My Grief Story

The Before

I had a lovely life. Two beautiful boys aged 10 and 12, a loving and supportive husband and a thriving leadership coaching practice since 2009. In the summer of 2017 we had an incredible 2-week-long family trip driving across the country on the way to bring our oldest son, Ben, to play in a baseball tournament in Cooperstown, NY. We stayed with dear friends along the way in Madison, WI, Chicago, IL, Washington, DC, Wilmington, DE, Milwaukee, WI and had an awesome time. But when I was snapping photos, I noticed that Ben had a crooked smile. That’s weird, I thought. I made a mental note to bring him to his pediatrician as soon as we got home.

The Earthquake

Then my world was completely upended. After examining him, our pediatrician ordered a full brain and spinal MRI which illuminated a mass in his brain stem. He would need a biopsy and debulking surgery as soon as possible. He spent a month in the hospital after that surgery, and we learned that the tumor was a very rare, fast growing cancer that was fatal. We were told that we had 6-18 months. We got 13. They were the most beautiful and brutal months of my life.

Living With Cancer

His biopsy surgery - a craniotomy - required significant recovery and rehabilitation, and I set aside my coaching practice to be able to be Ben’s primary care provider. My husband and I were both his nurses, thrown into learning how to care for a patient with a feeding tube and tracheostomy. This meant taking turns sleeping in his room and being on call each night for many weeks. The sleep deprivation was akin to having a new baby, and the additional scare of always being on alert for any change in breathing or low oxygen was something I never imagined having to do as a mom.

The year was filled with heartache and loss. When illness causes decline, you lose someone bit by bit. One day we’d wake up and his eyesight was declining. The next, he was unable to walk any distance and needed a wheelchair. I remember giving him his medications in the morning and then hiding out in the bathroom to choke down sobs of guttural sorrow for what he was going through and for us, losing our son little by little. Utter devastation are the only words that come close to describing it.

Cancer – or any devastating illness – shapes a family. Our other son was parented less that year. It was the first year I outsourced his birthday to a trampoline park (which he loved, but I felt like I was just throwing money at the problem). Thankfully our family and friends supported us all and I don’t think he ever felt a lack of love. The guilt of not spending as much time together as a normal family was real. I don’t think anyone goes through something like this without guilt. We were all focused on Ben’s health and keeping him with us with the highest quality of life possible for the time he had. You make choices based on this value and other things fall away, sometimes really important things.

I learned that focusing on the past or what lay ahead was crazy making. The only way I stayed sane was to focus on the moment I was in, literally putting one step in front of the other many days. The way I found joy was through gratitude: for the comfortable couch I napped on, for the time we had, for the beautiful moon I got to look at on sleepless nights, for the ability Ben still had to do things he loved like reading and cracking jokes.

After multiple hospital stays, treatments, prayers, tears, love and support from a whole army of medical professionals, family, friends and strangers, Ben died on October 31st 2018. He was 13, just two weeks shy of his 14th birthday.

And then came the real grieving.

The Aftermath

The simplest way to describe how our now three-person family grieved is to say we did so in our own separate corners. Literally. I was on the couch, our son in his room and my husband on the lower level. We were each trying to survive and had little to give to each other. We all were grieving differently, and over time – and with the added stress of living in a pandemic world - a toxic dynamic creeped in. My husband and I separated and planned to divorce. I essentially took on parenting alone, took a job at a company for stability and endured more loss than I knew was possible. Not only had I lost Ben, I lost my partner. I lost my family. And at this same time, my father became ill after a fall and died within 7 short weeks.

With all this to carry I still needed to show up to work. “How the hell do people do this?” I frequently wondered. The anguish was debilitating.

At times, the distraction of work was a relief. At others, I simply needed to have my own private meltdown – a challenging thing to do in an office with glass walls. I found the work less fulfilling than what I was doing in my own coaching practice. In fact, it illuminated how much I gave up by letting it go for the stability of a corporate job. With the support of my incredible team, I decided to leave after just 14 months and reignite my executive coaching practice to do work that is deeply rewarding and to work with leaders who want to be more effective and fulfilled themselves.

Recombobulating

Today, my practice has expanded to work with leaders in grief in addition to the work I do in developing executive leaders. I’m still on my own grief journey, but I’ve developed more capacity for life, my work and for holding space for others on this journey. Grief will always be a part of our lives because grief is intertwined with love. The bigger the love, the greater the grief. Making it go away is impossible. But what is possible is to grow your life around it.

So what has helped me? I believe in leveraging experts to help you when you need it, and, I did just that. I started working with a grief therapist. In fact, I’ve worked with THREE therapists. I’ve learned from them all. I’ve learned strategies and tools that have been critical in my own grieving process. In fact, with the support of a tremendous therapist-coach and by doing our own individual work, my husband and I reconciled and are now able to put our love and tools into action in a way we never were before. I now share these tools and practices with the people I work with.

Another important part of my healing has come through participating in and then facilitating a mental fitness program through Positive Intelligence. There was rich learning here for me, including the notion that while my grief is unique to me, my pain is not unique. We all experience loss and grief at some point in our lives. This made me more intrigued about how to support others in this process. As a result, I became a Certified Grief Educator to support my work with leaders experiencing loss.

At first I was a little gun-shy: did I really want to work with people who were navigating loss? Won’t I just be sad all the time? What I’ve found is exactly the opposite: coaching grieving leaders creates space for the conversations that matter most. It’s a space to be honored. It feels like my calling. My mission now is to be not only a coach to leaders who want to accomplish something big in their leadership, it’s to walk alongside those who are leading while grieving. Because leading is hard; but leading while grieving is brutal. I’m here to help you integrate who you are with how you lead after loss.