Warrior Moms: Surviving Child Loss
A club no one wants to be in because the initiation is too big of a sacrifice: the loss of a child. Unthinkable. Unimaginable. Warrior Moms is local group in north Atlanta filled with strong, courageous, funny, and fiercely loving women who are surviving and thriving amidst horrific grief.
This podcast features Amy Durham and Michele Davis, two of the Warrior Moms, who will guide listeners through their grief journey. Every fourth or fifth episode will showcase another Warrior Mom, the trauma they endured, stories about their beloved child, and tips on how they get out of bed every day.
Each and every Warrior Moms' story is different, the children and the loss is different, but one thing they share is the decision to live. They have figured out how to live life putting one foot in the past and the other moving forward. Yes, it's beyond awful. Yes, it's hard. Yes, it's worth it. And yes, they say, you can survive child loss AND thrive.
Warrior Moms: Surviving Child Loss
Mary Leopold: Oliver's Story: Ep 43
Mary Leopold never expected to find herself on the other side of grief—as a psychotherapist with decades of experience, she'd helped countless clients through loss, but when her extraordinary 19-year-old son Oliver died unexpectedly in December 2021, everything changed.
Oliver wasn't just another teenager. With a mind that "worked differently," he blazed through life creating lasting impact wherever he went. At his high school of 4,000 students, he became known as "the voice", making morning announcements. During COVID, while many teens struggled with isolation, Oliver graduated early to work as an EMT in emergency rooms and on ambulances. His entrepreneurial spirit led him to create an app used by local firefighters and even purchase a decommissioned 42-foot fire truck (much to his parents' initial dismay). His passion for helping others defined him.
When Oliver passed away suddenly in his sleep from undiagnosed heart conditions, Mary found herself navigating the terrain of grief without a roadmap. The experience transformed both her personal journey and professional approach. "I'm much more patient with myself as a therapist now," she explains, "knowing there's no beginning, middle, and end to grief." Rather than focusing on fixing or resolving grief, Mary describes a process of integration—learning to incorporate profound loss into a new reality while still finding moments of joy and connection.
Perhaps most beautiful is how Mary has channeled her grief into creating the Wind Phone.
The wind phone began in Japan in 2010 when Itaru Sasaki, a garden designer, built a phone booth in his yard so he could “talk” with a deceased relative. Months later, the Fukushima earthquate and tsumami hit; in a matter of minutes, more than 20,000 people died.
Sasaki opened the phone booth to his neighbors, who urgently needed a place to express their grief. Word spread, and soon people came on pilgrimage from around Japan to speak through the "phone of the wind" to those they loved.
Mary heard about this and began to make plans, Soon, a British-style phone booth with a disconnected rotary phone where people can "call" their departed loved ones was set up at a local, public golf course; this public memorial has become a gathering place for community healing.
Mary has painted hundreds of rocks bearing names of loved ones lost, creating a visual testament to shared grief, all while honoring her precious Oliver. Meanwhile, donations made in Oliver's memory have funded life-saving equipment for the fire department and scholarships for paramedic students.
Mary's story reminds us that grief doesn't follow predictable patterns, but through community connection, creative expression, and honoring our loved ones' legacies, we can learn to carry both our sorrow and our joy. Here's a wind phone website to find out about ones near you...and how to set one up! https://www.mywindphone.com/
"Dream Bird" by Jonny Easton
Thank you for listening to Warrior Moms podcast. It is an honor to share about our beloved children gone too soon, and we hope by telling of our loss, it may help someone in their grief journey. Please note that we are not medical professionals and encourage those listening to seek help from mental health professionals.
We'd love to hear from our followers!
Website: https://www.warriormoms.me/
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Instagram: WarriorMoms.SurvivingChildLoss
With love,
Warrior Moms Amy & Michele
Hello and welcome back to Warrior Moms. I am Michelle Davis, carter's mom.
Speaker 2:I am Amy Durham, alex's mom, and we are so grateful to be here with a new friend that we just made via the World Wide Internet. You know the World Wide Web always brings us to cool people and cool stories and sad stories, but you know we hate that we're here, but we love that we're here at the same time and to support each other. But we have Mary Leopold and she is in the north suburbs of Chicago and she is here to tell us about her, her son Oliver, who passed away back in 2021, and how she's, you know, managed to get out of bed and keep moving every day. So, mary, thank you so much for being here with us today.
