com/thehelphub.co [https://instagram.com/thehelphub.co] 💼 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lisa-sugarman [https://linkedin.com/in/lisa-sugarman-she-her-hers-16925b69/] KEY TAKEAWAYS Here's what stayed with us long after this conversation ended: * Suicide grief is its own category of loss. Unlike other forms of grief, losing someone to suicide layers on shame, guilt, the unanswerable why, and a kind of reckoning that never fully closes. Lisa describes it as a spiral staircase - you move up and down it unpredictably, and the only way through is radical grace for wherever you happen to be standing that day. * You can grieve someone twice. When Lisa learned the truth about her father's death at 45, every feeling from age ten rushed back in an instant. Grief, she reflects, lives in the body, and learning a new truth about an old loss can restart the whole process from minute one. This is not a failure of healing, it’s part of it. * Secrets kept out of love still carry weight. Lisa's mother bore 35 years of silence to protect her daughter. Lisa holds no resentment. Instead, she sees her mother's choice as one of the most extraordinary acts of love she has ever witnessed. And the 12-year conversation that followed the truth being revealed became one of the most beautiful chapters of their relationship. * The people who seem the happiest can be carrying the most. Lisa's father was joyful, adventurous, deeply present, and also privately struggling in ways no one around him could see. This is not an anomaly, it’s a reminder that we cannot rely on surface presentation to gauge the depth of someone's pain, and that checking in matters even when everything looks fine. * Grief does not end, and that's okay to say out loud. Our hustle culture wants us to process, tidy up, and move on. Lisa pushes back: grief is not a box you check. Naming that truth without apology is, itself, a form of liberation. When we stop waiting to be done grieving, we can finally meet ourselves where we actually are. * Knowledge is protection, not burden. When Lisa finally told her daughters about their grandfather's suicide, she wasn't passing down trauma, she was giving them the tools to understand their own mental health landscape. Families that speak openly about mental illness, she believes, raise children who are more likely to seek help when they need it. * Compassion is showing up exactly where someone is. When asked what compassion means to her, Lisa's answer was grounded and precise: true compassion is meeting someone in their actual moment, without an agenda, without a fix, and holding space for whatever form that moment takes. STAY CONNECTED The Human Experience Podcast [https://www.thehxpod.com/] | Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/thehxpod/] | Facebook [https://www.facebook.com/getthehx] The Human Experience Legacies [https://thehxlegacies.com/] | Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/thehxlegacies/] Connect with Jennifer on Substack [https://jenniferpeterkin.substack.com/?r=3zi6na] | LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-peterkin-04b92b1b/] Support the Podcast [https://ko-fi.com/jenniferpeterkin]

Property of the Revolution: One Cuban Refugee's Story of Loss, Legacy, and the Power of Intergenerational Storytelling | Ana Flaster

What does it mean to carry a country inside you — one you were forced to leave before you were old enough to understand why? In this deeply moving episode, Jennifer sits down with Ana Flaster, Cuban-American author of Property of the Revolution, to explore the story that shaped her entire life: fleeing Cuba as a child in 1967, arriving in the snowy mill town of Nashua, New Hampshire with one suitcase and a family that refused to let loss have the last word. Ana recounts the visceral moment she stood outside her childhood home in Havana as a banner was nailed across the door reading "Property of the Revolution", and the decades of storytelling, grief, humor, and resilience that followed. She and Jennifer dive into what it truly means to be a refugee (not just an immigrant), the multi-generational Cuban household that became Ana's entire world and moral compass, and how the women of her family rewrote their trauma into a survival story rooted in pride and laughter. They also explore the realities of how the Cuban Revolution has been romanticized and misrepresented in American classrooms, the unique identity struggles of being Cuban American in a country that doesn't always know how to hold that complexity, and why Ana believes stories are the only real antidote to division. This is a conversation about belonging, memory, and what we owe the people who carried us here. 