He’s Not Coming Back: Theresa Bruno on Rewriting Life After Suicide Loss | EP 439

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. Hey there, everyone. I'm Brian D Smith. And thanks for joining me today on Grief 2 Growth. And whether you're tuning in for the first time, or you've been walking this path with me for a while, I want to welcome you to a space where we confront life's deepest challenges with open hearts and with open minds. On this show, we explore life's biggest questions like who we are, where do we come from, why are we here? And where do we go when this life ends? We aim to bring meaning to our pain and purpose to our path forward. Today I'm honored to welcome Teresa Bruno. Now, Teresa is an author, a speaker, a coach, and she's the host of the Soul Talks podcast. You may know her as the founder of Jordan Alexander Jewelry, a luxury brand favored by icons like Oprah, Julia Roberts, and even First Lady Michelle Obama. But Teresa's story, like so many of ours, took an unexpected and painful turn when her husband died by suicide 5 years ago. That shattered the life she knew and catapulted her into a new, raw, and deeply human journey. And since that life-altering loss, Theresa shifted her focus from building businesses to rebuilding lives, starting with her own. She now uses her platform to speak honestly about grief, about healing, and about reinvention. And her upcoming book, He's Not Coming Back: Rewriting Life After Loss: A Path to Healing, is a passionate, compassionate— is a powerful compassionate guide for anyone navigating in the wilderness of grief. So today's conversation, we're going to explore what it means to be— to truly renew when you're still carrying the weight of loss. We'll talk about the myth of linear healing, the emotional clutter that we carry, and how nature— yeah, the simple act of stepping outside— can become one of our greatest tools for transformation. Theresa will share a practice she calls defiant gratitude helped her reclaim joy. And how rewriting our personal stories might be the bravest thing we can do to the road to wholeness. If you've ever wondered how to begin again when your heart still aches, then this episode is for you. And when the episode ends, I invite you to continue the conversation at grieftogrowth.com/community, where we come together to listen, to share, and to grow side by side. And with that, I want to welcome Teresa Bruno.

Hi Brian, thank you so much for having me on your podcast. I'm delighted to be here.

Yeah, I'm glad to have you here. Uh, we both kind of got on this path through, through loss. So before we get started talking about your book and things like that, let's tell me about your, your husband.

Oh gosh, where do I start? Um, James and I met in our 20s. Um, he, you know, you never know, you know, sometimes when you're young and falling in love, you don't know what it's going to look like 20-something years later, but he truly was the kindest man I've ever known. He was a tremendous father. When he died, we had two boys in early 20s— not, I like to say, not yet men. And James was an extraordinary father. He was my very best friend. Such an incredible, just an incredible man.

So, unfortunately, you lost him to suicide. So I'm sorry for that. And Suicide carries a lot of different emotions. Grief carries all kinds of emotions anyway, but sometimes suicide comes with some, maybe some unexpected emotions. Did you have any unexpected emotions after his passing?

Oh my gosh, I was shrouded in them. I was completely washed in every, every kind of emotion. And you're right, suicide, the thing I talk about a lot and I hear responses about a lot, and it's crippling because with suicide, unlike if, you know, your spouse or your loved one dies of anything else that's not tragic, you know, you just constantly say, what did I miss? What could I have done differently? How did I not see? I knew James was depressed. I had no idea that, that suicide could happen in our family because I felt like our whole lives were built around building our children. And I just didn't think that he— I— it just had never gone between my ears that that could happen. So I Yeah, for, for, I wouldn't say for a very long time, but certainly for the first 9 to 12 months, there was a lot of why, why, why, what didn't I see? How could I have been there for him? You know, you, you backtrack through those final hours and final days and you examine them through a microscope and none of it really helps because you might find some clues, but the truth of it is I think when— that I've learned in, in with a lot of therapy and counseling and processing is that I think when someone's, um, in that kind of pain, I don't think there's anything you can do to stop it if they are determined, um, to make that decision. And, and, and you'll never have all the answers. I know James was an amazing father, husband and person. And I never thought that this could happen to us, to me. And I'll never fully understand all the whys. So yeah, the emotions are just a roller coaster.

Yeah, I'm sure. I'm, I know, there again, the emotions of grief, there's so many, they're complicated. There can be anger, there can be guilt, there can be betrayal, there could be, you know, lots and lots of emotions that come up. And As, as you looked for those answers, did you find any answers that, that helped you? Because, you know, I, I find that sometimes people feel like, well, if I, if I just find out the why— and it's, this is whether it's suicide or other ways— that people somehow feel like that'll bring them some sort of closure. What was your experience with that?

I really did. I've, you know, I've found a few things. I began to realize he left letters for both the boys and for me, but he had been planning it. Um, he left everything very organized. You know, there was a box left on his desk with every single thing for me to do next and every single thing about our homes and, you know, how to give me control and management of all of that because he handled everything. So clearly, there was immediately an understanding of a planned situation. Brian D Smith, I don't think that there was anything that came forward that gave me much. But I tell you, two things happened very the first day, I, you know, I had to tell my children, and I felt like it was so important to get both boys in the same place at the same time, which meant waiting a minute or waiting an hour or so, because one was in college a few hours away, one boy was at work. And so I was trying to get the boys in one place at one time, which that didn't end up happening exactly like I had hoped for, but they were about 30 minutes apart. And when my younger one walked in the room and I told him And he kind of sunk to the floor, and the first thing he said was, 'Mama, if he loved me so much, why wasn't my love enough to keep him here?' Yeah, that's, that's a 20— a young 21-year-old boy just broken over his daddy. But the next thing he said, which was interesting to me because James was a person who was very much in service— he was an introvert, he loved giving and serving to others— and I think probably he— that was one of the things that ended up hurting him was that he didn't let others know his pain or what he was going through. He was always about everybody else. And Andrew, my youngest, said, 'Mommy, he was so good. He just wasn't meant for this world very long.' So that was one thing that sort of started playing in my head. I thought, that's a soft way to look at it. It's a beautiful way to look at it. But it gave me some peace. And then about a week later, my older son came to sit with me and have lunch. And we sat outside. And, you know, he just, he just said, Mom, you'll never know the whys. I think what we need to do to, to kind of keep going and, and keep this now family of 3 together is, is to just talk about him. Let's talk about him every time we're together. He was hilariously funny. You know, he was a cut-up. He was goofy. Let's tell all the things we can about Dad and keep the goodness of him, you know, current in our lives because it's so easy just because it's so hard to talk, you know, It hurts to say it. It hurts to have the memories front— right in front of you at first. Now it's not so hard, but those early days, it was gut-wrenching. But both boys guided me towards something that was healthier than probably what I would have done on my own. But no, no real answers.