Speaker 3:It's so nice to be here. I wish it were under different circumstances, but I'm so happy to be connecting with all of you.
Speaker 1:Yes, oh, my gosh. Well, yes, just start us out, tell us about your Oliver.
Speaker 3:Yeah, oliver, like all of our children, was an extraordinary child. I think that he lived more in his 19 years than truly, than most people that I know of any age. He just he packed so much in. He was such a passionate, passionate young man. So he, as a lot of our children, was, you know, very affected by COVID in terms of the isolation.
Speaker 3:Oliver very, very extroverted, really liked to be helping out in the community. He was known to everybody in his high school in terms of what he did with technology and he did the morning announcements every morning Cute and he became the voice of his high school of 4,000 people, huge public high school. Wow. He decided that his senior year he was an incredible student and he decided to. Well, he took an EMT course his senior year at night and he had been involved in this wonderful program in our community for high school students who were maybe they were interested in the fire department.
Speaker 3:Oliver didn't necessarily want to become a firefighter, but he they were interested in the fire department. Oliver didn't necessarily want to become a firefighter, but he was very interested in, kind of like, the mechanisms of how the fire department worked and he was in this great program with his peers for four years and became really close with all the people in the fire department. The chief, the I mean the chief once helped Oliver change a flat tire of. I mean just, he just kind of embedded himself and he actually created an app during his junior year, I think, or senior year, that actually was put on all the rigs in our city and that he created this app that basically encapsulated like he didn't have to rewrite any information, but any any sort of medical emergency information was much more easily accessible with this app.
Speaker 3:Um and so the fire department was using this app, so he just a brain like no other.
Speaker 3:A brain like no other. My husband and I are both social workers. I'm a psychotherapist in private practice, have been for many years. His brain worked so differently. He literally kind of came out into this world as a little entrepreneur and he was always interested in inventions and numbers. He was also very, very social. So he had this wonderful combination of completely extroverted, was comfortable in a crowd and he just had this mind that just worked all the time. His first video he bought with the money that he saved. It's so wonderful to tell these stories. It's been a long time. He bought an old well, it's not old, but just like a cash register Now you don't see them anymore but like a Casio, whatever cash register.
Speaker 3:And he did his first little video on YouTube with his little like high pitched voice. He was wearing a little his little blazer how to use this cash register and it had like 800,000 views. It was crazy and he started a YouTube channel which I have not had the heart to look at.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Thousands of followers and he would talk about. He would talk about technology, or one of his really popular videos was and he would do this on his own. You know, was how like a child can use get a debit card and use a debit card if they're kind of and how to do that.
Speaker 3:And so his mind was just. He was just constantly producing and thinking about ways in his school, in the community, even when he was little, how to kind of make changes. And he was in middle school and he was asked to speak at Northwestern's business school oh my gosh, young entrepreneurship. And again he had this squeaky little voice. He hasn't reached puberty yet. He's talking to all these graduate students. So he was we really, and I think this is true for a lot of our children. You know, we let we, let him lead us. He was he. His mind works so differently.
Speaker 3:He has so much passion and drive and he was such a good kid in terms of he didn't act out and it would have been fine if he had right, if he had had typical adolescence, but we, we really just let him lead and he led us to incredible places and places that we would have, you know, never gone, and this is experienced. Yeah, that that really is. They're all dear to my heart, but this sort of tells you a little bit about Oliver. So so he ended up doing EMT, an EMT program, his senior year, his first semester. He really wanted to. Everything was, you know, everything was shut down with COVID. Everything was remote. It was so hard for him and he really had this idea that he could help out during COVID and he didn't know how that would look. But he did get his EMT degree. He ended up graduating early, which he reached out to the school. He reached out to the schools he applied to. You know what would this look like? Would this be OK?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And it was very much OK. He had been such a stellar student and so he graduated early and he ended up working at our local hospital, which has a few different locations, and he worked in the emergency room and then he also worked on a private ambulance At what age?
Speaker 1:So he would have been like 17?.
