The First Last Breath I Ever Witnessed: What Death Taught Me About Grief

Fifteen Years Fits in a 5x10 Storage Locker

I stood in the doorway this weekend and looked at what’s left. Boxes stacked in a concrete room the size of a parking space, behind a roll-up door with a padlock I bought from the storage facility office. Fifteen years of a life together. And I’m not even done. Two more loads at least before I leave for Winnipeg in June. That’s the math nobody warns you about when a marriage ends. Not the lawyer fees. Not the custody calendar. The math of square footage. The brutal, quiet arithmetic of this is what’s left. The lie we tell ourselves about “stuff” I’ve said it out loud maybe forty times in the last month, to friends, to my online followers, to the woman at the storage facility who asked if I needed insurance: it’s just stuff. And I mean it. I do. I’m not the girl who confuses decorative pillows with a marriage. I know the difference between a thing and a life. I’ve read the books. I am doing the work. I can recite the line about how we don’t own our possessions, they own us, and I can say it with a straight face while I’m taping a box labelled CLOSET MISC and trying not to think about the memories made in these outfits. It’s just stuff is true, and it is also a lie, and both of those things can sit in the same sentence without breaking it. It’s just stuff. And also, that’s the shirt we bought on a date, at a show. That’s the cutting board that was given to us by our neighbour. That’s the box of Christmas ornaments we collected, one for each of us, per year, on purpose, like a project. Like we were building something. We were building something. What distillation actually feels like There’s a word for what happens when you reduce something to its essence: distillation. It sounds clean. Scientific. Like you end up with the pure stuff, the truth of the thing, and you throw the rest away. It doesn’t feel like that. It feels like standing in a 5x10 concrete room and realizing that fifteen years of inside jokes, shared playlists, arguments about the thermostat, road trips, holidays, the specific way someone says your name when they love you, none of that fits in a box. None of that got packed. None of that is in here. What’s in here is the residue. The physical artifacts of a life that doesn’t exist anymore. And the cruel part is that the residue is what you have to deal with. The mortgage. The furniture. The padlock. The two more loads are still waiting at the home we built together. The intangible part, the part that actually mattered, just evaporates, and you don’t get to box that up and decide what to do with it later. It’s gone before you’ve finished the inventory. I will rebuild. I know I will. I know this part too. People keep telling me, and they’re right. You rebuild. You get a new home. You buy a new couch. You can start fresh. The boxes get unpacked, or they don’t, and either way, life moves. I believe that. I’m not writing this from despair. I’m writing this from the strange, flat clarity of the afternoon after a load, when the door is locked and there’s nothing left to do today except drive home to a place that isn’t home anymore either. Winnipeg is coming. June is coming. The next chapter is closer than it feels. My single mom, Sharon, always taught me to make sure that I would always be okay on my own. And, so I am and will be. I always land on my feet. A 5x10 storage locker is 50 square feet. Our last place was bigger. The footprint keeps changing. The math keeps changing. Fifteen years, a stack of boxes, fifty square feet, one padlock, and two more loads to go. It’s just stuff. It really is. But I sat in my car in the parking lot for a long time before I drove away, and I want to be honest about that, because I think someone reading this is sitting in their car too. Or about to. Or just got home from doing it. It’s sad. It’s heartbreaking. It’s a reminder of something that will never be what it once was. It’s grief. You’re allowed to grieve the boxes and stuff that is no longer yours. Even while you know better. Even while you’re already rebuilding in your head. Even while there are still two more loads waiting. The stuff isn’t the life. But the stuff is what’s left of the life that I no longer have. And those are two different sentences, and both of them are true. XX Blair P.S. I will be in Winnipeg for the month of June and am open for speaking, workshops, coffee dates and anything else that is fun and soul-nourishing. Please connect. P.P.S. I offer a complimentary call. If you want to see what it’s like to work with me as a Grief and Resilience Coach, book a time here. [https://calendly.com/blairkaplanvenables/bounce-forward-30-minutes] How We Navigate Grief is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thanks for reading How We Navigate Grief! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit howwenavigategrief.substack.com/subscribe [https://howwenavigategrief.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Hundreds of Goodbyes: A Poem on Endings, Beginnings, and the Butterflies That Found Me

