Blackbird: A Mother’s Journey Through Suicide and Spirit with Betsy Thibaut Stephenson | EP 446

You know you need something, you're just not sure what. You've been listening, you're doing the work, but there's still this feeling that you're circling the same place, like you're waiting for the thing that finally moves you. Now maybe you've thought about working with me one-on-one. Maybe something's held you back, the timing, the money, or you're just not sure you're ready yet. I get that. And I want you to know there's still a place for you. I built a resource for exactly this moment, guided meditations for when the waves hit and you just need to breathe. Workbooks to help you get out of your head and onto the page, ebooks on what near-death experiences tell us about the people we've lost, and whether they're really gone, a full course for widows and widowers who are ready to find their way back to living, and a full course for the evidence of the afterlife. And all of it is available for pay what you want. Nobody gets turned away because of money. I think these resources are valuable, but I don't want to hold them back because you don't have the money to pay for them. You don't have to wait until you're ready for coaching. The next step might be a lot smaller than you think. To find out, go to grief2growth.com/store. That's grief, the numeral 2, growth.com/store. And check out the resources I've made for you. Close your eyes and imagine. What are the things in life that cause us the greatest pain? The things that bring us grief are challenges, challenges designed to help us grow, to ultimately become what we were always meant to be. We feel like we've been buried. But what if, like a seed, we've been planted? And having been planted, we grow to become a mighty tree. Now, open your eyes. Open your eyes to this way of viewing life. Come with me as we explore your true, infinite, eternal nature. This is Grief to Growth. And I am your host, Brian D Smith. Hi there, welcome to Grief 2 Growth. I'm your host, Brian D Smith. And whether you're tuning in for the very first time, or you've been working on walking on this journey with me for a while, I'm truly grateful that you're here. This show is a place for healing, for discovery, and for connection. We explore the big questions of life, who we are, why we're here, and what happens when we leave. If you're navigating life after loss, if you're wrestling with grief, or if you're just seeking meaning in your daily existence, you're not alone. And today's guest is one I know you're going to feel in your heart. My guest is Betsy Tebow Stevenson. She's a mother, a writer, and a fierce advocate for honest grief. In just 6 weeks in 2022, Betsy experienced the unimaginable. She lost her beloved son Charlie to suicide, her mother-in-law to dementia, and her family dog to cancer. But rather than avoid her pain, Betsy chose to move through it, embracing grief not as something to get over,, but his lifelong companion and a life forever changed. She's here today to talk about her book, Blackbird: A Mother's Reflection on Loss, Grief, and Life After Suicide. Betsy was told what many grieving writers hear, which was, write from your scar, not your wound. But she wanted to write through her grief. We're gonna talk about what that means. In our conversation, we're gonna talk about Charlie, his light, his complexity, and his sudden passing just 11 weeks after expressing first expressing thoughts of self-harm. We're going to explore the unexpected physical symptoms of grief, the social anxiety that comes with it, and how Betsy fought not to lose herself in the silence. So this is an episode for anyone walking through profound loss and a call to create space for truth-telling in our grief. So with that, I want to welcome Betsy Stevenson.

Thank you so much for having me today.

Betsy, thanks for, for being here. Um, I always like to start when someone has lost a child as I have. Tell me about your son.

I love those words. Charlie. I'm getting wobbly already. Charlie's my youngest. He has two older sisters. He died when he was 21. And he, his entire life, he was the easy kid. You know, family dynamics are a real thing. And He was always the one who was like Mr. Chill. He— the, the room would be chaotic with noise and excitement and chaos and, you know, disruption, and he would just be sitting there, even as a toddler, playing with his toys or watching it all happen. And, and that really was his true personality, even as he grew older and, you know, middle school and teenage years and high school and college, you know, he was a, he was an observer. He was quiet, but he wasn't shy, you know. He was easy to get talking to. And in fact, he had a wicked sense of humor, um, kind of impish, you know. And his, he would, he would wait for just the right moment to make the, um, the really clever comment or observation. He liked to catch people off guard, but he was, um, He was a very deep-feeling person. And so he became the guy that people turn to. He was the one that his friends knew they could count on to listen to them or let them vent, or be with them when they were struggling. And this even— or just needed companionship, you know. When he, he lived in a dorm, there were the— I heard after he died, there was a whole group of freshman boys who would automatically walk through the door at the end of the day and go straight to Charlie's room. And he was older. So that, you know, he pulled people in that way. They felt safe with him, you know. And then when he got to college, you know, he's a guy's guy. He was in a fraternity, did all the fraternity things. And yeah, he was also the, you know, he, we heard the story after he died that He was leaving a party one night and there was a young lady coming in and he knew her, but she didn't know many people in the room. And so they stopped and said hi and he's like, I'm leaving. And she's like, I'm looking for so-and-so, but I don't know anybody else here. And he's like, I'll go with you. I'll, I'll, I'll stay with you until you find your person. So he goes back in. And helped her get oriented. You know, that was the kind of guy he was, right?