Speaker 3:He was 18 when he so he was a senior in high school, in high school but graduated early, graduated in December and, literally like days later, was already working 12 hour shifts at the hospital. And he was very by choice Totally by choice, yeah, yeah, completely by choice and he was working on it for a private ambulance company, so he'd helped do transport and he was very, very humble and very sort of quiet about the work he was doing. I think that a lot of what he saw was probably very intense and he had a wonderful colleague. He had wonderful colleagues at the hospital, but he came home and he just wanted his kind of his quiet time.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And we obviously we respected that we were making sure that he wasn't getting too overwhelmed by the work he was doing. He seemed to be managing it really well and he ended up, so this was his, so what would have been like his winter semester of high school.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And then he went through the graduation and everything and then he decided to. He applied to schools and he decided to defer for a year and he was admitted to paramedic school and he wanted to study bio, but first it was computer science and then he switched to biomedical engineering. He had a best friend who was she was studying biomedical engineering. So he said he didn't want to be a doctor which you know would have been fine, of course or paramedic, but he really, he just really loved this hand, the hands-on piece of it. So he was in paramedic school. He was also still working in the emergency room. I don't know how he did it, but he just had so much energy to just to help and to kind of be in the world in such a way that I really have yet to meet anyone like that.
Speaker 3:As extroverted as I am, I really like to come back to myself, have my quiet time. I'll have a day seeing am. I really like to come back to myself, have my quiet time. I'll have a day seeing clients. I'll need my time at night to relax.
Speaker 3:Tonight, you know, he just was fully engaged all the time and he this is a fun story he bought it's crazy. So he and I think part of it was COVID and just being so kind of locked in right as so many of our kids really struggled with that, he ended up buying. It was an auction, we never thought it would happen. He bought a decommissioned fire truck. Okay, so crazy story. So he had said, like that he wanted to buy like a decommissioned ambulance. And my husband and I said, oh honey, that's easy. Like where are you going to park it? Okay, so where are you going to park it?
Speaker 3:Ambulance, which now, looking back, would have been so much easier than a fire truck, a 42 foot fire truck, 42 foot, and it was literally. He was like working and he said, oh, mom and dad, you know I put in an offer on this fire truck and we just sort of ignored it. He was always sort of thinking about this. Hours later I got the fire truck. It was an Evanston decommissioned fire truck, so it had been used in Evanston for years. It was from like the 1980s or something. So our first question you know we're practical and it wasn't that expensive, it was his money.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Where are you going to park it? Yeah, and he's like, oh gosh, I don't know when am I going to park it. You can't park it anywhere. You can't park it on a city street. No Parking pad in back of our house. It's not 42 feet long. This is Oliver.
Speaker 3:He just thought it was the coolest thing. We were confused why not? We were totally freaked out about it. I mean, I didn't even want to tell friends about it, I was so freaked out about it. His friends thought it was the coolest thing.
Speaker 3:They had all sorts of ideas for it and it ended up that he did find a parking spot for it in like an outdoor lot somewhere. And you know, his, his um, the people at the fire department, like the captain, and he was really close with one of the um, with one of the chiefs and one of the captains, and they loved this and they would actually go and he got his permit and they would. But he couldn't drive it alone. It's this huge, I mean huge, and he would. They would take turns driving with him and so you know I love hearing the stories of that he would go out and they would like show him how to put gas in it and they cleaned it one day and they brought it down to the beach and he actually was able to bring it. He didn't drive it, but he was actually able to bring it to a summer camp that he used to work at as a counselor.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 3:And he brought it to them and the kids got to kind of go in and out and he, you know, there was 150 foot ladder on the top of it. Crazy story.
Speaker 3:It's also beautiful that when he died, we were able to donate it to the largest fire training institute in the Midwest where he had gone over different summers, for, you know, a day or two at a time for training with his peers in the fire department students, and so we were able to donate it, and this was June. After he died in December, and it was a beautiful ceremony. They dedicated, they put this beautiful decal on the side fire truck. So these are the kinds of things like. This is Oliver's energy. Yeah, as you can see, as I'm talking to you, I'm getting more sort of energized and excited and these were just the kinds of things that he did.
Speaker 3:He left he sort of left things better than when he found them. It sounds like it In a lot of ways. And he I don't want to dwell too much on his death, but his death was completely unexpected. I was home, he was home, my husband was at work and it was a Thursday morning and because of COVID, there's a Thursday morning yoga class I've been doing for years, decades I've been doing this class and it obviously had moved to remote and usually on Thursdays Oliver would work a 12 hour shift, like 11 to 11. But we knew, since Oliver's work schedule was so busy and he would often take on extra shifts, that we never woke him up. You know, even though he wasn't in college that year, he really, we felt, really wanted to be treated like an adult.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Our teenage kids do. But really all of his, all of his friends were at college, so we really let him come and go have a schedule. So I didn't really think anything at first of not seeing him that morning. Yeah and um, I finished my yoga class and I went into his room and he was I can't even say the word, but he was not alive.