As a little girl, I turned to writing whenever I had big feelings. In my diary. For school assignments. In poetry. There was something about putting words on a page that made the inside of me feel less crowded. Writing helped me understand myself, and it gave my deepest thoughts a place to go, somewhere outside my body, where I could finally look at them. I drifted away from it for a long time, the way we drift away from a lot of the things that once held us. Life gets loud. Seasons change. But lately, the words have been coming back. And in this season of life, I’m going to keep sharing them, in whatever format they flow out of my mind. Poems. Essays. Half-finished thoughts. Whatever wants to come. This one landed over the weekend, while Teddi and I were at my happy place, packing up my belongings. The Place That Held Me Our lake spot has been a place of deep soul healing for me. It’s where I went after our miscarriage. After the death of my father-in-law. After losing my mom, and then my dad. It’s where my nervous system finally exhaled, for the first time EVER. Where the noise in my chest got quieter. Where I discovered what peace actually feels like, not as an idea, but as a physical sensation in the body. The kind of peace that lives in the sound of water against the shore, in the way light moves across a dock in the late afternoon, in mornings that don’t ask anything of you. For years, it was the place I returned to to remember who I was beneath everything I’d lost. I’m newly at the end of a 15-year relationship, and so there is a lot of undoing in my life. This comes with a deep feeling of unteatheredness. It isn’t the end of my time at my happy place. The lake will still be the lake. The water will still hold me. The beach will always be a soft place to land. But it is the end of my time there with my Wasband. The happy place we built together, the one with our shared rituals, our inside jokes, our particular way of being there, is no longer ours. It’s mine to rebuild now, on my own terms. And that’s a different kind of grief. Quieter. Stranger. Harder to name. The Butterflies Saturday morning, a girlfriend and I walked along the beach. We weren’t talking about anything in particular. Just walking, the way you do when there’s too much to say and not enough words for any of it. And then, all at once, they were everywhere. Hundreds and hundreds of butterflies. I’ve never seen anything like it. They moved around us like a slow, drifting cloud, landing on the sand, on the driftwood, on the edges of our shadows. We stopped walking. We just stood there, watching them, both of us a little undone by it. It felt like a gift. A tender sign that everything will be okay. That the universe, or a higher power, or whatever you want to call the thing that occasionally remembers us, was paying attention. I don’t always know what to do with moments like that. I just know I want to write them down before they go. Here’s what came out: Hundreds of Goodbyes At the beach, hundreds of butterflies came to say their final goodbyes. Feet in the sand, tears in my eyes, guttural cries. They circled the shore, wings catching the light a slow, tender flight. And I stood there, undone, learning to part, learning my heart. The end of something special. The start of something true a quiet world made new. If you’ve been through your own version of this, a separation, a goodbye, a closing of one chapter and the slow, uncertain opening of the next, I’d love to hear from you. We need to support one another because it’s lonely over here. Leave a comment. Share this with someone who might need it today. Or just sit with it quietly, the way I sat with the butterflies. The end of something special is also the start of something beautiful. In between the painful moments, I’m learning to believe that. XX Blair P.S. I will be in Winnipeg for the month of June and am open for speaking, workshops, coffee dates and anything else that is rad. Please connect. P.P.S. I offer a complimentary call. If you want to see what it’s like to work with me as a Grief and Resilience Coach, book a time here. [https://calendly.com/blairkaplanvenables/bounce-forward-30-minutes] How We Navigate Grief is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thanks for reading How We Navigate Grief! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit howwenavigategrief.substack.com/subscribe [https://howwenavigategrief.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

I Thought I Was at Peace. I Was Wrong.