Yeah.

And that's a beautiful thing. But I think in hindsight, you never know these things until afterward, that, um, selflessness, that focus on others, that, um, consistent pull to be there for others made it hard for him to express what he needed. Wow. To express his priorities.

Yeah.

Others were vulnerable with him, but he didn't have a lot of practice making himself vulnerable to others. And so when he got sick, and depression is an illness. I think that set him back because he was not used to— he felt like he didn't, couldn't impose on people, that to express his needs or his fears was an imposition. Imposition.

So, well, first of all, I want to say I'm sorry for your loss. And I know you've had a few, you know, in that short period of time, but particularly for your son. And when suicide happens, when someone transitions by suicide, there's usually a lot of questions, you know, should I have seen this coming, et cetera. And I know you did have some indication before Charlie took his life. It was a pretty short period of time though, as I understand it.

Yes. So we, we learned these things after the fact, but the general timeline was he'd never had depression, anxiety, or mental health struggles growing up or in high school, or We didn't— we don't think the first 2 years of college. He was in college his freshman year when the pandemic hit. And he was a— he came home for college spring break. And then nobody went back, right? It was that, right?

Yeah.

And a lot of students, high school and college, had that experience. He I think, because people often want to know, like, was it the pandemic? And of course, when the world is so scary, of course that affects us all, right? Um, but our family, blessedly, actually had a pretty positive and unifying pandemic experience, which is hard to say at a time when, you know, so many people struggled and suffered and are still dealing with the aftermath. Mm-hmm. But he and his sisters were all living elsewhere, and they came home to Virginia, and we were the 5 of us together. And that was good at a time when we were, you know, years before and certainly after, our kids were growing up and moving out. And so as a parent, I loved it because we were all under one roof again, right?

Yeah.

We are fortunate we have a large backyard so we could be outside and we could, we could not just be trapped in the house. And we also— Charlie particularly had a couple of friends, like his best friends, his dearest friends, that he did not go to college with, but he, you know, knew from high school. They were all in the area and they kind of formed a little pod. And so he was with his buddies hanging out all the time. And they were able to go to, like, one of his friends had a lake house in North Carolina. So they went down there and just stayed for like 2 or 3 weeks and they did their online classes and they, you know, whatever. So like, there were some real positives. But then he went back to school, to college, and everything seemed fine. But I think, again, we figured out in hindsight about— it was his junior year of college, he started to feel, um, stressed, unmotivated. Anxious, and just really was starting to have a hard time. He did something that I am— remain very impressed by, which was he put himself in therapy. He used the campus resources, you know, they put flyers out, they send emails, they say, if you need help, 'Come to the counseling center, come to the health center.' And he, he went and he signed up for therapy through his university. And he didn't tell us. Like, to me, that's part of the whole 'I don't want to bother you.' Yeah. But also, I think it is an indication of just how, you know, depression is one of those things that We feel like we can handle ourselves, or we feel like we should handle ourselves. So he went to therapy. We didn't know about it. And, you know, it was, it was okay. It certainly didn't hurt. But I don't think it helped as much as it needed to. And then it just, I mean, I, I saw We saw him a lot considering we were in different states, you know, between holidays, and there would be events at school. And he— in March or April of his senior or junior year, I got a call from a friend of his who said that he had threatened self-harm. And I was shocked. I had no idea. Remember, I didn't know he was in therapy. I didn't know he's having a hard time, right? So this idea that he was having suicidal thoughts. Was like, what? And we dropped everything. I flew essentially overnight to Texas. I was there when the sun came up to meet him, stayed with him in a hotel for a week. Was right on campus. It was across from his house. He continued to go to classes, but that was the first time that I had talked to him and really could see how much he was struggling. And he was— he wasn't eating. He had trouble sleeping. When he let himself go, when he allowed himself to be vulnerable, he was crying a lot. I hadn't seen him cry since he was a little boy, you know. And You know, we got him help. He talked to— the school had a great program for if you're struggling, um, they can work with your, um, professors to make sure if you need more time or you need, you know, the things like that. That was all— so it was like full-on support, still in therapy, and I left after a week. He said, Mom, I got this. And I'm like, okay, you know, at some point it becomes more strange to have your mom hanging around, you know. And he finished out the school year. I told him, I said, you don't have to finish if you don't want to. We'll figure it out. It's not ideal, but we'll figure it out. If you, if you are in a life or death situation, We're not going to sort of force you to keep working if it's going to kill you. If your kid had a cancer diagnosis 2 months before the end of the school year, you wouldn't say, well, let's just finish out the school year and then we'll figure out how to treat it.

Right. Right.