Speaker 2:He was in his bed.
Speaker 3:It looked like he was sleeping. There was nothing out of the ordinary. It was the most horrifying experience. It's hard to talk about it.
Speaker 1:I'm so tired.
Speaker 3:My husband was at work and, of course, I called him. I called 911 and the people who came to respond were the people who loved Oliver and knew him, and so, as traumatic as this was, I was surrounded by these first responders who knew and loved Oliver, so much Wow.
Speaker 3:Chosen family, so to speak. I mean literally, and we didn't know what happened. We, you know there was no, we just we didn't know. We didn't know if he had ingested something, although that would not have been. He was, that wasn't who he was, but we, just, we just did it hot as an 18 year old. We didn't find out. We still don't really know. Everything's still inconclusive.
Speaker 1:Gosh.
Speaker 3:So we and we will never know, but we did not know when he died that right after he died this was December 9th that the that all the reports were inconclusive. We didn't know that because the medical examiner never reached out to us. I think they thought they're going to continue to do some testing. You know, if we had gotten even that little bit of information, I think it would have helped. We thought, maybe he died by suicide.
Speaker 3:We just did not know no yeah, nothing to indicate that he wanted to harm himself. He, as far as we knew, did not have any mental health issues beyond being just an intense kid. Yeah, he was super driven. He had just talked to his best friend that night. He had told us he wasn't feeling that great. He went to bed and then five months later we again still inconclusive. We got the report that he had several heart conditions not necessarily that they couldn't say for sure what actually, you know, ended his life.
Speaker 3:So there's a piece of this that I know a lot of moms, parents, can relate to, in terms of not knowing the whole story.
Speaker 3:You know whether your child died by an unintentional overdose or right or fentanyl, poisoning or suicide, or where there just, or where there are more questions than answers, and not that one is any easier than the other in terms of knowing. My child died, you know was hit by a car. My child died in an accident. There's living with this, not knowing, it's excruciating, and I'm actually in the process of writing a memoir right now about this time between losing Oliver in a very traumatic way and then my mom died a year ago, died from cancer.
Speaker 3:Not that I don't miss her terribly, but it was expected. We knew that she had stage four cancer. We knew when the medication stopped working. It was very expected and I've always wanted to write about Oliver's death and losing my mom in a non-traumatic way and having that experience opened me up to wanting to write about it more.
Speaker 3:So I'm in the process of writing this memoir, which is also really brings in a lot of grief theory and psychological theory as a therapist, and I'm just starting to write about Oliver's action. I haven't even written yet and I've written probably 150 pages. I have not written about Oliver's death yet.
Speaker 1:I have not written about Oliver's death. Yet oh, we know, that is. I mean, it's so physically and emotionally exhausting.
Speaker 2:We were just talking because we've written a book, a group, a collective book of 14 moms, so yeah, so I mean we know how grueling it is to write about that. Yeah, revisiting that trauma from the book that we're writing, because 14 of us have each written a chapter specifically about our child, the trauma and everything, and it's hard.
Speaker 3:I'm so looking forward to your book. I think it's going to add so much to this, to the grief space Right, Because there are and my book is not, will not be a grief guide, Because there are and my book is not, will not be a grief guide. And and I don't think yours will either, except that right, how each of you has coped and managed.
Speaker 2:Ours is a survival guide.
Speaker 3:A survival guide.
Speaker 2:It's a survivor's guide is what?
Speaker 3:ours is.
Speaker 1:So I'm in the process of writing and recalling and, you know, putting everything, getting everything onto paper, yeah, Well, and I'm sure, like you said, as a therapist, to see these two traumas back to back and to come at it. You know, theoretically, and then just personally too, I bet that has just been an extraordinary journey and it's going to be an extraordinary read. Yes, I'm really looking forward to it.
Speaker 3:And I think also being a psychotherapist and I've been in the I graduated over 30, almost like 31 years ago, which is crazy.