For most of my life, I thought I knew what it meant to rest and feel calm. I wasn’t having panic attacks. I wasn’t falling apart in public. I was functioning. I was showing up. I was getting things done. And in the absence of visible crisis, I told myself that meant I was okay. I was not okay. I just didn’t know what okay actually felt like. This is the part nobody talks about when they talk about grief, trauma, and resilience. It’s not always the dramatic breakdown that signals something is wrong. Sometimes it’s the quiet hum of tension you’ve normalized so completely that you have mistaken it for your personality. The Moment Everything Shifted I remember sitting in what should have been a genuinely peaceful moment. Nothing was wrong. No fires to put out, no crisis to manage, no one needed me. And I felt... nothing. Or worse, I felt uncomfortable. Restless. Like stillness was a threat. That’s when it hit me. I had spent so many years operating in survival mode, moving from one hard thing to the next, that my nervous system had recalibrated around stress. Stress was familiar. Stress felt like home. And what I had been calling “calm” was really just a lower-grade version of anxious vigilance. My baseline was broken and I hadn’t even noticed. If you’ve experienced significant loss, grief, or prolonged hardship, I want you to sit with that for a second. Because this is more common than you think. When your body has been in fight-or-flight for months or years, your nervous system learns to treat that as the default setting. Rest starts to feel suspicious. Quiet starts to feel dangerous. You become so adapted to bracing for impact that you forget how to simply breathe. What I Did About It I want to be honest with you here: I didn’t fix this overnight, and I didn’t fix it alone. The first thing I had to do was accept that what I thought was my personality, that edge, that low-level readiness, was actually a dysregulated nervous system doing its job. It had kept me safe through hard times. But it didn’t know the hard times were over. My body needed to be taught that it was allowed to rest. Here is what actually helped: Regulating my nervous system became a daily practice, not a reaction. I stopped treating relaxation as something I did after I earned it. I started treating it as something my body needed the way it needs water. This looked like: Writing. I did not come to writing as a wellness practice. I came to it because I had things inside me that had no other way out. Grief gets stuck in the body when it has nowhere to go, and writing gave mine somewhere to land. Not polished writing, not writing for an audience, but the messy, unfiltered, nobody-will-ever-read-this kind. A journal. Morning pages. Notes in your phone at 2am. Neuroscience actually backs this up: naming what you are feeling engages the rational part of your brain and creates just enough distance from the raw emotion to breathe through it. You do not have to be a writer for this to work. You just have to be willing to be honest on the page. The nervous system does not care about grammar. It just needs a door left open. Getting Outside. There is something that happens to my body the moment I step outside that no supplement or habit stack has ever replicated. Something releases. Nature does not require anything from you. It does not need you to perform okayness or meet expectations, and in a life shaped by loss, that unconditional quality is genuinely therapeutic. Research shows that time in natural environments lowers cortisol, reduces heart rate, and quiets the part of the brain responsible for rumination. What I have learned is that it works best when I leave the podcast at home and resist the urge to make the walk productive. Just outside. Just sky and ground and air and whatever is around you. On the days I least want to go out are usually the days I need it most. I have learned to treat that resistance as information, and then go anyway. Practicing Gratitude. A decade ago, I started setting an alarm on my phone. Not a wake-up alarm, not a reminder to take a vitamin. A gratitude alarm. It goes off every single day at 9:00pm, and when it does, I stop whatever I am doing and I find three things to be grateful for in that exact moment, from the past 24 hours. Not later. Not in a journal at the end of the day when I can curate and reflect. Right now, in the middle of whatever ordinary or hard or chaotic moment I happen to be in. That practice, which I have now been doing for over ten years, changed the way my brain is wired. Grief narrows your vision by design and locks your nervous system into a state of lack and danger. The gratitude alarm was my daily interruption to that pattern. A forced pause. A tiny, non-negotiable moment of noticing. A strengthening of my resilience muscle. Over time, those moments stacked. My brain started scanning for good things in real time, not just when I prompted it. Gratitude did not make my grief smaller. It made my life larger. Consistent sleep and food. This sounds basic because it is, and also because we chronically underestimate how much dysregulation is really just a depleted body screaming for basics. Strengthening my resilience muscle required me to stop treating