Yeah. Well, thanks for sharing that. And I, and I do find that there aren't— most of the time there aren't real answers. And, and we've, we tend to pursue them thinking they're going to somehow solve everything, but they don't. There's still difficulties. And two really interesting things that your boy said, I think, are very common and also very true. There's this feeling sometimes people say, "Well, why wasn't my love enough to keep them here?" Like it's somehow our fault. If we had loved them more, then they would have chosen to stay. And realizing that that's not true takes a while, I think, to get to. Right. So in terms of the title of your book, I was very intrigued by it. Tell me about how you chose the title.

This kind of dovetails into some of the things you speak about. I was doing a meditation one day, I was working out and doing a meditation and trying to figure out what the title of this book was about. And so I very much believe in calling in my angels, calling in my spirit guides, calling in James. And the morning that he died, he was supposed to pick me up. He said, I got to go to the office for a little while. And he was going to pick me up. And we were going to our little lake house about an hour and a half away. And we were going to plant the sunflower garden. So the COVID of the book has sunflower garden on it. And in the back of a man walking away. I was down in the gym, and I was trying to exercise and trying to meditate and calling in my angels, you know, I'm saying, what is this book supposed to be? And those words just were before me. He's Not Coming Back: Rewriting Life After Loss. And it has become very much a philosophical and spiritual principle for me, certainly in the last 3 years. The first 2 years, I'm not sure how much I did other than just survive. Yeah, but, you know, really understanding the invitation from life, from God, from spirit to look at what my story is next. But it's an opportunity in this horrible grief and betrayal and sorrow. And, you know, there is also an invitation from life to go, okay, what woman do you want looking back? Yeah, you're every morning when you get up, are you just gonna sit in it? Or are you going to make something of it? And so rewriting my story, and I— that's not all a positive thing. It's a hard thing, has become really important to me in showing other people the survival tools that I sort of pulled up from the earth myself, because I didn't truthfully do a ton of reading. I joined grief groups, and I couldn't stay in them. You know, it was very— it became very much a spiritual journey for me to find the survival tools to walk out.

Okay. And so you said you joined grief groups, but you didn't, you didn't stay in them. So how did, how did you discover these, these tools that you found? 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 is about. 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.

Well, I've always been I've always been a prayerful person. And I've always been a spiritual person. I haven't always lived my life connected to spirit and aligned with spirit the way that I feel like I'm doing now. I had always been an avid reader. And so I had a lot stored up inside of me. You know, I think gratitude was a wonderful pivot, but I don't like to Sometimes I don't like the way in our culture we say, oh, they've got the beautiful picture of the steaming coffee cup and the sun coming through the window in the morning and 3, 3 points of gratitude and your life's changed. That, that doesn't exactly work.

Right.

One of the very first steps out for me was I made, you know, I made a decision the day that I found James, and I had to sit for 5 hours waiting for his body to be released. I made a decision that whatever I did next would be so important to my children and how they went forward. And even if I didn't feel like it, even if I didn't feel like holding up, I was going to, because that's what they would do. Or that was my perception. I think my boys ended up being stronger than I was, and they taught me a lot about how to do it. But so I made a decision, you know, I'm going to get up every morning and make coffee and those first, you know, few weeks, maybe even months, just getting— the act of getting out of the bed, willing myself just to walk down the hall and make the coffee was a really big deal. It sounds small, but it was a really big deal for me. And I would take the coffee back to bed. But we, we at that time lived in the house that we'd lived in almost all of our married life and raised the kids in, and it faced mountains. And I was I just loved that view. And so the second thing I decided to do, again, as simple as it comes, is I would draw the drapes and I would look outside. So what began to shift for me pretty quickly was if I could just make the decision to get the coffee and look outside— I love nature— it directed me to something besides my sorrow. So there was just— and it was a flicker, It wasn't even— it was a few seconds. But I began to find that every time that I could just be thankful, not, not for anything huge, but just the smallest thing in front of me. Um, the other thing I did in learning some survival tools, and this sounds kind of macabre, but it worked for me. James died on a Saturday, and for the first few months, I wrote him a letter every Saturday, and I just poured out I poured out my anger. I poured out my sense of betrayal, my loss, my missing him, my confusion. I didn't know how to do all the stuff I was supposed to do, you know, to keep life going. But I poured it out on paper like a journal, but it was very directed to him. I'm sure that that was very cathartic for me.

Yeah.

Because, you know, it kind of got it, got it out of me. But your question about how did I— I found the tools just by trial and error. You know, I sat on the sofa way too long. I didn't want to talk to anybody. I didn't want to go anywhere. Um, but I was thinking and I was finding little places of gratefulness, or I was showing up for my kids. Those were the very earliest things.