Speaker 2:Careful now.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I know I don't want to age myself here. I was a baby when I went to college?
Speaker 2:Yes, exactly.
Speaker 3:But having the experience of being a psychotherapist and really being kind of metaphorically like on the other side of the couch right now. Right, I am a grieving mom, a grieving daughter and. I've been working with grief and working with people who are going through all kinds of grief my whole career. And what is it like, right, when you, the sort of professional I'm putting it in little quotation marks become that griever? Or become that mom who's so bereaved.
Speaker 2:And so what is it like? Do you feel like you've given your clients in the past, your patients in the past, the right advice, or are you coming at it at a different?
Speaker 3:angle. Now I'm coming at it from a very different angle and I write about that, and I write about how, in the past, even four years ago, three and a half years ago Oliver died three and a half years ago that I would feel, I don't know if the need or the pressure whatever the word is to fix it, to help fix it. I need for this person to leave this therapy session feeling better about their grief, feeling more resolved about their grief, about their grief, feeling more resolved about their grief, whatever the word was I wasn't doing it right.
Speaker 3:Why was this person still feeling stuck in their grief?
Speaker 3:And that I just if I read more, if I go to more conferences on grief, I'll be able to help so much more. And I think now, as we all know, it's sitting in it right, it's sitting through it. And with my clients they don't all know that I've lost a son. I don't, obviously, the people who were working with me when Oliver died, no. But if I have a new client and I'm sure people Google their therapist but people, not. Everybody knows and that's fine. So not everybody knows that I've had these losses, that I lost my mom a year ago and they don't need to know. Obviously this is not about my work, this is about the work that I'm doing with them. And I think what I have found in myself is I'm just so much more patient with myself as a therapist, knowing that this is a process, this is a journey. There's no beginning, middle and end. Well, there are sort of there's the acute grief and then sort of middle grief.
Speaker 3:There's no end to grief and me sitting with that in myself and knowing that about my own process, I think has helped me be much more relaxed with my clients about grief, much more open in terms of again, not about my own experience, necessarily, I'm not bringing that into the therapy unless it feels like it could be therapeutic or helpful, depending on it varies client to client. But just knowing the grief, knowing the devastation and the trauma, and also knowing that that we can, whatever that next step is literally if it's, if it's getting out of bed the next morning, if it's taking a shower, right it just.
Speaker 2:It's these baby steps that personal experience definitely helps relate to identify with that person. We have some moms that in our group that they're like I don't want to go. They find more comfort in us, just as you know friends with that have lost a child than they do in the counselors that they've seen, because they're like they can't.
Speaker 2:They just can't relate, even though they're an expert on grief. They've never lost a parent or a child or a spouse or you know they. Just they haven't lived it. And even though you can study it in a book, it doesn't translate into the same way anyway. Same way.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and even as a therapist, I have not turned as much to therapy during this time of grief as I thought I would. I joined and I was really lucky that this came about. And actually this is related, like very directly related, to Oliver. It's hard as a psychotherapist in this community that I've been in for so long to try to find someone I don't know.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I reached out right.
Speaker 3:I mean, it's kind of yeah, and so I reached out to a woman who works in grief and and, um, she said to me I have to tell you and I never met her, I didn't know her from anybody else, except that I didn't know her she said, I just want to tell you, my husband runs the emergency room at the hospital where Oliver worked and he loves Oliver. And I'm like, oh my gosh, even just reaching out to a therapist, like this person knows Oliver, Like that's kind of how Oliver worked, Like he really did have his little in so many parts of the community. Anyway, she ended up, she ended up running which was really, really lovely, if that's the right word a short term group for bereaved moms who had lost young adult children more recently. So we were all in the same age range, Our kids were in the same age range, we were sort of in similar stages of our grief.
Speaker 3:Yes, and then I met with a therapist and it was wonderful, um, who does more somatic work and I do some of that in my work with clients a little bit, Um, but she was more trained in it and it really helped and this is, you know, a different discussion, but it really helped around like the trauma of seeing Oliver in his bed that morning and it's sort of like EMDR. You know where you're retraining. It wasn't EMDR, but retraining your brain and it sort of softened that literally that trauma and it sort of softened that, literally that trauma.
Speaker 3:I have found, though, that reaching, you know, connecting with other moms not that I don't connect with fathers, but connecting with other moms has been for me the most helpful in terms of socially in terms of socially connecting around our grief.