You know, got sick with, with a serious illness 3 weeks before the end of football season, you wouldn't say, well, just keep playing, you know, it's your junior year, it's important, keep playing, and then we'll figure out how to do it. No, you'd stop everything. And you would say, how do we get you well? We'll deal with the rest later. And that was my attitude about Charlie's suicidal thoughts. I said, if you can't do this, we will find a way. We will support you. First and foremost, we want you to be safe. He's like, I'm okay, I'm okay. So we knew he was seeing a therapist. We were checking in on him all the time. We had some friends checking in on him. He came home a few times. We met up for that family graduation. You know, he did seem like he was struggling, but he was on it. And he was talking about it. And he was making plans to come home and to take an annual trip with his buddies. And he had a job lined up for the fall. It's like, you know, you're looking at all these indicators, you know, they tell you these are the things you need to look for. And I was like, okay, he's sick, but he's okay. He's gonna be okay. And 11 weeks between the time that I went to Texas to see him in this crisis moment, 11 weeks later, he killed himself. Mm-hmm.

Well, I'm so sorry. Yeah.

And, you know, what that tells me, what I realized, you know, I've had depression before. I've been anxious. I've been treated for it, sometimes with medicine, sometimes not. Thought-talk therapy, exercise, all this. I thought I really understood this disease. Mm-hmm. I realized— I learned the hard way with Charlie how sneaky it can be and just how strong it can be, because you— people think of depression as a quiet disease. In a lot of ways it is, although one big symptom is anger. People don't always realize that. They think, I'm depressed, so I'm still and I'm quiet and I sleep. And that's true. That's all true. But because of that sort of quiet, you know, reputation, I know I underestimated how strong it could be. Yeah, and it is powerful. And that was a realization that really hit me hard, you know, because I felt like if you're ministering to it, you're taking care of it, it can— it's manageable and it's not going to get you.

Yeah. Well, Betsy, I, I want to thank you for, for sharing that, and I think it's so important to talk about this, um, when it comes to suicide in particular, because so many feelings come up with suicide that don't come up with other ways that people transition. Um, you know, guilt is one I see with a lot of the people that I work with. I should have known better. I should have seen it coming. If I had just done this one thing, then they, you know, if they would just— if I just told them I love them more, you know, you did everything that anybody could physically be expected to do. And I hope people that are listening to this understand that if your loved one has, has transitioned by suicide, it's not your fault. It's not because you didn't do something, or if you love them more, you could have kept them here or anything like that.

Stay with us. We'll be right back.

You know, one of the hardest things about grief Most of the people in your life just don't get it. They want you to be further along than you are. They get uncomfortable when you bring it up, so you stop bringing it up. And that's why I started writing. My Substack is where I go deeper. Thoughts I don't always get to on the podcast. Essays on consciousness, on continuing bonds, on what it actually means to carry a loss and still build a life. The stuff that used to keep me up at night, written out in a way that I hope meets you in the morning. But here's what I didn't expect when I started it: the community that showed up. People who are doing exactly what you're doing— listening, learning, trying to find their footing. Readers who comment, who share their own stories, who remind each other that none of us are as alone in this as we feel. And that's what the Substack has become— a place to go deeper with me and to find your people. It's free to subscribe. Find me at grief2growth.com/substack. That's grief, the numeral 2, growth.com/substack. Or just go to Substack and search for Grief to Growth. I hope to see you there.

Yeah, and that is really hard. I mean, it's just sitting here as a parent on the other side of this. Sure. You know, I couple things. I, I have come to a place where I don't blame myself. Um, I, I don't hold myself fully responsible, but as a mom, I'm just being honest, I can't quite let myself off the hook, right? It's our job as parents to protect our children. That's me. I'm not saying other people should feel that way. But that is a— what— where I have come on with that is I have to live with this for the rest of my life. So in my grief journey, that's been my focus, not absolution, not getting over it. It's how do I live with this? And there's the grief. And there's the shame. And then there's the, you know, kind of just fundamental, I'm a parent, I need to protect my children. And the way that I have approached this is You know, if anything big happens in our life, especially something that's painful— divorce, loss, losing a job, losing a home, relationships gone wrong, betrayal, anything big that hurts— I really feel that You have to come up with the story that you tell yourself, right? And it's, it's your story. It's not what your neighbors think. It's not even what your partner thinks. It's certainly not what strangers think. What is your story that is going to enable you to continue to live? And move forward. And the only way to get to that story is you have to be brutally honest with yourself. You have to go there. You have to take every what-if and follow it to its endpoint. So for me, what if I had made him stay home that summer instead of letting him live in his college town? What if he were under my roof, right? Seems obvious. He's not living in a group house with a bunch of fantastic people, but 21-year-olds. Um, maybe if he were home, he wouldn't have done it. And I have to go down every scenario and every possibility, and sometimes it goes to an ugly place. Sometimes it goes to a place that says, no, that wouldn't have worked. Because what are you going to do? You going to lock him in his room, Betsy? He's 21 years old, right? Come on, get real.

Yeah.