Yeah, well, thanks for sharing that. And I think that's really, really important. Um, those, those first few days, weeks, months, even a couple of years, you know, people are, you know, feeling such overwhelming emotions. And I feel sometimes kind of bad when people listen to my podcast or something, they hear me talk about growth. And they're like, I'm not even thinking about growth. And I never want to forget those, how I felt during that time. So those, those tips, you know, when we talk about gratitude, I, when I first heard about gratitude, I was like, I don't want to hear about this, right? No. But just getting out of bed, making the coffee, opening the drapes, just something that simple, and giving yourself credit for that, because that is a Herculean effort when you've just gone through the type of thing you've gone through.

Well, and I feel exactly the same as you do. 5 years in. Yeah, I'm writing about rewriting your story. I'm trying to show people ways to get life moving again. To feel good about themselves, feel like they are enough, have courage, have resilience, all those things. But like you, I want to say and acknowledge and honor the first, the first year is just baby steps. And it's so hard. And grief, grief is a jagged line. It's not a straight line to healing. Straight line out.

I completely agree. You know, people ask me sometimes, what about the 5 stages of grief? And I'm like, no, there aren't 5 stages of grief. There are 500, 5,000, 5,000, 500,000. Like, yes. And it's back and forth. And as you said, jagged line is a great way to put it. But the other thing that you said that I think is really, really important is giving yourself permission to feel all those emotions. To feel anger, to feel betrayal. And again, with suicide, that can happen. But also someone that— you might have lost someone to cancer, people still might feel that. Why, you know, why did you leave me? Or an accident or whatever it is. And pouring those emotions out and understanding our loved ones can take it.

Yeah. And, and James and I had a pretty honest relationship. He was the nice one and I was the dramatic, tough one, I think. But he was used to me saying, no, you know, we're not going to look at it that way, or no, that's not what's right. For the kids, or, you know, really, you know, kind of bouncing off of him sometimes when he wanted to do things in a much smoother way. And so writing to him in a sort of aggressive way was really indicative of how our relationship had worked.

Yeah.

And I have to say, and you've spoken a lot to this, um, I have felt his Brian D Smith's presence. And I don't mean this in like that I have deified him or that I am worshiping him. Please don't take it that way. But I certainly have felt his presence and his guidance. It was hard at first to hold on to it and wonder if that was real. And I didn't have a— I sort of didn't have balance with it. But as the years have gone on, you know, I've learned I don't write to James anymore, but I talk to him every day. If things are going on, if I'm having a rough spot, or if I know one or the other of the boys is— I just had a son who had surgery and was like, James, you get those angels and you'll take care of this boy. You get in that surgery room, you know, it's like I talked to him. And it might sound ridiculous to some people, and that's okay. But I do believe there's communication with other spirits, spirits who have gone on?

Oh, I can— I completely think there is. I— well, I don't think there is, I know that there is. Um, and it's, you know, it's interesting how in our society we feel almost ashamed sometimes to say that, that we communicate with our loved ones on the other side. But, um, and sometimes religion keeps us from doing that, which I don't really understand because religion teaches us we're spiritual beings. And I don't want to get too far down that rabbit hole. But I do completely— I know, I think it's fine to talk to our loved ones. In fact, I think it's preferred. But as you said, they're not— we don't want to deify them either. They're still the person that they were. And we still, again, having the complicated feelings we have with them after they've gone is the same as the complicated feelings we have when they're here, right? They do something that hurts you, you're gonna, you're gonna be mad about it. And that's okay to let that out.

Yeah, I had, I had a number of experiences through my childhood and early years, you know, I think as children, we're just so open to everything spiritually. And sometimes we don't even understand what's happening to us. But I had had a number of experiences that sort of took me down that path of believing in communication with spirits that have gone on, but I didn't ever talk about it or explore it or go after it, if you will. I was raised Christian, James was raised Catholic. And so for a few, you know, I don't know, maybe the first 10 years of our marriage, I converted to Catholicism and went to church with him. And one of the things that I learned in the Catholic Church that helped me so much after he died was there's very much this belief in communication with the saints. Yes, you know, speaking to the saints, and they believe that everybody is a saint as they go up. And I may be saying that wrong, and some priests could come after me, but I learned a tool, a prayerful tool to communicate with those who've gone on, whether you, you know, they're named a saint or not. And so that helped me in feeling freedom, I think, to just keep James in my everyday life, keep him in the boys' lives. To ask for his help. So it seemed, um, it wasn't unnatural.

Yeah, I think it's, I think it's very natural. And going back to the Catholic Church, for example, as you said, you know, they, they— and I was raised, uh, Pentecostal, so we didn't, we didn't necessarily believe in praying to saints, but Catholics do. But then on the other hand, sometimes some Catholics will say, well, you, you can't talk to your loved one that's on the other side. It's like, well, why not? If I can talk to a saint, that part really never made a lot of sense to me. Right. But I can tell that, that, that brings you, again, that brings you comfort. I think that that's great. And also you can, you can process, I think, through those emotions. If you can still feel like I can have the conversations, like you said, the, the writing, that, that cathartic aspect of getting that out. Um, and I've seen sometimes, unfortunately, people that have certain religious beliefs that'll block them from even expressing their anger because I'm not supposed to be angry.

No, I was furious. I was like, how could you do this to me? But how could you do this to these boys? They are amazing young men, not fully grown. How could you? I came to a much softer place in that after a while, and I came to feel like thought he was doing us a favor because he was so depressed. He wasn't functioning well in life, and I think he was in a complete fuzz by the time he finally took his life. There were lots of pointers toward that. Um, but when you mentioned defiant gratitude, early on, I mean, everybody was telling me things like, oh, you need to be grateful for the years he had— you had with him. Oh, he was such a good man. And I mean, I'd want to punch him in the face.