Speaker 1:Yes, I mean, we can't even put words to it. I don't think Amy and I talk about it a lot, but just without having to say a word, we can look at each other as grieving moms and you just see something on their face and you don't have to say a word. We just, we understand each other.
Speaker 3:It's like you're already there. You're already there, right. It's like everything that came before. I mean it matters who our children were, who they are, right, it all matters. But there is something about I get tearful just thinking about it something about that, just like that instant connection that we're all holding this pain and we can hold it for each other. So I think therapy if someone decides, just because I'm a psychotherapist, if someone decides not to be in therapy around their grief, that's fine, right. As long as people have some sort of feeling that there's support, that there's some kind of community, whether it's structured or not, right. And I think your group of warrior moms is just the perfect example of of creating, creating community.
Speaker 1:Yeah, community Absolutely.
Speaker 2:And we say all the time that we're not therapists, like we'll have people that'll come in, we're all in their grief and we're like whoa, like we're not, we're not therapists.
Speaker 3:We'll have people that'll come in very raw in their grief. I know, yes, I'm sure, and we're like whoa, we're not qualified.
Speaker 1:Is that right? Right, we can sit with you in the grief and we certainly know the pain, but, yeah, we're not professionals and we are currently struggling with that just because you know we've had so many wonderful new moms come and we're at that point, I think, in just a group, as an organization, where we're growing faster than you know. We, we need to put something, some sort of kind of protocol, together that says you know, please go seek someone. You know whether it's a therapist, a pastor, you know somebody that is in this grief space, you know. And, of course, and come back you know, with welcome arms, exactly.
Speaker 1:But it's a both, you know, it's a both for sure.
Speaker 3:And I'm sure that that's tricky, right In your situation where it's more social. And obviously, in my situation as a therapist it's very different. That's what people are coming to me for.
Speaker 2:So what have you done for you?
Speaker 1:What have they done for me. Your grief, yeah.
Speaker 3:What's helped yeah, so what helped early on and still helps, but it's changed is that in the really early days it was the middle of winter in Chicago. I don't remember what kind of winter it was.
Speaker 2:I think it was Chicago winter right, it was cold, that's all I know.
Speaker 3:Cold for you guys, for us probably just typical winter. Yeah, it was cold, that's all I know. Cold for you guys, for us, probably just typical winter. Yeah, it was COVID. So as much as we had people over visiting, it was still pretty controlled in terms of masking and everything.
Speaker 3:So I love to walk and I had a walk every morning for weeks and that was the only thing on my calendar and people really came out of the woodwork and during COVID I think we all felt so isolated and during COVID I'm like, do I even have any friends left? We're not seeing anybody, we're not interacting very much and that was so grounding for me to have those cold morning walks talking about Oliver, connecting with people around my grief, and it sounds so simple. But there was something the physical environment of, like breathing the cold air. I actually love the winters here, breathe it within reason, right, but I do enjoy the change of seasons and the cold and I love walking in the cold. And there was just something about like the sensory experience of being in the cold with like that bracing cold.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Somehow I just I, I felt better. I felt physically better, I felt emotionally better and that was that structured my day. Those were early days I did. I ended up going back to work about a month, maybe five weeks, after Oliver died. That was. I'm very fortunate that I'm in private practice. My husband has a salary, you know I I understand my privilege there that I because I'm self-employed that I was able to decide I didn't have to worry about bereavement and all the terrible things that can happen at work. So I really recognized that. So it was about five weeks where I felt ready to start very slowly with clients and I started off slowly and a couple of people a day or a few people during the week, and it really helped for me to be back at work. I've been with the same colleagues. We're not a group practice, we all function independently, but we've been together for years. I mean I think I've been with these same people for like 25 years and now a few people have retired.
Speaker 3:They're older than I am so I felt such a safety in going back to work which I know a lot of people can't say that they felt that and I felt so I don't want to say at the time, going back to work, I felt very anxious about it, but I feel so passionately about my work and about my clients, who I truly love and care for so much, that connecting with them again felt like you know they, they have no idea, I think, how stabilizing this was for me to work, and for some people it was too much. I don't think they could tolerate the fact that I had lost my child and left therapy or a lot stayed and we were able to talk about it in a way and I think that's also something that changed just quickly back to my work as a therapist is that if people wanted to engage around my loss, I was very open with them. I think that I saw myself not again, again. More in retrospect now that I can think about it, I was sort of just in it at the time, but I think sort of a mirror. You know that this is what it can look like, that you can function again, you can find joy in your work.