📍 This episode was recorded in Concord, New Hampshire. MEET ANA FLASTER Ana Hebra Flaster was just shy of her sixth birthday when her family fled post-revolutionary Cuba, in 1967, and settled in Nashua, New Hampshire. She graduated from Smith College and was a software consultant before beginning her writing career. Her essays have been published by the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe, among other national print and online media. Her commentaries and storytelling have aired on national broadcasts of NPR’s All Things Considered and PBS’s Stories from the Stage. Property of the Revolution, her first book, has won early recognition in several international writing competitions, including being shortlisted in the 2023 Restless Book’s New Immigrant Writing Prize and the 2022 Cintas Creative Writing Fellowship, and first place in the 2025 International Book Awards (Creative Nonfiction) and the 2025 Discovery Book Awards (Nonfiction overall). After forty years in the Boston area, Ana recently moved back home to southern New Hampshire with her husband, Andy, and their Havanese pups, Luna and Beny Moré. CONNECT WITH ANA 📘 Facebook: facebook.com/anahebraflaster [https://www.facebook.com/anahebraflaster] 📸 Instagram: @anahebraflaster [https://www.instagram.com/anahebraflaster/] ✉️ Substack: anahflaster.substack.com [https://anahflaster.substack.com/] 📖 Book: Property of the Revolution [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/215790035-property-of-the-revolution] — available wherever books are sold 💼 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/anahebraflaster [https://www.linkedin.com/in/anahebraflaster/] 🌐 Website: anacubana.com [https://anacubana.com/] 🐦 X / Twitter: @AnaHebraFlaster [https://x.com/AnaHebraFlaster] KEY TAKEAWAYS Here's what stayed with us long after this conversation ended: * Stories are not just nostalgia, they are survival. For Ana's family, retelling the stories of Cuba wasn't about living in the past. It was how they processed grief, preserved identity, and gave their children something solid to stand on. The stories kept them alive in ways no amount of material stability could. * Children sense injustice before they have the words for it. Standing outside her locked Havana home at age five, Ana didn't have the vocabulary for revolution or displacement, but she knew something deeply unfair had happened. That early, wordless recognition never left her, and it became the driving force behind her life's work. * The refugee experience doesn't end at arrival. Ana draws a sharp and important distinction between immigration and refuge: refugees flee, often with nothing, knowing they will likely never return and may never see their loved ones again. That particular grief doesn't resolve. It travels with you, and it shapes every generation that follows. * The women who spin the survival story are also the ones quietly grieving. Ana's mother, grandmother, and aunt transformed their trauma into a story of triumph — "We beat Castro, look at us go." But behind closed doors, they were crying in dark rooms. Both things were true at once: the resilience and the grief. Holding that complexity is how they protected their children. * History written by the victors can silence an entire community's truth. Ana encountered the romanticized version of the Cuban Revolution in her own college economics classes, and she pushed back. The propaganda around figures like Fidel and Che has obscured what most Cubans actually wanted and what they actually lost. Telling the fuller, more complex story is itself an act of resistance. * We are drowning in data and starving for wisdom. One of the most striking lines of the conversation: "We're drowning in data and starving for wisdom." Ana sees storytelling, especially from older generations, as the antidote to the noise, fear, and tribalism that fragment us. Wisdom lives in the stories we no longer have time to sit still for. * Start with the human, not the label. Ana's message to high schoolers — and to all of us — is the same: before you try to figure out someone's politics, ask who they are, what they've been through, what they care about. That's where common ground lives. The extreme version of what happens when we don't? She watched it happen in Cuba. STAY CONNECTED The Human Experience Podcast [https://www.thehxpod.com/] | Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/thehxpod/] | Facebook [https://www.facebook.com/getthehx] The Human Experience Legacies [https://thehxlegacies.com/] | Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/thehxlegacies/] Connect with Jennifer on Substack [https://jenniferpeterkin.substack.com/?r=3zi6na] | LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-peterkin-04b92b1b/] Support the Podcast [https://ko-fi.com/jenniferpeterkin]