Yeah. I understand.

I would be like, are you kidding me? That's what you're gonna say to me right now? Absolutely not. You know, and then I'd go home and I'd stomp around and be so mad. And then I began to just kind of laugh at myself and go, all right, you want me to be grateful? I'll be grateful because it won't— I'm not going to let this sorrow kill me. Very backwards way that I came to, okay, I'm gonna look out the window and be grateful. And I'm okay, now I'll do the 5 things. You know, it was like, so defiant about— I did the gratitude thing. I did it because I was like, this sorrow is going to kill me if I don't do something.

Yes.

And even though I did it defiantly, it started to change me.

Yeah, yeah. And I, and I understand that because I, you know, my daughter passed from, from natural causes, you know, in her sleep. But I still had this, the sense of of anger, of, of like— and not, not at her necessarily, but I think we, we directed toward God, the universe, whatever. You can direct it toward the doctor because she had a cardiologist, and, you know, there was a time I wanted to punch him in the face because, you know, he didn't tell us to expect this because she was totally fine as far as, you know, as far as we knew. So there, there is that, that thing that we like— anger, disappoint, whatever— that we want directed at somebody. But that can also fuel us. So as you said, I like that idea of defiant gratitude, because when people talk to me about gratitude, I'm like, yeah, I don't want to hear about that. But then I finally started like looking at little things, like you said, you know, just the fact that the bed is warm, or it's, you know, or I have power. You know, we were talking earlier about, you know, you're in a situation where you're having— you're experiencing weather, And I tell people, like, you know, one of the things you can think about is that feeling you have when the power goes off and it's been off for a while and you're worried about the food in the refrigerator and all that stuff, and the house is getting hot because it's summer, that when the power kicks back on, that feeling that you have, that gratitude, you can experience that, you know, really pretty much any time. So there's always something that we can turn our attention toward, and you start to find those things if you look for them.

I think too, for me, and like I said, I've always had a strong spiritual life. Gratitude was leading me to a stronger spiritual exploration and in ways that I hadn't explored previously. But, but the gratitude definitely was, you know, operated, it had agency in it in turning, you know, certainly shifting my mind and allowing me to have moments where I wasn't just completely, you know, besotted with grief, because it would take me out of it. But I also began to shift my life. I didn't realize it. But that, that defiant gratitude, then, you know, kind of being able to be more prayerful, whatever you call, you know, your, you know, the God of your understanding, doesn't matter to me. I'm not proselytizing in any way. I just believe that spirit speaks to everybody. Call it universal consciousness, you know, the universe, whatever. I say God, but I did, I did start to be moved more towards spirit.

Yeah. Now, I'm gonna ask you this question. It was on my list of questions to ask you, but I'll let you answer however you choose to. People will ask you, like, when did it shift? When did things shift for you? So was there a time or a moment or an event where things shifted for you? How was that experience for you?

No, it was teeny tiny baby steps over time. But I, I, you know, I'm sure I had movement in the first year and a half or two, but not a lot. It was after the 2-year mark. And I hate to say that because it just sounds like forever to anyone who's listening. Yeah, it was true gutted out survival the first couple of years. It wasn't some, you know, light came down from above and I was well enough to go on with life. I did begin to make some change, pretty big shifts at the 2-year mark, um, not really knowing where they were leading me. But I had, um, I closed my jewelry business just a few months before James died, and I did that due to fraud. Um, I had to shutter the business to pay back all the fraudulent, um, credit cards and things that this person had created. I couldn't, I couldn't carry it forward. And that was devastating to me. I had a lot of shame as an entrepreneur, as a woman. Um, I had another business, very successful regional marketing firm that was just beautiful and running well and debt-free. But this other business that was a passion business, this kind of Cinderella story in the jewelry, you know, fine jewelry design world. Sure. So I walked into James's suicide without the kind of fearlessness and courage that I had lived my life prior, because of the shame I was carrying from this business collapse. So I was already in a place, you know, that was unhealthy, where, you know, I think it kept me in isolation and guilt. Maybe longer than some people would have stayed there, but I was already pretty far down because of the pain. So I had to, you know, I kind of had to really dissect that a lot and go, why can't I— why can't I make any movement in my sorrow and grief? And the first thing that really dawned on me, but it was near the 2-year mark, was because you are carrying so much stinking shame from this business collapse that you won't share your pain. And I now say to everybody, sharing your pain lessens its power. You take the power out of the pain. When you sit with friends, trusted friends and family, and share, you know, the depths of your heart as much as you can, your friends and family begin to carry it with you. It does lighten it. I didn't do that the first 2 years. The shame kept, kept me in isolation. I think suicide, the asking the whys, having guilt around it, that kept me in isolation. It kept me from healing. So at about the 2-year mark, I had begun to process through some of that, and I wanted to shift. I wanted to shift out, and I felt life calling me to something more purposeful. Um, I had had 2 businesses, you know, the marketing business had, had remained to be, you know, very successful. The jewelry business was a crazy wild ride to success that I had never even imagined. And then it was my biggest failure, if you want to call it that. But I take, I take responsibility in that failure. Yes, it was because of fraud, but it's a, it's a big lesson I've learned about being present. I was running two big businesses. I was working all the time. And I probably wasn't present enough to see what was going on right underneath my nose. I was off designing. I was off selling, you know. Um, but at that 2-year mark, I was starting to feel called, and I didn't know what I was called to, but I knew I couldn't keep running this big marketing agency and kind of have a do-over. So my agency was almost 20 years old, and, um, I, I sold, closed it, made sure every single person had a job, made sure all my trusted clients were placed with other, you know, agencies they were comfortable with, and I walked away from it. And I mean, that's like, who does that? Well, yeah, without knowing what next steps were. But in the 2 years that I kind of, you know, like, sat in a cocoon, um, I, I wanted to make— I had never lived my life in a way where I was like, okay, You're the source, I'm the resource. I want to do whatever you want me to do on this earth. I had never done that. I was so driven for success and perfectionism and all the stuff that comes with that, you know, that just striving mentality. So when I allowed myself the freedom to close a successful business and go, there's another run in me, I don't know what it is, But I deep down really wanted to make sense of the collapse of the jewelry business and the shame. I really wanted to talk to others about that and help others who were trapped in it. And I wanted to, I wanted to make some sense of the tragedy that happened to me and my children. The only thing I knew to do was to talk about it, because people didn't want to talk about it. You know, we don't want to talk about suicide. But we don't have any language around death. We don't have— we don't give people time. I mean, 2 weeks off, you're supposed to be back at work and functioning, right? We don't, we don't give ourselves time to grieve and to feel it. And so I just began to be willing to talk about my story. And that's when I started to see growth.

