Under the Influence (with Jo Piazza) - March 13, 2025


Navigating Grief and Grief Influencing Online

Topics
grief influencers
Can You Change Your Personality？ What if Social Media Were Good for Tween Girls？

Episode Stats


Length

34 minutes

Words per minute

151.38

Word count

5,204

Sentence count

307

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
00:00:00.000 Hi, all. Joe here, and you are listening to Under the Influence.
00:00:11.240 Today's episode is a difficult one, and we're going to talk about the loss of a child.
00:00:18.000 I think it's an important and powerful episode, but I also want you to protect yourselves.
00:00:23.160 Our guest is Susie Shaw. She's a mom who faced the unimaginable loss of her child, William,
00:00:28.480 and has emerged with immense strength and resilience. Susie's world turned upside down
00:00:35.060 on February 19, 2019, when William went missing during a family ski vacation in Big Sky, Montana.
00:00:43.960 Was eventually found dead, and the tragic incident marked the beginning
00:00:48.240 of a life forever changed for Susie and her entire family.
00:00:52.360 today we're talking about the challenges of grieving we're digging into the need for better
00:00:59.720 bereavement support in our society and we're talking about the world of grief influencers
00:01:05.060 online who can both help and harm those going through one of the worst moments of their lives
00:01:12.020 but first we're going to start with suzy's story i had my first son in 2009 his name was william
00:01:21.420 and then we welcomed our second son Kai in 2012 and it felt like we were living the dream. My
00:01:31.380 husband was doing great at his job. We had just recently bought a beautiful home in Carlisle,
00:01:37.840 Massachusetts. I was a stay-at-home mom, really happy in that role and it felt like, again,
00:01:46.080 We were just on top of the world. My husband is a big, avid skier, grew up skiing and wanted to
00:01:53.500 share that with his children. I also was a skier, but a fair weather skier. But I went along with
00:01:59.660 the family and enjoyed our ski vacations. So in 2019, we set out for Big Sky, Montana
00:02:07.980 for a family ski vacation. William was nine at the time. My son, Kai, was six.
00:02:15.400 And we had a couple of great days out in Big Sky. But on Tuesday, February 19th, 2019,
00:02:27.340 my son, William, my oldest, he was following along behind my husband on a very easy trail
00:02:34.300 after conquering Lone Peak which is the hardest part of Big Sky. So they were just traveling back
00:02:41.780 along the mountain to meet me and my younger son who weren't able to do the really hard Lone Peak
00:02:47.400 and in an instant everything went from we were having a beautiful family day on the mountain to
00:02:53.240 absolute chaos and tragedy. William went missing for about two and a half hours. It started to snow.
00:03:00.820 It started to get dark on the mountain. We couldn't find him. And eventually, probably around 4 p.m., he was found. He had suffered a blunt force trauma to the head and chest after having gone off the trail and he hit a tree.
00:03:15.340 and they found him at the bottom of a tree and our whole life completely changed after that moment
00:03:21.440 we didn't really have any support out in big sky at the moment that he died we were shocked in
00:03:29.460 deep shock we immediately felt the need to escape big sky montana so the next morning after having
00:03:37.620 not slept at all we boarded a plane back home to corlisle mass with just our six-year-old in tow
00:03:44.360 We had gone out as a family of four. We returned as a family of three and started the long and still enduring process of trying to figure out how to move forward after child loss.
00:03:59.600 And here we are today.
00:04:01.740 And here you are today. It's something that is every parent's worst nightmare. It's unimaginable.
00:04:11.260 How did you and your husband, what did you do in those early months to get through this?
00:04:20.480 Yeah, we did a lot, actually. So both he and I were very familiar and comfortable with the idea of mental health support.
00:04:30.680 We had both been to therapy in the past and we felt fairly educated in that world and that it was helpful.
00:04:37.500 So we came home from Big Sky and we immediately staffed up and we did so for ourselves individually and also as a family.