No, you're not. You have to see all those things through. And for someone with suicide, but I would even say traumatic loss, accidents, maybe illnesses that aren't necessarily detected, things like that. You have to go all the— you have to be honest with yourself. This is not to anybody else. You don't know anybody anything. This is for you. And then I had to accept that most of those questions did not have answers. I will never know. No one will ever know. So, but only through going, going deep, deep into them and being honest with myself, could I come to a place and say, well, this is not something the universe is ever going to let me know.

Yeah.

And then you hold that and you say, this is, it is what it is. I can't make it anything else. And then through all that, you come up with your story. And story sometimes becomes— that story is not a fable. I mean, it's more of a fable than a cover-up, you know? It's like, um, what do I tell myself? So I tell myself I was on it. I tell myself I understood the situation to the best of my ability. I told myself he got help and I was consulting with professionals at the same time, making sure that I was doing the right things as a parent and a caregiver. Um, you know, we took it seriously. Um, this was out of character for him, and he got really sick unexpectedly, and he, he thought he could handle it. And he couldn't.

Yeah.

My husband's story is a little different. Not hugely different, but he has ideas about things that were sort of triggering events or culprits or, you know, things. Not that he could have done anything about them, but like his story focuses a little bit more on that. I focus on what I could have done. My husband focuses on the external world and how it was affecting our son. You know, his sisters have a slightly different story.

Interesting.

They don't— they will never be fact-checked. You're not on the stand. You know, it's not a, you know, a deposition. Yeah. It's not even about being complete. It's what do you need to tell yourself? Right?

Right.

And in our family, we respect each other's stories. We talk about them openly. So when someone says, I wish I just had done this, or Sometimes I think about this, you know, conversation or opportunity, and I think it really, you know, that mattered more than I realized at the time. Those are their truths, and that's okay. It's not up to me to say, no, honey, you, you know, that was not important, don't make that important. That's not my job. My job is to have what I can live with, and my husband has what he can live with, and his sisters and his roommates and his friends that out with him the night before he died, hours before he died. Everyone has to have their own story.

Well, this is a good time to say to people, because I know you even say about your book, it's not how other people should do grief, it's about how you do grief. So we want to make that important or clear. And you said that. You said, this is the way that— this is what I have to do to process my grief. And grief is unique. It's different for everybody. And it's interesting when it comes to stories because there are, there are facts and then there are interpretations of facts. Now, so there's— that people can be given the same set of facts and interpret them completely differently. So, you know, I— you, you talk about he did get help, he— you did go there, you did these things, you, you talked to him, you gave him support, you, you offered him— all those things are facts. Um, could anybody have done more? That's where the interpretation comes in, right? And so it's something that you said, and for you going down each one of those rabbit holes and going through the what-ifs, it was important for you to come to the conclusions that you've come to. So I appreciate you being so, so open about your process. And I know that you had said, and when I got your information, that your publishers said you should write from your— I want to get this right— you should write from your scar, not from your wound, I think is what it is. So what does that mean?

So, um, it's a bit of a saying, um, in the memoir world, and my book is a memoir, um, that you write from your scar, not from your wound, meaning, um, your, your memoir, your story that you share with others, is— will be more effective if you give time and space and growth and learning and healing. You put that between your audience and the inciting event, right? And that makes a lot of sense, because A lot of times when people read memoirs, particularly about things like this, you know, I want to see how someone else has gotten through it. I want to see where someone else ended up. They want to, they want to know what's possible. They want to know they lost this person, lost a child. But they made it, you know, they're okay. And that has been huge for me. And I presume, but I shouldn't presume, for you as well. You see people who have gone through the same journey, journey, and you're like, okay, I don't feel like it today. But look at this guy. It's been 10 years. He did it. You know. And so, but for me, when I was struggling in those early weeks and months after losing my son, my mother-in-law, and my dog, I was— everything was dead because everything was dying. Like, every time I turned around, something was dying.

Yeah.

I mean, you should never have a direct line to the funeral home, you know?

Right.

And so I, I, I looked and searched. I'm a big reader. I looked hard to find books, podcasts, blogs. This is not a new topic. It is covered. It is very, you know, there's a lot out there. And what I found was that for books, things fall into two categories. Self-help, which is written by experts in their field, they usually have letters after their name, and thank God, they dedicate their lives to understanding different aspects of grief or mental health or, you know, motivation or whatever it is. And so that's filled with really important perspective, but also advice. And they're qualified to give advice, right? Or they're memoirs, and we learn from other people's experiences. We see, we feel seen and heard. Oh, they went through this too, and this is how they handle it. So there's a lot of value there. But I was so selfish in my grief. That I literally, I'd pick up a beautiful memoir with a relevant situation. And I was like, I don't care about your childhood. I don't care about your extended family and the way all the characters that led up to this moment. I want to know what to do now. I want to know how do I go about healing or just existing when everything in my body and mind and soul has shut down. I want to know now. And so I did read a lot, and I consumed a lot listening, and, and it was kind of like a nugget here and a piece there. And that's fine. That's good. I think that's— if you, if you like to consume information that way, it's, it's a good thing. And so I was taking notes, taking notes, and then I would take one of my personal questions, and I would apply it against some insight or something I'd learned, and I'd turn it over and turn it over and untangle it in writing. And then I realized that what I needed to do was write a book that dealt with that raw moment and those ugly, ugly thoughts, ugly thoughts directed at me, myself, at Charlie, at the universe and God. People who said stupid things to me like, don't you wish his friends could have done something?