Yeah. Wow. Thank you. That was, that was a great answer. And someone asked me that question the other day, you know, it was an interview, like, at what point? And I'm like, there's it's, I said, it's like asking what time the— I know technically there's a time when the sun rises, but if you're watching the sunrise, there's no— it just comes gradually, right? And but you, you said something I think is extremely important there about a couple of things. One is the grief of losing something that's precious to you as a business that you started is actually grief too. So we talk about grief, we often talk about the death of someone, but you're going through a grief event already with with the shuttering of your business. And then shame. Shame keeps us isolated. Shame keeps us from sharing our story. I think I would say that guilt, I found, is a big block to us being able to release our grief. But shame is just as bad.

Shame is just— I mean, Brené Brown has done such a beautiful job making shame the— she's given context to it in our culture so that we talk about it at the dinner table kind of thing. But I do, you know, it's been hard for me speaking about the shame of the business and the shame of James's suicide in one, you know, in one context, because one is certainly not as important as the other. But you're exactly right. You know, I, I shuttered the business. And James packed up the business, you know, I had 2 salons, and then I was in jewelry stores, you know, all over the US and some in Europe. And James was the one who said, you don't ever need to go back in there, I'm going to pack it up for you. I don't want you to feel this. I think that was the end of February. COVID was announced March 12, I think. And James died on April 19th. So I didn't have a lot of runway for any kind of—

wow.

And I was, I really was just drenched in shame. I was embarrassed that I hadn't made it work. I was embarrassed for my— I had investors and I felt like I'd let them down. I was an unknown brand and, you know, movie stars and Mrs. Obama named me one of her favorite American designers. I mean, all of these people had put their faith in me and had bought my pieces instead of buying somebody much more well-known than me. You know, I was, I was mortified that I had let everybody down. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, that's, that's a lot. It's a lot to carry. Again, the guilt and then the shame. And I, one of the things I would love to do is to remove some of the shame that we have around suicide for the, for the person who took their took their life or ended their life, and also for the people who are left behind, because there's often shame for both. And, you know, coming to the understanding that people who do die by suicide, that it's not something they do out of selfishness, it's not to hurt their family or the people around them. It's usually, it's like they think, for whatever reason, we'd be better off without them. And I think coming to that understanding is really, really important. And that way we can have compassion for that person and for the family, as opposed to the shame and the anger and all that stuff that goes along with it.

Yeah, I think that's a really important point, and I wish I had used the word earlier in this interview, but it is so important to come to a place of compassion. And I like to say it takes a courageous compassion to make that turn. Yeah, to forgive, or in some part forgive the one who left us. But one of the best pieces of advice I got was from a therapist. James and I had been in therapy for a year prior to, um, his suicide. We'd never been in therapy before, but I knew something was terribly off. I just didn't understand it. Oh, sorry, I was trying to turn this off. I didn't understand it. And when he died, I immediately called the therapist who had worked with us because I thought if anybody would have known that he had that in him, she would have seen it. She was kind of in the depths of his soul for a year, right? That to me, and I— tremendously helpful. She said, Teresa, James' suicide started in childhood. She said it was, you know, things that happened to him in his childhood, the relationships he had, how he was carrying shame and hurt, feeling like he didn't measure up to an extremely successful father and uncles who had created a big company and taken it public. And he just wasn't that kind of guy. You know, he was— he sort of set back. Yeah, he was not an entrepreneur. And he carried a lot of shame for not— he felt like he disappointed But she put it in perspective for me that then I could look back and see some markers and it made sense. But that was very helpful advice. So I, I love you bringing forward the compassion, and I would say to your listeners, it takes so much courage to extend that compassion.

Yeah, well, and there's that word shame again. So, um, I, I think that's, that's maybe one of the themes of today is like, you know, we we need to overcome that. We need to, we need to move beyond that. We can't let that hold us back from reaching out for help, for, from telling our story, whatever it happens to be. And I, I really appreciate what you're doing. Again, I think especially around this, this idea of suicide, because it's such a sensitive subject, and we, and we have pathologized it in so many ways and even criminalized it. We're getting away, at least now, from the terminology of committing suicide. And I'm I'm glad to see that change in language. The people— again, that's just so hard, you know, even for, for the family, for the people who are, who are left here, you know, carrying that person's legacy forward. And you talking openly about it, I think, is really healing for a lot of people, you know.