resilience as a destination. Resilience is not something you arrive at. It is not a reward for surviving enough. It is a practice, a capacity you build through repetition, through choosing to return to yourself again and again even when it feels uncomfortable. For me, that meant: Sitting with discomfort instead of immediately filling it. When stillness felt threatening, I got curious about that instead of reaching for distraction. What was I afraid would happen if I just... stopped? Letting grief be grief. I stopped rebranding my grief as strength. Sometimes I was just sad. Letting myself be sad, without performing okayness, was part of how I healed. Building a life that included genuine restoration. Not just productivity recovery, not “self-care” as a buzzword, but actual moments of joy, connection, and rest that existed for no purpose other than to fill me back up. What Peace Actually Feels Like Real peace, I have learned, is not the absence of difficulty. It is the presence of capacity. It is knowing that hard things will come and trusting that you will be able to meet them without fracturing. Real calm is not a low-grade hum of readiness. It is a body that can soften. A mind that can wander without panic. A nervous system that knows the difference between a genuine threat and just a hard day. I still have hard days. I still feel grief. I still sometimes catch myself bracing for something that isn’t coming. But now I know what I’m feeling. And I know how to come back. That, more than anything, is what resilience has given me. XX Blair P.S. I offer a complimentary call. If you want to see what it’s like to work with me as a Grief and Resilience Coach, book a time here. [https://calendly.com/blairkaplanvenables/bounce-forward-30-minutes] Where’s Blair? May 3-5, La Le Jeune, BC Join me, Stacey and Simone this May at the Regulated Retreat [https://lljresort.com/regulated/]. I’m stoked to be speaking at Regulated, a three-day nervous system reset retreat for people who are done surviving and ready to feel steady again because most of us don’t need more motivation, we need regulation. And that’s what makes this experience different. This retreat blends nervous system science, movement, nature, and honest conversation to help your body downshift and reset. I’m honoured to be part of this experience and would love to share it with you! Early bird rates end March 15th! May 11-14, 2025, Vancouver, BC I’ll be attending Web Summit Vancouver so that I can sharpen my skills and spread our mission. August 23-29, Porto, Portugal I will be co-facilitating the Portugal Grief Trip alongside Rachel from Happy Grieving. There is still room for you. Learn more and book your spot! [https://grieftrips.com/portugal] How We Navigate Grief is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thanks for reading How We Navigate Grief! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit howwenavigategrief.substack.com/subscribe [https://howwenavigategrief.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Kintsugi Healing: How Grief, Loss, and Love Rebuild a Broken Heart

Kintsugi Healing: Learning to Feel Again After Grief Five and a half years ago, I made a quiet decision that would change everything. I was going to put my heart back together. Not to return to who I was, but to become someone who could feel again. To crack it open and let love back in. I couldn’t feel it. Not love. Not gratitude. Not joy. I was numb. If you’ve ever experienced deep grief or trauma, you may know this feeling. It is not dramatic or loud. It is quiet. It is the absence of feeling. It is moving through your life like you are watching it happen instead of living it. So I created a visual in my mind. I imagined my heart shattered into pieces. And instead of trying to hide the cracks, I imagined them being filled with gold. This is the philosophy of Kintsugi. The Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold. The belief that the break is not something to fix or erase, but something to honour. The history becomes part of the beauty. I decided my heart would be rebuilt this way. Not despite what I had been through, but because of it. Healing, Expansion, and the Moment Everything Changed When I entered my second healing journey, I could feel the difference immediately. I was more grounded. More aware. I had done the integration work. I was not trying to escape my pain this time. I was ready to meet it. And something shifted. On the final day, I experienced a level of emotion I did not know was available to me. I felt like I was standing at the edge of a cliff, heart wide open, arms stretched out, completely surrendered. Below me was a lush jungle, alive and vibrant. And from my heart, something extraordinary happened. Butterflies. Light. Color. Joy. It felt like pure love radiating out of me. Like the most powerful version of a Care Bear stare you could imagine. I was not chasing happiness. I was inside of it. For the first time in a long time, I felt alive. Fully. And in that moment, I understood something important. This is what is possible. Grief and Joy Can Exist at the Same Time That night, everything changed. My intuition told me to turn my phone on and call my sister. And that is when I found