00:04:46.440 We each got individual therapists.
00:04:49.000 We got a family therapist so that we could go with our six-year-old, Kai, and we actually still go.
00:04:55.320 And we also looked for grief support groups.
00:04:59.920 We tried out a couple and eventually found a really wonderful family support group that we, again, we still go to this day.
00:05:08.420 And we relied on our community.
00:05:11.260 I had established myself and our family as an integral part of the Carlisle community.
00:05:18.200 I did a lot of volunteering at the school.
00:05:21.260 We live in a very small town.
00:05:23.380 And so I felt like it was important to become a part of that community.
00:05:27.180 and after William died it actually really paid off for us because we were all so interconnected
00:05:34.260 and the loss of William felt like the community's loss and so we had so much support from our
00:05:41.760 friends from our family from the school even and so we felt very cared for in those initial months
00:05:49.740 another important aspect of our grief and this is a luxury item is that my husband was able to take
00:05:58.300 six months off of work the average bereavement leave for companies is about three days wait
00:06:05.980 three days the three maybe some companies don't give you any of course yeah but yeah it's three
00:06:15.120 days paid let's say and then that sort of depends too on who you've lost so if you say lose a
00:06:22.800 grandmother maybe you get less or none and if you lose a spouse or a child maybe you get three now
00:06:28.600 that's not to say that companies can make individual policies so some do support their
00:06:35.320 employees but yet the bare minimum is three days which if you lose a child it's laughable it's
00:06:42.540 laughable right of course there isn't better bereavement policies there's actually a lot of
00:06:47.260 people who are fighting for better policy but yeah so my husband was able he was a partner in his firm
00:06:54.400 and he just told his company like i need six months and that in and of itself was i think
00:07:01.500 one of the things that that saved our family we were able to spend time together as a new unit of
00:07:07.800 three and figure out what that felt like. We were able to travel and get away, create new memories
00:07:14.400 for our family. We were able to escape the sometimes heaviness that was at home and was in
00:07:22.320 our town. Everywhere we turned was in our own home and in Carlisle reminded us of William.
00:07:28.920 And so sometimes we just needed to get out of that space. And so we took a lot of trips
00:07:34.180 just to try to have some lighter moments in those awfully dark times.
00:07:42.460 So we did a whole series of things.
00:07:45.220 And again, like I said, I mean, grieving well is a luxury item.
00:07:50.280 Most people have to go right back to work, have to pay their bills, have to pay their mortgages.
00:07:55.160 And we were very lucky in the way that we were able to grieve.
00:08:00.220 And grieving shouldn't be a luxury item.
00:08:03.520 It should be something available to everyone.
00:08:06.500 Absolutely.
00:08:07.680 And I will say that my support group that we still go to, that is free of charge.
00:08:13.560 They do such a wonderful job fundraising for their organization.
00:08:19.900 And so they provide these support groups for families for no cost, which is huge.
00:08:25.540 But my therapist, on the other hand, who, by the way, is unbelievable, she charges $450 an hour.
00:08:33.100 I believe that we spent over $20,000 that first year in therapy costs alone.
00:08:39.880 And that is out of reach for so many grieving families.
00:08:43.880 Yeah.
00:08:44.400 Yes, it is.
00:08:45.340 Yes, it is.
00:08:46.100 I would say the majority of grieving families it's completely out of reach for.
00:08:50.800 Absolutely.
00:08:51.840 One of the reasons I wanted to speak to you today was to draw awareness to this,
00:08:56.600 is that everybody deserves to be able to grieve well.
00:08:59.640 And at the moment, it's just not possible for so many families.
00:09:05.980 I want us to take a quick break.
00:09:08.020 And when we get back, I want to talk about the letters that you write to William.
00:09:26.580 Okay, we are back with Suzy Shaw.
00:09:29.640 When did you start writing letters to William?
00:09:33.020 Another one of the things that I did in my early grief was to write about William and just to almost journal.