Yeah.

I mean, yeah, come on. No.

Yeah.

Yeah. And so dealing with all that, the wound without the benefit of time and building up the scar tissue. You know, I'm— I just hit the 3-year anniversary of Charlie's Cell, right? And I do have a lot of scar tissue, but I feel like I got it the healthy way, not by slapping a Band-Aid on it and just saying, hold your breath until it heals. You know, I mean, I wanted to be ex— exposed and out there, and I wanted my environment and my body to do the work.

Yeah. Well, I think one of the biggest things with grief is, is we have to process it. We have to go through it, you know. We can't, we can't go around it. We can't avoid it. And, and you decided, I'm gonna, I'm gonna dive right into this.

Yeah.

And I don't want to, um, to gloss over the fact that you also lost your mother-in-law and your dog during this period. So tell us about, about that experience.

It was so stunningly horrible. Um, you know, I talked about Charlie and how we had 11 weeks between learning he was struggling till he died. He was 21. On the other end of the spectrum, we have my mother-in-law who'd had dementia.

The—

her illness was a very slow burn. You know, she'd had symptoms for more than 10 years, and she had— was in a, um, a great care facility 2 miles from our house. And, and she had been in memory care, so, you know, kind of a nursing place for 4 years— no, 3 years, 3 years, a while, you know. And so we were very, um, we anticipated losing her. She was in her mid-80s, and even though it's slow, you can see, you know, they, they lose certain abilities. And she wasn't talking very much. She barely recognized her son, my husband, didn't recognize me. We take the kids, our grown kids, and she didn't really recognize them. So we knew it was coming. And she had just Um, you know, the nurses and doctors are great. You know, they tell you, well, it's been 3 days since she could feed herself, and you're like, okay, so there's these little acceleration points. And my mother-in-law had just hit one of those little acceleration points, and she was— they were— the flags were coming more frequently. When Charlie had his episode. And we believe part of our story, my story and my husband's story, is that one of the reasons he didn't turn to us more, and he, you know, we had open communication, all that, is that he knew we were consumed with taking care of his grandmother. So he wanted to take care of his health himself, which is fine, sure, but it's a little bit of an unnecessary stoicism, you know, that he had. Well, you know, they're having to go to the nursing home every day to take care of Grammy, and I mean, she had care, but you know, right? And he just didn't want to bother us. And so I— Charlie died. We're shocked. We're obliterated. Um, we have his funeral service on a Friday, and I'd taken off from work between his death and his funeral. And then on Monday, I went back to the office, and my colleagues were fantastic, very supportive and gentle. And I mean, I was worthless anyway, but you know, you just kind of have to ease back into life. And I'm on a call on a Zoom. And it's my first morning back. And my husband comes into the room and he says, the nursing home called, we need to go right now.

Oh, wow.

And so I told my colleague, she said, you're not gonna believe this. But I, I need to go be with my mother-in-law. Yeah. And so we went. And she hung on for like 2 days. So we would go back and forth. And we are in deep grief. From, I mean, our son had died few weeks before, like we were two weeks before, we were barely functioning, right? And then, you know, she, she passed peacefully, quietly. And, you know, we spent a lot of time at her bedside. And unlike our son, who had this violent death, out of the blue. She had this very protracted illness. She was in her 80s. And the contrast between the two was to be in the middle of that, because it's literally both sides.

Exactly.

Of the grief story.

Yeah.

And you always say, which would you rather know?

You know, you want to know what's coming, or you want to play that game, right?

Right. Talk about something that doesn't have an answer, right? And we were in the middle of it. And I, you know, you can't— and in a way, I mean, you know, that probably pushed me in my, my grief journey to more aggressively be a student of grief. I mean, I made it my job. I was like, everything around me is dying. So what am I gonna do to take care of myself and get through this? And I couldn't lean on a trope or a 'this is the way it should be,' because I was hit— hitting it from all sides, right? Right.

You know, and then your, your dog— when, when did that happen?

3 weeks later. Um, and our dog was 10 years old, family dog. Charlie loved her. Her name was Bear. And, um, She had been diagnosed— she had tumors. She'd been diagnosed again right when Charlie had his distress episode. So we're going through all this at the same time. I mean, like, Charlie's sick, mother-in-law's getting sicker. We also lost a beloved aunt during that time. My husband had back surgery. Oh, and then the dog has cancer. This was all like bam, bam, bam. And then it all kind of just came to a head just weeks later. So the dog's cancer diagnosis was terminal, but they— and they said that it could be pretty aggressive, but they're like, you know, if you want, you can do chemo and treatments and stuff like that. And because we were going through so much with Charles's mother and and the lost aunt. And, you know, we said, let's try and see if we can extend this dog's life, right? She's 10. She's not— she's not young, but she's not super old. And she wasn't in a lot of pain. That was a big thing. Yeah, she was acting pretty normally. It's just inside, she was a wreck. And so the kids knew, Charlie knew. And the, the vet had said, you know, this is the kind of thing, it, it's gonna come fast. She'll be, she'll seem normal and then she might just collapse. And the tumors literally would rupture.