Speaker 3:If it's work that you love to do, you can connect outside of your child, and so for those hours, minutes that I was with clients, I really felt like I could step outside my grief and then I'd come back to it. Literally I would finish my day sob on the way home in the car. I also have a regular yoga practice and that's been consistent and it's a community that is very close and this I found out Oliver died right after I had done yoga and the community really rallied around me and it was. That was really beautiful. Just the support in that specific class.
Speaker 3:And that's been a consistent for me and that's been a consistent for me. I also am not. I'm not critical of myself If I have a day where my energy is really low or I feel just really sad.
Speaker 1:I mean.
Speaker 3:I'm three and a half years out and that happens as much, as as much as ever. I'm not afraid, it doesn't change as we know it, kind of changes shape and form, but it's still there all the time.
Speaker 3:It's there all the time, and and I know this is I know this is something that a lot of grieving people talk about and I won't talk about it too much but just how relationships change too, that people you might expect to be there who aren't there, and vice versa, and I've had this growing of some relationships that I hadn't like, people I hadn't been very close with or kept in contact with, who really who really sought me out because of either they could truly understand or just their own compassion. Those relationships have been stronger than ever. So there are lots of right.
Speaker 1:There are lots of different lines. Oh gosh, yeah, this journey is just unbelievable and I love. I think one of the things just in listening to your story, both with Oliver and his gift for connection with people Oliver and his gift for connection with people that you know I see where he got that with you is that gift that you have with connecting with people. And you know it's no surprise when I was listening, that you went back to work a month, five weeks, because you were wanting to give to, like you said, to the clients that you cared for so much.
Speaker 3:And that's just that's beautiful to the clients that you cared for so much, and that's just that's beautiful, thank you. And that has like different ways of staying active, and I don't mean I mean for me, yes, it's like I like to walk, I like to be physically active, but that's not what I mean In this case.
Speaker 3:I mean Oliver was so active in our community and there were some things that we were able to put in place and I'll talk about the wind phone in a second. But there were some things that we put in place that sort of started with Oliver and and being able to follow those through and continue some of those pieces in the community, like, for example, we, when Oliver died, in lieu of flowers we said, if you want to make a donation to, there was a there still is a first responders foundation in Evanston. It's pretty small and Oliver was elected to be on the board. He was the youngest board member no exaggeration by about 60 years.
Speaker 3:Um, and so much money came in in Oliver's name, in his honor, that we were able and this is, you know, this is Oliver working. Wherever he is, he's still working his magic. So the fire, so all this money came in and the fire department needed these three machines. They're called Lucas devices and if you've ever seen them like on TV or just it, what they do is we didn't know about them before, but it's like a machine and it goes over a person's chest and it provides continuous CPR.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow.
Speaker 3:Impressions, and so if you know, if the fire department is trying to get up a small staircase or if someone has like fallen into a small space, right, it's a way that this person can have continuous CPR. So, like if a firefighter is walking upstairs and trying to give someone CPR, it's going to be almost impossible. Right, a machine that goes on their chest. And they said our dream is to have three of these machines and the total came out to. So the money that was raised just in Oliver's honor we didn't ask anybody to donate was $55,000 over a very short period of time and literally the amount of these three machines was like $55,000 minus $300.
Speaker 1:Wow, it was a significant amount it was.
Speaker 3:Just they're thrilled. And I still talk to firefighters who say you know, I know we don't tell you this a lot, but we use these machines every day and they are saving people's lives. Gosh, that's amazing. And then, and then we've also been able to, with the money that we have that we had saved in Oliver's 529, we've been funding little bits of of paramedic school for people who might not be able to afford their education in paramedic school. The program that he was in was through our community college, and so we've been able to reach out to the community college. Our high school now has this great paraprofessional program in health, and so we've been able to provide these smaller scholarships for students who might otherwise not be able to complete their education in the field.
Speaker 1:That's just incredible.
Speaker 3:So that again, I feel like Oliver would be just so excited about that.
Speaker 1:Oh gosh, yes.