00:09:41.360 And that didn't feel like a great fit for me.
00:09:45.160 And a few months, excuse me, a few years into my grief, I went on this grief retreat.
00:09:49.600 It was organized by a grief expert.
00:09:53.040 Her name is Claire Bidwell-Smith.
00:09:55.180 And it was out in Mill Valley, California.
00:09:57.240 I think it was about four years after William died, and went to this amazing retreat for
00:10:03.160 all types of grievers.
00:10:04.620 But I was there, obviously, for child loss.
00:10:07.020 And there was a woman there who was in charge of the writing portion of the retreat.
00:10:12.500 Her name is Barry Liner Grant.
00:10:14.960 And we were sitting around in group one day, and she said to me, I hear that you're writing
00:10:20.840 about William.
00:10:21.980 What if you write to William?
00:10:24.120 William. Just that simple turn of phrase from right about William to right to William completely
00:10:31.480 changed the relationship. I was able to start forming again with my son. I had felt so
00:10:39.180 disconnected from him and from being able to have a relationship with him. And I started writing
00:10:46.100 to him, telling him about my day or how I was feeling or what my grief felt like that day.
00:10:53.140 and all of a sudden I could picture speaking to him like I could imagine him in my mind
00:11:00.480 having a conversation with him whereas before I was just writing about him and it was too
00:11:06.300 disconnected and then I decided I wanted to start sharing those letters because I felt like
00:11:12.960 the things that I was writing about him in my grief could also be applicable to people
00:11:20.060 in general, parents in general. Some of the things that I struggled with as a mother in grief felt
00:11:26.160 like they were universal challenges for all mothers or all parents. And so now it's just
00:11:32.000 become this way that I both connect with William and then share with others who are facing either
00:11:38.320 similar struggles or just the general struggles of parenthood these days.
00:11:44.720 And how has this evolved since you started doing it?
00:11:50.060 My writing? How has my writing evolved?
00:11:52.180 Yeah, yeah.
00:11:53.080 How has your writing about William evolved?
00:11:55.440 It's gotten more and more personal.
00:11:57.980 I've allowed myself to open up and be even more vulnerable, I think.
00:12:03.380 They started maybe a little bit more guarded because I was nervous to share those inner thoughts with a broad audience.
00:12:12.000 But the feedback that I get from my readers is so wonderful and they want to hear more and they want me to go deeper.
00:12:19.080 And so I've been able to do that, which I think helps me connect even more with my son.
00:12:26.860 And another thing I started to do, we were just in Montana.
00:12:30.540 We went back to Big Sky for the first time in the winter just last week to see if our family would be able to ski again.
00:12:37.580 And I wrote a letter instead of Dear William, I wrote Dear Nick.
00:12:41.760 And Nick is my husband.
00:12:42.660 And so I've started trying to include other people in my letters so that I can start connecting in that way.
00:12:51.940 And I wrote to Nick to tell him how unbelievably happy I was that he was finally able to get back to skiing with his boys, which had been a dream of his.
00:13:04.180 And I just felt like I really wanted him to know how much I saw him and how much I realized that was an important part of our grieving process for him.
00:13:15.140 So now I can, I feel like I can write these letters and share and be vulnerable in lots of different aspects of my life instead of just with William.
00:13:26.220 And how has your marriage changed through all of this?
00:13:30.020 Again, it's unimaginable and it has to change both of you.
00:13:35.960 And I don't know if both partners necessarily change in the same ways.
00:13:41.260 We don't, that's for sure.
00:13:42.900 So I am still married to my husband, Nick.
00:13:45.540 I'm still happily married to him, which is, I think, a really big deal.
00:13:49.820 When you go through immense trauma, it's not always a given that you'll make it.
00:13:54.520 One thing that we realized early on is that we had very different styles of grieving.
00:14:01.060 I am very outward in my grieving and my emotions in general.
00:14:05.580 I like to share.
00:14:06.740 I like to sit and talk with others.
00:14:09.760 And that helps me process and heal.