Hmm.

And so just be on the lookout and if a tumor ruptures, there's usually nothing we can do about it. We're like, okay, we gotcha. So she's undergoing these treatments, and, um, it seems to be going well. And then Charlie dies, and then Paula, my mother-in-law, dies. And then my husband and I are just like, our dog, not our dog, don't take our dog, you know, because we— you know, you're clinging to whatever you can, right?

Sure.

And 3 weeks after my mother-in-law died, we find the dog collapsed outside of Charlie's bedroom. She'd been fine, you know, she was operating normally, like, you know, we weren't running her hard or anything, but you wouldn't, you wouldn't know she was sick. Just like the veterinarian said, it's going to come fast. She had a tumor in her heart that exploded. Wow. And I don't know what to believe. I believe different things on different days, but you can't tell me that that's not a sign that there are higher forces. You know, she was— she missed her boy. Her heart was broken. She sensed our pain. Yeah.

And, and Betsy, you know, it's been, it's been about 3 years.

Yeah.

Um, from— I tell people, especially parents who've lost children, 3 years is still early grief. So I'm not going to ask you where you've landed because I know you're still on this journey, but where are you, where are you now in terms of, um, you said the guilt, you're not, you haven't completely absolved yourself, but you're not taking full responsibility. Um, and you, you mentioned, you know, your, your dog Bear, I think it is Bear. Um, you think that's a sign that, you know, that, that was her time to go. What it, where, where are your thoughts on this now? That's hard for me to answer.

Yeah, um, I will say that talking about it, writing about it from the earliest days, being forthcoming about cause of death, and then trying to untangle these things, and in writing and in therapy and with my friends has brought me to, let's say, a healthy place. Okay. I feel healthy. I can go about my days. Right. There was a time I couldn't leave the house. I didn't leave the house for about a year. Effectively, you know, I had like 3 places I went. And In order to do more, I needed to have someone with me. I mean, I was really shut down. I was fortunate to be able to do my job remotely and over Zoom. So I was seeing people and interacting in a, you know, in a functioning world, but I was not out there. And so my goal was to get my feet on solid ground, to know that I could do what I needed to do to have a life, to live in the world, to stay connected with people, to cultivate curiosity. You know, all that dies when your child dies. You don't care what's going on out there. You don't care how other people are. I didn't, I mean, I didn't care how other people were. I wasn't interested in my world or my community. And I knew that was not sustainable. And so my goal has always been to become a functioning human, like, so that if I need to go somewhere I need to do something, or if it's the right thing to call on someone or to participate, that I have the strength and the skills to do it. And I am in a healthy place. I can do that. I have also in the last year become much more proactive. And much more— I'm more likely to initiate things, to say, hey, join me for dinner, or hey, let's go for a walk, as opposed to before, people were like, I'm doing this, I'd like you to come with me. Like, that was how I got out. Now, grief is crazy, you know. I mean, I can have this conversation about this, like, all the deepest details of what I've been through. And, you know, I can get a little choked up, but like, you know, we're— you and I, we're covering some ground. And I can feel like this is comfortable for me to talk about. And then I'll be Driving down the street and whatever, something invisible flashes across your mind.

Mm-hmm.

And I go, oh my gosh, my son is dead. And it's alarming. And I cry. And, you know, sometimes it's 30 seconds, and sometimes it's a pullover to the side of the road. But I always let myself feel that. I never fight it. Even if I'm out with people, you know, you know, if I need to pull myself away to another room, or a bathroom or whatever, I'll do that. But I'm not afraid to cry in front of people, or I'm not afraid to say, Gosh, I'm kind of having a moment, you know. Yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna sit down for a second. You carry on your conversation or whatever. And that gives me agency.

Yes.

So that the grief doesn't rule me. It's a part of me. It exists. I don't hide it. I don't fight it. I don't pretend it's not there. I try really hard not to compartmentalize because it's going to come out anyway. So when it happens, I let it happen.