And that was one of the beautiful things about starting a podcast. I started it not so much to tell my story, but being willing. But I wanted to just open up a space where anybody surviving anything, because One of the things I wasn't as aware of before all of this happened was that there's not a person on this earth who isn't surviving something. We are all in some kind of survival mode. We are all in some kind of pain. And so I wanted to, you know, create a space, an open space where people can talk about anything that they're surviving. The wonderful gift, kind of the kiss I got in it, you know, was that every time I interviewed somebody, I felt like I was the one who got the healing. Yeah, their stories, as I explored, you know, what was going on with them and their pain, I took something away that helped me. That was pretty wonderful.

That's an extremely important lesson. Because even though we now all know intellectually that other people are suffering too, we tend to think, oh, I'm the only one going through this. I'm the only one, you know, losing a child, losing a spouse, you know, child, having a rough childhood, not living up to expectations. We allow that to again isolate ourselves and to shame ourselves. We think everybody else has got it together. We're the only ones feeling this pain and we should just get over it and move on.

You're exactly right. And you know what? Everybody's experiencing some sort of that. And it does, you know, I think you get to a certain age where you kind of get this attitude of, okay, I'm just going to say what it is no matter what it is, you know, my faults, because I'm too old to hide them at this point. But, you know, when you're younger, I think, you know, we do have this perfectionist mentality in our culture.

Yeah.

That drives us so much and we don't, we're not taught that it's so helpful just to say, hey, these are the things, this is, this is me, flaws and all. And you know what? I'm enough just like this. I, I'm enough as a human being because I am.

Yeah. Yeah.

And we're not ingrained with that early.

No, we're not. And unfortunately, it takes a while to figure these things out, you know, for me, as I— because, you know, we, every— we look around and everybody thinks, oh, my family's dysfunctional, but it's only my family. And I've realized everybody's family's dysfunctional. It's just some people hide it better than others.

I didn't want mine to be. I, you know, I, I was striving to create this beautiful family that had as little dysfunction as possible, and oh my gosh, look what happened to us.

Well, you know, it's funny because with my— when my daughter was growing up— my daughter's, uh, 28 now, um, you know, I would think— because she'd say stuff like, well, you and Mom aren't perfect or whatever. I'm like, okay, what's wrong with this? What are we not doing right? Right? Because you, you want to be— you don't want to be dysfunctional, but we all, we all have our things. We all have the baggage that we carry from our, from our childhood. Um, and again, when we get those things out, it's, it's, it becomes freeing, you know, just, just admit it, let it out. So I think that's very helpful. Um, I know one of the things I wanted to talk to you about, because I know you say that nature can become a tool for our healing, and you, you touched on it earlier, just drawing the blinds, but what other, what other ways did you find that nature is helpful?

Oh my gosh, and I still do. Like, I'm sitting in my kitchen right now and I'm looking out at all green. And it is, you know, it just fills me up. I've always been like that since I was a little girl, you know, little things, the little beautiful thing, you know, the tiny little flower, or, you know, just, just nature, just green was so helpful to me. And James and I spent so much of our lives hiking. We love to hike. And we'd go everywhere we could on vacations, take the kids, you know, hiking was something we just adored. Um, he did it a lot better than I did. He always got to the top first and would laugh at me as I was huffing and puffing my way up. Um, and it was really hard after he died because the things I had done to— you know, walking and hiking is meditative and can also become very prayerful, very releasing of stress, all those things. And all of a sudden, I didn't have anybody to do it with, and I didn't want to go back to where it— him, because that was just like, oh, I can't even bear to think of, you know, watching him walk. I imagine— just had all these images of, I can't do that again.

I can't.

I had a spiritual teacher at the time, and there was— I don't know how many months in it was, I just couldn't stop crying. I just, I was just sobbing all the time. And she got very firm with me, and she said, 'Teresa, go get your feet on the ground.' Well, I thought initially— I thought she was saying just go for a walk, but it was a much bigger concept. She was saying go immerse yourself in the earth. And she took me to a stream one day not very far from my house, and, you know, there are people around, and I was acting like a raving idiot. And she was like, 'I want you to look at this water, and I want you to look above you, and I want you just to start releasing your sorrow into this stream.' give it back to Mother Earth where it came from. I just want you to pour it out right here in nature. And I was, I was sobbing because I was sobbing all the time. There was something I did feel a release. I did realize, okay, nature is beautiful, and nature surrounds us and does so much good in the world. But somehow I began to have this relationship with nature where I felt like, just like I said, when we share our pain with others, it lessens its power. I began to feel nature carry my pain for me. Completely. And I know that sounds really woo-woo, probably, but I got more well when I was outside, completely immersed myself in the trees, in the trails, in the flowers, you know, it, it just was very healing for me.

I find the same thing. I started walking a little bit before my daughter passed away for exercise, and I would walk, you know, maybe a mile or two you know, a day or something. And after she passed, it became like something I have to do. I walk 6 miles a day now. First, first thing every morning I do is I walk, and I love to see the birds and the squirrels and the, you know, the frogs and the ducks and the hawks and, you know, all the things around. So when I was walking the other day and I walked through the neighborhood, it's like there's not a lot of nature, but there, there's some. But there's something about just, you know, just being outdoors, just being outside. But you talked, you kind of touched upon it. So you used to hike with James a lot. Did you— you said you found that maybe difficult at first to do it without him? Because I find, and as you said, that was thinking about a friend of mine who loved music. And after her son passed, she said, I can't listen to music. And I thought that was just— I felt sorry for her because I couldn't stand not listening to music. It's really something that I need. So how did you get over that? Like, getting past where it hurt you to be in nature to the point where it was healing again?