The Year of Dating Yourself: How One Woman Chose Herself — and Changed Everything | Abby Rosmarin

What happens when you stop looking for love and start finding yourself? In this episode, Jennifer sits down with author and New Hampshire transplant Abby Rosmarin in Concord, NH, to talk about the year that changed her life: 2023, the Year of Dating Herself. After a string of tumultuous relationships that left her gaslit, depleted, and sitting in a bathtub wondering how she got there, Abby made a radical decision — to spend an entire year intentionally single, intentionally present, and intentionally devoted to her own company. The result? A healing journey she never could have predicted, a book, and a relationship she never knew was possible. From solo concerts and dining alone for the first time to impulsive ear piercings and sunrise coffee dates by the lake, Abby shares the raw, funny, and deeply human story of what it looks like to truly date yourself — awkwardness, check-engine-light moments, and all. She and Jennifer also dive into the pressures women face around singlehood, the power of therapy and self-reflection, codependency and healing, and what it really means to show up for yourself before you can fully show up for anyone else. 📍This episode was recorded in Concord, New Hampshire. MEET ABBY ROSMARIN Abby Rosmarin is the author of The Year of Dating Myself: How My Solo Tour Healed More Than Just My Heartbreak. Her work has been featured in the Huffington Post, Bustle, the Bangalore Review, and others. CONNECT WITH ABBY * Book: [https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-year-of-dating-myself-abby-rosmarin/1146537281;jsessionid=37404521AC380E59D1825E52C6CDBB7E.prodny_store02-atgap15?ean=9781632280992]The Year of Dating Myself [https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-year-of-dating-myself-abby-rosmarin/1146537281;jsessionid=37404521AC380E59D1825E52C6CDBB7E.prodny_store02-atgap15?ean=9781632280992] * Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/abbyrosmarin/] KEY TAKEAWAYS * Your story doesn’t start in a vacuum. The patterns in our adult relationships almost always trace back further than we think. Recognizing those echoes, without shame, is the first step toward changing them. * Dating yourself is an act of intention, not circumstance. Abby didn’t just “be single”, she committed to a structured, year-long practice of taking herself out, showing up for herself, and treating her own company as something worth investing in. * Self-care doesn’t have to be grand. Some of Abby’s most meaningful moments were a $5 coffee and a sunrise at the lake. Romanticizing the small things is a skill and a gift you can give yourself any day. * You’re not being watched as closely as you think. One of the most liberating lessons of solo adventures? Nobody is paying as much attention to you as your anxiety says they are. Do the thing anyway. * Codependency is quiet — until it isn’t. Abby reflects on how deeply her sense of identity had become wrapped up in romantic relationships, and how the year of dating herself helped her find, and keep, her own ground. * Loneliness is real, and it’s survivable. Being intentionally single doesn’t mean you won’t miss romantic love. It means you learn you can miss it and still be okay. * You don’t have to wait until rock bottom. Dating yourself isn’t just for the heartbroken. Whether you’re in a relationship or not, carving out time to be with yourself makes you a better partner, friend, and human. * Compassion is curiosity. When asked what compassion means to her, Abby’s answer was beautifully simple: instead of painting someone with a one-dimensional brush, get curious about what they might be carrying. ____________________ STAY CONNECTED The Human Experience Podcast [https://www.thehxpod.com/] | Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/thehxpod/] | Facebook [https://www.facebook.com/getthehx] The Human Experience Legacies [https://thehxlegacies.com/] | Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/thehxlegacies/] Connect with Jennifer on Substack [https://jenniferpeterkin.substack.com/?r=3zi6na] | LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-peterkin-04b92b1b/] SUPPORT THE PODCAST [https://ko-fi.com/jenniferpeterkin]