Yeah. Well, thank you. Thank you for sharing that. I think it's really important for people to understand that, you know, and that this idea that we get over grief and we wait 5 years and we write our book and then we can tell people, yeah, it's all behind me now. It's not. It's been 10 years for for me. It was 10 years last month, about a month ago. And, you know, there's still those moments, there's still those times you wake up and you go, I can't believe this is my life. And that's okay, you know. And as you said, it might last for 30 seconds, it might last a little longer. For me, it doesn't last a whole day anymore. It certainly doesn't last for weeks like it used to. But those moments still do come. And the grief is still with us. And, you know, the questions that you're asking and answering, you know, and the conclusions that we come to. So I ask you, you know, how do you feel about this today? Because it's still developing for me as to what I feel about the meaning behind this and why it happened. And, you know, and I will tell you this, Betsy, after talking to hundreds or thousands of parents who have lost children. Guilt is almost universal. It's been universal in my experience. I'm not going to say it's everybody, but it's been universal in my experience. Whether it's a child that passed from cancer, maybe I should have known sooner, or killed by a drunk driver, maybe I shouldn't let them go out with their boyfriend or whatever. We do play these what-if games. What if I had done this? What if I had done that? And As you said, we all have to come to our own conclusions when it comes to that. And I think, I think it's a process that we have to go through. I don't know anybody that hasn't gone through it, right? Um, I, I went through it. For me, it was really quick. I just, I was like, this is not taking me to a good place, so I just said I'm not doing this. I— but everybody has— it's their own. It's on your own time.

Yes, absolutely. And emphasizing a point you made earlier. This is, this is how I did it, and this is what's worked for me. And there is the one of the things that I really struggled with after Charlie died, and then with all this subsequent loss, you know, here I am thinking I, I didn't parent correctly. I didn't fulfill my motherly duty. And I didn't do it right. And now I'm not grieving right. You know, I'm supposed to be mad. I'm supposed to bargain. I'm supposed to, you know, and so that at a time when you You know, your self-esteem is nonexistent. You're questioning everything about your life, every decision you ever made. And you're certainly questioning your ability to be responsible enough to just exist and go forward. You know, what kind of world wants someone like me in it? You know? And then you're like, I can't even grieve right.

Mm-hmm.

And so I think it's really important that no matter the circumstance, no matter the relationship, you grieve the way you want to grieve. The only requirement is to be honest with yourself. Mm-hmm. Right. And that does require vulnerability. There's, there's no formula, there's no prescription, there are no categories that you need to go through and check. If anger is your grief language, then be just— but be mad. Sadness is it. If becoming a postmortem forensic emotional detective is it, do it. It's all okay, but you have to do it. You can't just say, you know, well, this happened. And yeah, I have to pretend like it didn't, you know?

Right. Well, and again, it's really, you know, when I— because I work with people in grief, and I'm listening to you as you're going through your thing, and I'm like, okay, this is, this is your, this is your thing, right? This is the way that you go through it. And I— everybody, as I said, everybody's different for what process they have to go through. And sometimes from outside, we see someone going through something, we're like, I don't know if that's going to a good place, but you have to go— you have to draw that conclusion yourself. Yes. You know, you have to— you have to get to that place for yourself. So going down those paths, going down those rabbit holes, and I think really being— and I love the fact that you wrote this book when you're still raw in your grief, because people need to understand, need to know that, okay, I'm going through this and I feel terrible. I feel guilt. I feel like I'm not doing this right. I'm not doing the grief right. I should be more sad, or I should be more angry, and all I feel is numb.

Yeah.

You know, all those emotions that people feel, and we need— sometimes we kind of need permission from someone else to say, what, what, this is okay. And it took you being very vulnerable to come out and, and to put this stuff out. So I really appreciate, you know, you doing that and putting this out into the world, because I know it's— and I wonder what kind of feedback you've gotten from, from the book? How, how have people responded?

It is, um, the feedback is what keeps me going, you know. Um, you know, I mean, I'm in a good place, but, and I knew I needed to write this book and to get this out there for me, but it has been so affirming. Um, I get messages from folks, or I talk to people at book events, and they say first the two most powerful words, me too. But they also say things like, you know, I feel validated in my experience, or I understand more now what was going on with me. Or, and this is really important because my community and my friends were absolutely essential to my healing, are essential to my healing. People say, I have a friend who's, who's going through a similar situation. Now I understand where they are better. It helps me know how to care for them. And that's really important. You know, I mean, yes, I wrote it for people who have lost children, or who have lost loved ones to suicide. But I also wrote it for anyone who just wants to understand what grief is like when you're in the middle of the wound.

Yeah.

And that we all go through it.

Yes.

It's universal, you know, it, we, we need, we all need to do better to try and understand what this does to people, what it will do to us. And, you know, one of the most revolutionary thoughts that I had that I think every griever has, especially in the early days, is you, you got, you, you're, you're carrying this, this loss and this weight and this emotion and you, and you pull yourself up and you go out into the world and you look around at the intersection or at the line at the coffee shop or, you know, the people in the parking lot and you go, every single person that I can see has or will experience what I'm experiencing. Yeah, it's humbling. It's humbling, because it's so personal. The grief is so personal. And you know, I was very, like I said, I was very selfish. I didn't feel bad about being selfish. But I was like, just me, me, me, Charlie, Charlie, Charlie. And you look and you go, That man may have lost a child. That woman lost her partner of 50 years. Yeah, you know, it, it happens.