For a long time, I couldn't go back to the trails we hiked. Yeah, I just couldn't go there. But I found new places and it hurt. It hurt. And I, you know, I still miss him all the time. He was my best friend. He was my buddy. He would say, we're peas and carrots. No, um, but, but I also knew there was healing in it. And I would know somewhere in my spirit that James knew how much I loved the outdoors. He knew how much— I mean, he made me get out because I'm a— I have been in the past a workaholic. And, you know, at the end of the day, he would say, no way you're going to sit in the house. We are outside, you know, come on. Even if it was pitch black, he would, you know, take me on a walk. So he knew how much it soothed me. And so I would begin to understand he would want me to have this feeling. So at first I found places we hadn't gone, and then there was a time when I went back to— in that month when COVID was announced and before he died, um, you know, my whole business turned into Zoom meetings, so I was in front of a computer all day long. And we made a pact that I would close down at 4 o'clock every day and we would go to a state park near the house and we would, you know, Matt all masked up, and there were only a few people on the trails, you know, just spend those last 2 hours of the day outside, pack up the car and have the waters and have snacks and, you know, be all ready for us. So we hiked those trails every single day for a month.

Yeah.

And the last, you know, I guess it was the day before he died, we were walking and my youngest son called and said, Mama, what is wrong with Daddy? He hasn't called me in a few days. Is he upset with me? Because they talked multiple times, you know, or text in a day. And I didn't— and I didn't understand. And I was like, I don't know, he's right here. Here's the phone. And James was strange about it because what he had tried to do was begin to distance himself from that love.

Yeah.

So after about a year, I thought, because I could so clearly see him that day walking in front of me, exactly what he had on, how his gait moved, him talking to Andrew. And I thought, I, I need to go, you know, I need to go to that trail, and it's gonna hurt, but I'm gonna go anyway, by myself. And I, I sat in all the places where I had memories. And I cried like a baby. But I was so thankful for his life.

Yeah.

So thankful for all he had given to me. And I could just feel him there with me and him urging me on to be healthy and to get outside, get my feet on the ground, you know, kind of. And so now I just take every opportunity I can to be outside. It's just who I am.

Yeah, that's so beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. And as you were saying, I was thinking about that arc of gratitude from just like let's get up in the morning, let's just make coffee, let's be grateful for opening the— open the blinds and looking outside, to the point where you got past that, that initial pain from the, you know, being in that place, and you were able to be grateful for his life. And that's not a— I want to say to people, listen, this is not an easy progression. Maybe it's natural, but it's not easy. It takes time. You're not going to get there, you know, overnight. But you, you can get there to the point where that, that thing that triggers you or activates you, you know, so much right now, later on will soften and actually will bring back the positive memories. My daughter and I, uh, there's a— we like White Castle, so there's a White Castle in our house, and my, my wife would not eat it, so I would take the girls there. And so every time I would drive by there, I would think about my daughter Shayna because I took her there first when she was like 5 years old. So for a long time, I hated driving by that White Castle. It just made me really upset, and I would avoid it. Um, but now I drive by there and I think about that first time that I took her there. But that took— it took a couple of years to get to that point.

Yeah, no, I completely understand. So Shayna was 3 years younger than her sister?

Yes.

Yeah. How did you navigate— I mean, it's one thing as a parent, but then you have to you still nurtured the one who's missing their sibling. How did you do that?

Yeah, well, Kayla's one of the reasons why I'm still here, because I was like, you know, I, I have to be here for my, my wife, uh, and my, and my daughter Kayla. So, um, you know, you, you find things that help you go on. No, it sounds like for you it's your boys, right? You know, like you, you have to be there for your kids. So for me, it was like, yeah, you know, be here for her, try to model for her, you know, healthy grief as best as I can, you know, let her talk through what she wants to talk through. Kids are different. You said your boys were in their 20s when, when your husband passed. Kayla was 18. They process things differently. So, um, you know, it was, uh, but I'm proud of her. I'm super proud of her. She's 28 now, and she, she finished her degree and got her master's degree, and she's a, she's a counselor now.

So that's amazing.

Yeah, yeah.

Let's celebrate her and celebrate you as a parent and your wife, because that doesn't just happen.

It's, you know, it is a, it's a process, you know, as we talked about earlier. The grief is, um, it's a, it's a process, and it takes a while, you know. I, I really always hesitate to put timelines on things, but when I talk to someone and it's been less than 2 years, I'm like, you're still in the early, early stages of grief. If it's less than a year, you're still in shock. You, at that point, you really don't even understand what's happened. I mean, you do, of course, intellectually, but it hasn't really settled in yet.

Yeah, I made a lot of decisions in that first probably year and a half to 2 years, you know. I, I made bad— some, you know, such a capable woman before James, and then I was completely incapable. You know, I just was, I was paralyzed. And I, you know, I wish I had, somebody had said to me, don't sell anything. Don't sell the house. Don't sell anything for 2 years because you're just not ready to make good decisions. You know, there was something else. I don't know how much time we have, but, um, I wanted to go back on for your listeners.

Sure.

You know, we talked about shame, and I think this is so important. Shame keeps us in isolation. And so I would encourage anybody to, um, you know, have a group, a trusted group of people to share with. The other thing that I found, and it took me a long time to kind of unravel this, one of the things that kept me from sharing and kept me from healing was judgment. Judgment of myself and self-judgment, whether it was about the loss of the business and feeling less than, that I wasn't good enough, that I wasn't a good enough business person, good enough creative, all those things to overcome that. But self-judgment just eats at you. It's like it wraps you in something really nasty and you have to fight to get out of it. I would encourage your readers to be gentle with themselves, your readers, listeners to be gentle with themselves, because one of the things that I've learned is to celebrate the small wins, you know, to honor how far— if I could only honor the fact that I could pull the drapes. Yeah, it was a step. I didn't really realize that at the time. But now looking back on how that jagged road of grief For anybody who's listening, I just say honor how far you've already come because it's darn hard. And if you've made any progress, celebrate yourself. And when you kind of take the judgment off yourself, I think what happens with us as human beings is we often judge others because of our insecurity.