out my dad was about to die. Within hours of experiencing the highest emotional state of my life, I was on a plane to say goodbye to my father. There was no time to integrate what I had just experienced. No time to process the expansion. My heart was wide open, and life met me there with loss. I held his hand as he took his final breath. There are moments in life that split you open. This was one of them. To feel that level of joy and that depth of grief so close together is something I still do not have words for. It was intense. It was disorienting. It was human. This is the duality of grief. We are capable of holding both. Rebuilding a Heart Through Grief and Resilience Healing is not about going back to who you were before the loss. It is about becoming someone new. This is the essence of what I teach through the Navigating Grief Framework. A process that supports people in moving through grief while strengthening their resilience muscle. Grief is not linear. Healing is not a checklist. But there are ways to support yourself through it. Grounding yourself in the present moment.Creating rituals that allow your emotions to move.Reflecting on what you have lost and what still matters.Leaning into support instead of isolating.Taking small steps forward, even when it feels impossible. This is how we rebuild. Not all at once. Piece by piece. Feeling Again: Where I Find Love Now Over time, something began to change. I started to feel again. Not all at once. Not in a big, cinematic moment. But in small, quiet ways. At concerts, when the music moves through my body.At festivals, surrounded by energy and connection.With my cats, in the stillness of being present.At our summer home, where time feels softer.On any beach, by any body of water, where I can breathe deeper.On hikes, where nature reminds me that everything continues. These moments became my proof. Proof that love was still accessible to me. Proof that my heart was healing. The Gold Is in the Cracks Today, I can feel it. The love. The gratitude. The connection. And I can also feel the grief. Both exist. Both are true. That is the beauty of Kintsugi. The cracks do not disappear. They become part of the story. They are filled with something stronger. I can feel the gold filling the spaces where my heart once broke. And maybe that is the point. Not to be unbroken. But to be beautifully rebuilt. Let’s navigate your grief and first last breath together, XX Blair P.S. I offer a complimentary call. If you want to see what it’s like to work with me as a Grief and Resilience Coach, book a time here. [https://calendly.com/blairkaplanvenables/bounce-forward-30-minutes] Where’s Blair? May 3-5, La Le Jeune, BC Join me, Stacey and Simone this May at the Regulated Retreat [https://lljresort.com/regulated/]. I’m stoked to be speaking at Regulated, a three-day nervous system reset retreat for people who are done surviving and ready to feel steady again because most of us don’t need more motivation, we need regulation. And that’s what makes this experience different. This retreat blends nervous system science, movement, nature, and honest conversation to help your body downshift and reset. I’m honoured to be part of this experience and would love to share it with you! Early bird rates end March 15th! May 11-14, 2025, Vancouver, BC I’ll be attending Web Summit Vancouver so that I can sharpen my skills and spread our mission. August 23-29, Porto, Portugal I will be co-facilitating the Portugal Grief Trip alongside Rachel from Happy Grieving. There is still room for you. Learn more and book your spot! [https://grieftrips.com/portugal] How We Navigate Grief is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thanks for reading How We Navigate Grief! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit howwenavigategrief.substack.com/subscribe [https://howwenavigategrief.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Confessions of a Treasure Hunter: How Collecting Rocks, Shells, and Sticks Became My Way Through Grief

I’ve always been a treasure hunter. Not the kind with a map and an X marking the spot, but the kind who walks slowly along a shoreline, eyes scanning the ground like something sacred might be waiting to be found. Because it is. Give me a beach, any beach. Ocean, river, lake. Give me a forest floor scattered with stories, and I will find magic. A speckled rock that looks like it was painted by hand. A shell shaped like it was handcrafted. A stick that makes the best walking stick. Coral broken off into a heart shape, like it has been quietly waiting for someone to notice it. I don’t just see these things, I feel them. There is something in me that softens when I’m collecting. Something that exhales. It is like my nervous system finally says, this is what we are doing now. We are safe. We are here. How We Navigate Grief is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. People sometimes laugh and ask what I am going to do with all those rocks and shells. And the answer is always the same. Keep them. Not because I need them, but because something in me recognizes them. Because each one feels like proof that beauty exists without trying. That time, pressure, water, and wind, all the things that can break