00:14:12.700 My husband is very internal with his grief.
00:14:15.900 So it might not look like he's grieving.
00:14:18.940 He doesn't cry that often.
00:14:20.780 And we had to understand that we both had these different ways of processing and grieving.
00:14:27.560 And so we both finally understood that we could support each other, even though we were grieving in very different ways.
00:14:35.380 And one of the most important things in grief is just to feel like you're being witnessed and you're being seen.
00:14:42.440 And so we really tried to make sure that we were doing that for each other, that I saw Nick in his grief.
00:14:47.960 He saw me in mine.
00:14:49.240 I mentioned that we go to a family support group. My husband doesn't go anymore. He went for the
00:14:55.260 first year and that was enough for him. He's not a group guy. And I understood that he wanted to
00:15:00.080 stay home and I continued to go with Kai and now I bring my new son Bodhi with me. But it was a real
00:15:06.380 challenge that first year especially. Everything about our marriage at that point reminded me of
00:15:11.900 William. Even having sex with Nick was really hard because I felt like William was right in between
00:15:17.880 us. And there was just so much pain and so much sadness that I didn't feel comfortable connecting 0.63
00:15:23.340 on an intimate level. We just had to do a lot of work going back to the luxury of grieving well.
00:15:30.740 We were just able to spend the time together to work on our marriage, to work on our family.
00:15:36.560 There was a lot of bumps. There still are. We butted heads a lot once our third child came
00:15:43.260 into our life. It wasn't planned in our original family. We were very happy having two children,
00:15:50.040 William and Kai. But when William died, we just felt like our family was so incomplete. And we
00:15:56.960 did decide together that we were going to have another child. And we thought we understood the
00:16:02.380 implications of that. But once Bodhi arrived, things got really hard for quite a few years.
00:16:10.140 and Nick especially really struggled with having another infant in the house and a toddler in the
00:16:16.300 house. He was also born during COVID. And so we didn't have a lot of help to support us in having
00:16:23.360 an infant and a toddler in the house. So that put a real strain on our marriage as well. Luckily,
00:16:28.360 things have turned around. Bodhi's now four and a half and he's a dreamboat. But adding him to
00:16:35.340 our family was a real challenge. But again, we just, we work on our marriage. We work on
00:16:40.640 a relationship on a regular basis. Yeah. I mean, because even when you don't go through something
00:16:46.640 like this, all marriages are work. It's a constant process. Every day. Actually, every single day.
00:16:56.980 Yeah. It's true. It's true. How do you guys keep William alive within the family and especially
00:17:05.180 for Bodhi who has never met him that's right so Bodhi was born after William died and we I didn't
00:17:14.140 really know I had never had this model before like how do you teach your child about their brother
00:17:19.940 who is no longer here and yet somehow we have Joe because Bodhi comes home from preschool on a
00:17:27.060 regular basis with pictures that he's drawn for William with books that he wants to share with
00:17:33.600 William like he he's part of our everyday existence and Bodhi has completely picked up on that
00:17:40.140 it started with just having a picture of William in Bodhi's room when he was born
00:17:44.720 and we have just continued to talk about William and we continue to tell stories about William at
00:17:52.320 our kitchen table at bedtime we're just always bringing William into the picture our son Kai
00:18:00.600 who's now 12 and a half he's continually talking about William as well both with us and to Bodhi
00:18:08.440 like I said Bodhi now comes to our grief support group and so that's another opportunity for Bodhi
00:18:13.680 to understand that there are other kids like him who are siblings and so Bodhi talks about him
00:18:21.600 there another thing that we did fairly early on in our community we started a non-profit it's
00:18:27.500 called William's Be Yourself Challenge. And it was started in response to a lot of William's
00:18:33.960 friends. As they were growing up, they didn't feel like they had any support for their grief
00:18:41.360 because friends of kids who die don't have support groups. There are support groups for moms and
00:18:47.640 siblings and that sort of thing. But William's friends were at a loss as to how to move forward
00:18:53.520 When they were in fourth grade and sixth grade and sixth grade, these kids are just so confused and they're missing their friend.