You're absolutely right. And it is, you know, there are a couple universal experiences. Unfortunately, they're— I think they're grief and death. We know we're all going to die. We're all going to, we're all going to walk that road someday, as my, as my mother-in-law said. And we're all— if we're here long enough, we're going to lose somebody or something. So we're all going to have these universal experiences, but we make it so personal and so private. So as you're walking, as you said, you were standing in line at the coffee shop or the movie theater or whatever, you're looking at a person, you don't know what their grief is, but you know they've either experienced it or they're going to.

They're going to. Yeah.

Yeah. And so we need people like you that puts that on display for people. Like, this is a way to walk through it. This is, you know, and there's some, you know, it's good to, as you said, honesty is really important. Honoring your grief, having your grief witnessed is very important. Those things are universal. It's not— and I just talked to someone fairly recently. I found that shame is a big part of grief when people feel like I'm not doing it right, or they're feeling some guilt that they don't want to speak out loud. You know, again, especially in the case of suicide, like, if, you know, if I'd done this or I'd done that, it's, it's almost, you know, unspeakable. But, you know, getting those things out, as you said, going down that, that rabbit hole, rabbit trail, that's, it's probably a healthy thing to do for, for a while.

Yeah.

I do want to ask you, at the, at the very beginning we started talking, I noticed people's language, and you talk about Charlie in the present tense. So how is Charlie a part of your life now?

This has been one of, I think, the most beautiful things. You know, I heard early on, and I'm sure you've heard it many times, that, you know, when you lose someone, they're still with you. You just have a different relationship with them. And that brought me so much comfort. And so I try and cultivate that relationship. You know, it's got some pretty terrible parameters around it. You know, I wish I could hug him or hear his laugh or ask him things and get an answer back. But the, the ways that I have come to bring him into my life or keep him, keep him in my life and our family and amazingly his friends. This really feeds my soul, you know, so we always say his name. We bring him up and of course a lot of it is memories, you know, oh, remember when we did this and Charlie said that. But it's also, Charlie would love this, or I wonder what he would say about this. And then we get into a game of, well, he— I think he would say this, and I would think he would do that. You know, he is with us and present. And, you know, there's a subtle little shift that happened about the 2-year mark for me. I realized that I could bring him up in casual conversation, like in a social setting where, you know, I'm talking to people I know, but not like my friends who know everything. So there was a moment I was talking with a group of women. I was at like a luncheon event thing. And we're playing the kind of who are you and who do you know and where do you live and what do you do kind of thing. And You know, these are all strangers to me. And one of them said, I, you know, this is whatever, da da da, I've got 3 kids. They went to this high school. And they were, her kids were older than mine. And the high school was the same school that Charlie went to. And I realized I could say, oh, my son went there too. Not my son went there too, but he died.

Right.

For the conversation, the setting, the people, I could bring him up. And I wasn't afraid to say he died. I was willing to say, you know, if somebody said, where is he now? I would have said, I We lost him, you know. But the conversation stayed in that, oh, I know that school. Oh, what do you think about this neighborhood? You know, kind of level. And no one asked.

Yeah. Yeah.

And so that's, to me, that was a little bit of a breakthrough moment where he's with me. I'm bringing him up. He's a part of my life. I'm speaking about him the way I would have spoken about him. When he was alive.

That's awesome.

Yeah, you know.

Yeah, yeah. And I know I've, I've had those experiences. And, uh, it's funny because I— Shayna's with me. I don't— I was gonna say I think— I know Shayna's with me. And I know that I— not that I would deny her anyway, but, you know, she's like, yeah, you're not denying me. So when people ask me how many kids I have, you know, I have two girls, you know.

Yes, yes, absolutely.

And then, and then if it goes, you know It depends on the situation, where it goes. And I've had situations where, you know, I'm like, I'm trying to spare their feelings because I don't really care. Yes. So, yes. And finally it's like, okay, well, she's not here anymore. And then you get the, oh, I'm sorry. I'm like, it's okay, you know, it's okay. But I, I, you know, I love that you're, you know, he's still part of your family and we're still a family of four.

Yes.

Um, so I think that's really, um, that's really important that, that you, that you bring, that you keep him with you. So, um, we're coming to the end of our time. I want to thank you so much for, for doing this. Remind people of the name of your book and where people can find out more about you.

Um, the book is called Blackbird, and it is available wherever books are sold. Amazon, you can go to a local bookstore and order it there, um, bookshop.org. I have a website, blackbirdbetsy.com. You can also order the book through there for a bit of a discount. But I have some resources about suicide and grief. And then I'm also on social media, primarily on Instagram, blackbirdbetsy21. Is my handle.

Awesome. Well, Betsy, again, thank you for doing this today. Thank you for sharing Charlie and your mother-in-law and Bear with Us. Um, thank you for, for being a model for what it's like to walk through grief. You know, one way of walking through grief, right, that people can take what works for them. So thank you for doing this.

Thank you for having me.

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