us, can also shape us into something worth holding. I am not alone in this instinct. The more I pay attention, the more I realize that nature is filled with collectors. Sea otters have their favourite rocks, carefully chosen and carried with them, tucked into little pockets under their arms. They use them to crack open food, yes, but it is hard not to feel like there is something more there. A preference. A familiarity. Maybe even a quiet attachment. Octopuses gather shells and build little fortresses, creating safety out of what they find around them. Decorator crabs turn themselves into walking pieces of art, attaching shells and fragments to their bodies to blend in and protect themselves. Penguins search for the perfect pebble to build their nests, sometimes stealing from one another because even they know that some things are worth fighting for. And then there are crows. Brilliant, curious, wildly intelligent beings that collect shiny objects and little trinkets. Sometimes it is curiosity, sometimes play, and sometimes something deeper. Crows have been known to leave gifts for humans they trust. Buttons, beads, pieces of glass, small treasures offered like tokens of connection. A wild animal choosing you and leaving something behind as if to say, I see you. If that does not feel like magic, I don’t know what does. So maybe what I am doing when I collect rocks and shells is not random. Maybe it is ancient. Maybe it is instinct. Maybe it is a deeply human way of making sense of a world that can feel overwhelming, heavy, and sharp. And now, I also collect for my mom. I will bring pieces of each magical adventure from around the world to her headstone in Winnipeg. Wait, am I a crow? LOL. When you have experienced loss, when grief has moved through your life and changed you, you begin to look for anchors. Small things. Grounding things. Things you can hold in your hands when everything else feels like it is slipping through your fingers. This is something I have come to understand not just personally, but through my work. Grounding does not have to be complicated. It does not have to be a perfect morning routine or a long meditation practice. Sometimes it looks like standing barefoot on a beach, letting the water kiss your ankles, and picking up something that catches your eye. That is it. That is the work. In my world, we call this grounding in the present. It is one of the core ways we begin to move through grief, not around it. It is about coming back into your body, into the moment, into something tangible when your thoughts and emotions feel anything but. When you are collecting treasures from nature, you are not just gathering objects. You are gathering moments. You are collecting proof that you were here. That you paused long enough to notice something beautiful. That even in a world that can break your heart, there are still tiny, perfect things waiting to be found. Each rock, each shell, each piece of driftwood carries a story. Not just of where it came from, but of where you were when you found it. Who you were in that moment. What you were feeling. What you were moving through. They become markers, little breadcrumbs of your life, reminders that you kept going, that you kept looking, that you kept finding. So yes, I will always be a treasure hunter. My pockets will always be a little too full. My suitcase will always be a little too heavy. My home will always have collections of rocks, shells, sticks, and stories tucked into corners and displayed on shelves. Because every piece I collect reminds me of something I never want to forget. We are shaped by the elements. We are softened by time. And even after everything we have been through, even after loss and heartbreak and change, we are still here. And we are still worth finding. Let’s navigate your grief and first last breath together, XX Blair P.S. I offer a complimentary call. If you want to see what it’s like to work with me as a Grief and Resilience Coach, book a time here. [https://calendly.com/blairkaplanvenables/bounce-forward-30-minutes] Where’s Blair? May 3-5, La Le Jeune, BC Join me, Stacey and Simone this May at the Regulated Retreat [https://lljresort.com/regulated/]. I’m stoked to be speaking at Regulated, a three-day nervous system reset retreat for people who are done surviving and ready to feel steady again because most of us don’t need more motivation, we need regulation. And that’s what makes this experience different. This retreat blends nervous system science, movement, nature, and honest conversation to help your body downshift and reset. I’m honoured to be part of this experience and would love to share it with you! Early bird rates end March 15th! May 11-14, 2025, Vancouver, BC I’ll be attending Web Summit Vancouver so that I can sharpen my skills and spread our mission. August 23-29, Porto, Portugal I will be co-facilitating the Portugal Grief Trip alongside Rachel from Happy Grieving. There is still room for you. Learn more and book your spot! [https://grieftrips.com/portugal] How We Navigate Grief is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit howwenavigategrief.substack.com/subscribe [https://howwenavigategrief.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]