Yeah.

When you stop judging yourself, you don't need to judge others either, and your, your life becomes a lot freer.

Yeah.

And so it's those three things that get us messy. I think it's, you know, shame, guilt keep us in isolation, and judgment.

Yeah.

Urge your readers to be gentle with yourselves. Why am I saying readers? This is not a book. Yeah, I'm sorry.

Yeah, no, that, that is, you know, it's funny because you said shame, uh, guilt and judgment, and as we were saying, you know, you're talking about that, you know, we were both raised as Christians and we were taught about Satan, you know, the devil. Uh, the original— one of the original words for Satan is hasatan, which is the accuser. And we— and as I've studied positive intelligence and some other psychological forms, we have— we all have this judge inside of ourselves, this internal thing, and we are so hard on ourselves. And if, if there is a Satan, if there is a devil, that's what the devil is. It's, it's that voice telling you that you're not good enough, to, to stay in your shame, to stay in your guilt, You got to let that stuff go.

Yes, the self-judgment and whatever you believe the evil is, you know, against the good in this world, it's to keep us from being our best.

Yeah.

One of the things I did, and again, all my things I think sound so sometimes silly, but years before, I had spent a lot of time in LA doing film work.. And I— somebody had given me Louise Hay's book about positive affirmations. And, you know, I was just seeking anything that could help me hold on to something that would be a go forward. And like you said, you know, there's just— there's this like avenger inside of you trying to keep you down, keep you in shame, keep you from, you know, getting out and creating your life again. And so I began to just take plain old sticky notes and write down how I wanted to feel because I was not feeling how I wanted to feel. Just, I want to feel peaceful. I want to feel confident. And so at first, you know, I couldn't do it the way Louise Hay would have said to do it, or now more modern affirmation proponents would say, you absolutely state what you want.

Yeah. Yeah.

But I did. I put it on my mirror where I got dressed in the mornings. I put it by my gear shift and I put it in my wallet. Those were my 3 places because I I saw them all the time. And as little as that sounds, seeing I want to feel courageous, I want to feel confident, I want to feel peaceful. I just had it inside my being every day because of the places I was looking. I think it's really helpful to put positive affirmations in front of us or dreams to begin to build your dreams back, what you want in your future, and to write it down. And I now have this thing that I do. It's a 369, whatever I'm working on. You know, 3 times in the morning, 6 times at noon, and 9 times before I go to bed at night, because I'm building forward the life that I want. But it's just, you know, the smallest things. I was such a confident person before, and I had no confidence, and I just wanted to feel some confidence again. So it, you know, would encourage everyone to just find a few little positive things you want in front of you in your journey that you just can't seem to grasp a hold of emotionally, write them down, put them where you'll see them all the time, because they will begin to infect you in the best of ways.

Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, we do— we all have self-talk, and you can— your self-talk can either be positive or it can be negative, and it's your choice. And I love your, you know, your realism with this stuff, because, you know, gratitude— again, when we're going through the early part of grief, you I'm not going to be grateful that I, you know, that, you know, you're young and you can find somebody else or whatever, um, the stupid stuff that people say. But you can be grateful that you got up and got to the coffee machine and made some coffee. Uh, you can be grateful that, you know, the sun's out today or that the power's still on. You can be grateful for things like that. And when it comes to the affirmations, I've heard some of the stuff like, you know, I, you know, if you can't get to the point where you say, I am beautiful, say, I want to feel beautiful. That's a good start. That's a start.

It's a start. And mine was not, you know, like I said, I didn't make the full turn to I am confident, I am courageous, right? Early days. But I did begin to identify, you know, what I wanted to feel going forward and also felt very strongly it's what James would want for me.

Yeah.

And, and I have shared that with people and that they, they're kind of taken aback a little bit with it. But, you know, I encourage my employees, I encourage my friends, I'm like, write it down, put it everywhere you can see it, whatever it is that you want next in life, whatever you're building forward for, if it's the way you feel, if it's an abundance of wealth, if it's I want to have a child, whatever that is, put it in front of you in writing and, and make sure it just begins to infect your body with its goodness.

Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, the first step is wanting to feel it. You know, for those people that are early, early in grief, you, you may not even want to feel— you don't feel like it's possible. So if it's not possible, how could you want it? So if you get to the point where you can get to the point where you want to feel better, where you want to rebuild your life, if you want to move forward, that's that's, that's a step, you know. I tell people that when people call me, I'm like, this is the fact that you called me, the fact that you're listening to this podcast is a step.

100%. And like I said, congratulate yourself that you're trying, you're listening. Yeah, that shows that you're walking out of the sorrow in some way. May not feel like it, but if you're listening, you want healing.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, Teresa, we are coming to the end of our time. I'd like for you to remind people, I know you your podcast. Let's get people the name of your podcast, your book, and where people can find out more about you.

Yeah, so my podcast is called, called thesoultalks.podcast, and it's on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and I shoot it as an interview show, so you can view it on YouTube. And then my book is available at Amazon and at Barnes Noble. It's called He's Not Coming Back: Rewriting Life After Loss. My website is Soul Talks with Theresa, and you can learn lots more about me there.

Yeah, well, it's been a pleasure getting to know you today. Thanks for doing this.

Absolutely the same, and I just applaud your journey and how you're helping people, what you're putting into the world. Thank you.

All right, well, we're glad we made it through. I know you were having storms. We got through it, so— all right, all right, have a good afternoon.

Take care, Brian. Thank you.

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