00:18:59.700 So we started an organization where we provide opportunities to support these kids.
00:19:06.840 And Kai is a participant in all of the things that we do.
00:19:10.660 And now Bodhi is a part of all of the things that we do.
00:19:13.260 So our community is very involved in remembering William too.
00:19:17.160 And so I think that really helps to normalize talking about our dead people.
00:19:21.800 When we bring it into the community and we show the community that we're willing to talk about it, then more people start to engage with us.
00:19:29.920 Everybody in Bodhi's preschool class knows that he has a dead brother.
00:19:34.000 It's beautiful.
00:19:35.920 Yeah.
00:19:36.540 Yes.
00:19:37.180 To be able to talk about that.
00:19:40.220 There's so many things in our culture that we no longer talk about.
00:19:45.640 We don't with children.
00:19:47.680 And I don't know why we're shielding them.
00:19:50.040 And it's only been in the past, I would say, maybe even less than 100 years because kids used to see siblings die on a much more regular basis.
00:20:01.840 Kids used to die all the time. That's why people had so many of them.
00:20:05.100 Exactly. Exactly.
00:20:07.340 But if you talk to people today who are in their 70s or 80s and they lost siblings, nobody ever talked about it.
00:20:16.800 You put Uncle Jimmy's picture in the bureau, and you were never allowed to talk about it at home.
00:20:23.300 Whereas today, I want to be talking about William.
00:20:26.660 We celebrate his birthday every year.
00:20:28.760 We have a cake.
00:20:30.000 Every 19th, William died on February 19th.
00:20:33.220 Every month on the 19th, we have a taco dinner in his honor, and we light a candle.
00:20:38.000 I want William to be a huge part of our existence.
00:20:41.900 Just my other two living children are a huge part of our existence.
00:20:45.340 And I think only then, when we start to bring these people who are important to us into our lives, can we start to normalize it outside of our own families. We celebrate Day of the Dead, because I think it's such a beautiful holiday. It's an opportunity for all of us to say our dead people's names. And so many of them feel comfortable saying our dead people's names. And you watch the movie Coco.
00:21:11.000 And if I love that movie, such a good movie. And it just expresses to you, if you don't say your people's names, then they will truly die.
00:21:20.940 I had this wonderful woman in my community. She teaches religious education at the Unitarian Church that I go to.
00:21:27.880 and she told me we all we die three times once when we take our last breath once when we're
00:21:35.460 put into the ground and once the final time when somebody says our name for the last time
00:21:41.660 and and i will never stop saying william's name and i don't think my children will either because
00:21:48.020 we don't want him to truly die he's gone from our lives physically but like i'll never stop saying
00:21:53.420 his name. And his name is a regular presence in your house, right? Oh, for sure. His name is
00:22:01.800 probably said in our house at least 15 times a day, just like a normal day, because we hang out
00:22:08.060 in William's room. There's all sorts of Legos in his room that we all go and play with. Is his room
00:22:13.320 the same as it was then? No, no. And that's always like an interesting dilemma for families who have
00:22:22.000 lost children. Some people keep it the same. Some people keep it that shrine-like place.
00:22:28.260 I was very adamant very early on that I didn't want it to be his childhood bedroom with the
00:22:35.160 bunk beds. I just didn't feel like I could be in there like that. And so we changed it into a
00:22:42.780 meditation den. It has a nice daybed and a little altar to him. But the shelves in there are still
00:22:51.360 filled with all of his favorite things so it's this unique mix of being a room where we can hang
00:22:58.980 out and rest but also very evocative of him and all of his favorite things and that really works
00:23:05.160 for our family i want us to take one more quick break and when we get back we're going to talk
00:23:11.600 about something that you and i have messaged a lot on the instagram about which is grief influencers
00:23:17.320 Yes.
00:23:18.580 Online.
00:23:23.500 Chew on this bold question from Dentine Gum.
00:23:27.400 Is it ever okay to compliment a millennial on their skinny jeans in 2026?
00:23:36.500 Dentine, chew bold. 0.96
00:23:43.040 Okay, we are back with Suzy Shaw.
00:23:45.720 And I want to talk a little bit about grief influencing and how it's evolved, what it is.
00:23:55.100 I think it's changed since William passed.
00:23:58.340 What has your experience been with grief influencing?
00:24:01.800 And how do you want to show up for people online as someone who has been through this kind of grief?
00:24:09.600 Yeah, I think you talk a lot about how there's if there's a subject matter, there's an influencer for it. And I think that's just as true with grief. I recently mentioned to the woman who runs our grief support group, I'm like, can you believe how amazing the whole grief influencer space is getting? There's just so much support and so much information out there.
00:24:31.820 And she's, oh, Susie, yes, and I think you've curated your feed to be specific for grief
00:24:39.380 influencing.
00:24:40.040 We still have a lot of work to do.
00:24:42.020 So it's interesting.
00:24:43.080 I follow a lot of grief-inspired accounts or grief influencers.
00:24:49.260 So I do feel like it's everywhere for me.
00:24:52.180 But I don't know if your average Instagram user is going to see it as much as I do.
00:24:57.100 But after William died, I was looking for people in the same situation. I was looking specifically for moms whose boys had died skiing. And there's not a lot of that specific type on Instagram.
00:25:14.920 But as I started to go through and look for different people out there, I did find that connection and that community that I was looking for. And then I started to share my experiences as well. I went from being, I think my original Instagram name was Susan Shaw, which is my name.
00:25:35.120 And I now go by bereavement mom, because I feel like that's a huge part of my personality and my character now. I am a mother, but I am a bereaved mother. And that's a really important aspect of who I am today.
00:25:52.760 And so I became bereavement mom on Instagram to connect with these grief influencers, but also to share my story and my thoughts about bereavement and being a bereaved mom.
00:26:05.260 And I think it's so helpful. It's so helpful to have any type of community, whatever it is you're going through.
00:26:11.860 And the bereavement community I've found is unbelievably supportive. We, in general, as a culture, talk a lot about how horrible and bullying Instagram can be. And you see so many negative comments out there. And I don't yet feel that in the bereavement community, which is really nice.
00:26:32.480 I don't know if it has to do with the fact that like how can you be mean to a bereaved mom that's
00:26:38.440 just so cruel but it just seems like such a supportive community and we're all striving
00:26:45.040 towards the same thing education trying to figure out the best way to walk through grief everybody's
00:26:53.400 grief experience is different but I think we're all just out there trying to normalize the grief
00:27:01.260 experience and educate people. And it's just important to grieve, right? And that it's okay
00:27:07.320 to grieve and to share and have those enormous emotions because it's an enormous life-altering
00:27:13.640 event when you especially lose a child, but just lose any important person in your life.
00:27:20.080 I've been really impressed with the grief community online, and I've met some fantastic
00:27:24.680 people. I've met some of them in real life. I chat with some of them just through Instagram,
00:27:29.900 But yeah, I recently went to a conference out in L.A. called End, and it's a conference dedicated to the art of ending your life well and grieving well.
00:27:41.780 And it was such a fun group.
00:27:44.680 And that's the thing.
00:27:45.880 I actually have a friend whose parent has decided to end their life.
00:27:52.000 They're faced with a terrible, chronic, deadly disease, and they have made this decision.
00:27:57.880 And and us having the conversation about the process and about them, we cried, but we also laughed very hard.
00:28:04.740 OK, because you talking about death can be all of the things is what I'm starting to realize.
00:28:13.300 Yeah, it can be all of the thing. It is so sad and it is so tender and it can be uplifting and beautiful and insightful because it has to be because it's so heavy that you also have to add.
00:28:27.880 laughter and light to the whole experience or like you're just you're not going to make it
00:28:33.800 if you're not able to find some sort of lightness eventually i'm not talking these early days weeks
00:28:41.200 and months of grief those are dark and they almost need to be dark but eventually it's such a positive
00:28:49.300 thing to turn towards that light that's where you find the hope that's where you find the will to
00:28:56.020 keep going we needed to keep going because we had a six-year-old Kai who was depending on us right
00:29:02.120 we couldn't stop as much as we wanted to to stop parenting being alive in those early days and
00:29:11.060 weeks we couldn't because there was this tiny little guy looking up at us with his huge eyes
00:29:16.220 needing us to support him and so we were able to find that light mostly through him to be honest
00:29:23.040 but yeah just finding that community online has been really beneficial to me and I've started
00:29:29.980 I'm I have no degrees in grief or psychology or anything like that but I do feel like I'm a grief
00:29:35.900 expert because of the path that I've walked and the self-education that I've given myself
00:29:41.860 and the things that I'm trying to do now to give back to the grieving community like I said before
00:29:48.420 we started this non-profit and for the past few years it's been very community-based but this
00:29:55.660 past December we just launched an incredible initiative that I'm so proud of and I'm so
00:30:01.160 excited about and it's called The Greenhouse. The Greenhouse is our answer or our support
00:30:08.360 for grieving families. Like I said before grieving well is a luxury and so many families aren't able
00:30:16.900 to afford the luxuries of getting away, taking time to reset. And so our aim with The Greenhouse
00:30:26.760 is to purchase a vacation home in Falmouth, Massachusetts, where I'm from, which is on Cape
00:30:32.380 Cod. And we want to offer free week-long vacations to grieving families so that, like our family
00:30:40.920 got to experience. These families will be able to come to this house by the ocean and just spend a
00:30:49.160 week connecting with each other, starting the long journey of healing in a space that is nurturing
00:30:56.080 and specifically curated for their grief from somebody who gets it. So we're in the midst of
00:31:02.740 raising money for that initiative. And I couldn't be more excited to be able to provide these
00:31:08.960 families with something that's so important in the grief journey that just isn't available to
00:31:14.880 so many people that's so beautiful i love that is there anything else like that no there is not
00:31:21.960 which which is both exciting for me to start something like this and that's one of the
00:31:28.880 roadblocks is because there's nothing like this people don't quite know what we're getting into
00:31:32.700 But there are similar programs. There is a few houses that sort of support families who are going through cancer treatments, right? If you're a young family and your child is in cancer treatments, you can take a free vacation.
00:31:46.940 There's a lot of things for veterans and their families to have these little escapes.
00:31:52.600 But as all the research that I've done shows, there's nothing for families who are in grief.
00:31:58.020 And it's so important for these families to preserve what they have left.
00:32:03.260 We went from a family of four to a family of three, as I mentioned.
00:32:07.000 And that was an unbelievable shift.
00:32:09.180 And we had to figure out how to proceed, how to preserve that family we have left.
00:32:14.520 And so we want to be able to give grieving families the opportunity to do that, to just take some quiet time away from all the chaos and just reset and start their healing journey.
00:32:26.600 And we want to offer that to families who have both lost children like us and families who have lost spouses or parents.
00:32:33.780 Because talk about a financial hit, like if, let's say you're a family who has two working parents and you lose one of them, that's unbelievably traumatizing, not for just the family unit, but your finances as well. So our mission is to be able to serve all of these families.
00:32:51.320 How can people find out more about that and also find you?
00:32:54.580 Yes. So we have all sorts of information about our nonprofit, Williams Be Yourself Challenge and The Greenhouse at www.wbycgiving.org. I'm also on Substack as Suzy Shaw, and I am on Instagram at bereavementmob.
00:33:20.540 Thank you so much for being here, Suzy.
00:33:22.680 Thank you so much, Joe. I really appreciate the opportunity to speak with you about this.
00:33:52.680 Thank you.