Speaker 3:And then so for me it's been more about like action.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:What can we do to stay to help? What can we do to be involved? My husband is much more introverted. He, he manages his grief very differently. I'm much more like like front of the house, you know, in a restaurant, like, hey, how can I help you? Yeah, and he's much more kind of in the back, supportive, doing things that I wouldn't be able to do. So that's for a whole other discussion, right, how do you manage if you are in a partnership and you lose your child? But I think, knock on wood, we support each other in the different ways that we can. And the one thing can I transition to just quickly, talking about the WinPhone Absolutely.
Speaker 3:Yes, I'm excited for you to tell, so I won't be too long winded about it. But after Oliver died I found out. I did not know what a wind phone was and I found out about the concept from, I think, a friend told me. I sort of forget how I heard about it, but there's a Japanese landscaper who lives in Japan and in 2010, he lost his cousin to cancer and he was so bereft that he created what looks like. It looks like a vintage British phone booth, but it's all white, it's beautiful, and it sat in his back, like his beautifully landscaped backyard in a in a town in Japan, and he had a disconnected rotary phone that he put into the phone and he called it the wind phone and there's obviously a Japanese term for it, I forget what it?
Speaker 3:is, but I wouldn't be able to pronounce it anyway and the translation is like your words are getting carried off by the wind. And so his idea was he could connect with his cousin by picking up this receiver and talk to his beloved cousin. A year after that, the tsunami happened in Japan and thousands and thousands of people died and were unaccounted for, and it affected very much the town that he lived in. So he and you can, you know, you can look it up. He, he moved the wind phone to a public garden, beautiful park that overlooks the Pacific ocean, and he and his wife still care for the wind phone. They're the, they're like their sole caretakers of this wind phone, and people, people travel from all over to visit this original wind phone, and since then other people have had this idea and there are hundreds around the world now that are documented.
Speaker 2:I'm sure there are even more.
Speaker 3:And it can be as simple as a phone attached to a tree, you know, just a disconnected phone. It can be any simple structure. So I heard about the WinPhone. I started doing research on it. There's a wonderful website that's mywinphonecom.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:And there's a woman, amy Connelly Dawson, who lost her daughter and who heard about a wind phone and loved the idea also and has now been has been chronicling these wind phones as as many as she can learn about. Yeah, they're on a map, you can look at it. There's also a Facebook page called my wind phone and it's a not a private Facebook page and I connected with her and there's also really good advice if you want to try to bring a wind phone to your community. So I had this idea. I didn't know what it would look like and there's a friend of ours who is very involved in our city and he loved Oliver and Oliver, like, spoke at a chamber of commerce meeting, I mean, they just had this really relationship and he's my age, you know, and he has kids, our kids ages, and he lives down the street and he's really also involved in our public golf course and he said he loved the idea and he said, oh my gosh, go big or go home.
Speaker 3:I imagined a bright red, you know, thinking of Oliver's fire truck like red British, a replica of a British phone booth. And so you know, I mean literally within days, he brought this to the um, to the canal shores, that's the public golf course, to the the board and they, right away they accepted. You know they're like, yes, we'd love to do this. And also, within days he spearheaded raising money to get this phone booth. And I mean in two days we raised, you know $4,000 or something. It all just happened so fast and I feel for people who in their communities want to establish a wind phone and sometimes there's a lot of bureaucracy in the city that they live in.
Speaker 3:So I completely and anyone's happy. You know, anyone can reach out to me, but I completely empathize with those who are trying to get this into their town and for whatever, whatever reason, have some. There's some resistance. Yeah, we were so lucky so, literally within weeks, this beautiful British it looks like a British phone booth exactly shows up on the golf course. And I bought just on eBay, I bought just an old rotary phone yeah, oh my gosh.
Speaker 3:And there have been some newspaper articles written about it and it's had enough sort of press that people are coming to see it and we live just a block and a half from there. So in the summer we'll walk there pretty much every day and we'll meet people who are visiting the wind phone. Or if someone's you know, I always give people privacy, of course, but if someone's just come out of the wind phone, I'll say, oh my gosh, tell me, you gosh, tell me about how you heard about this. And then I had the idea to start painting little rocks and placing rocks first in the wind phone with people's names on them, and decorating them. And I reached out to our community, our Evanston community, on a parent's private Facebook page and I've had hundreds and people I know on a parent's private Facebook page and I've had hundreds and people I know, hundreds of requests. I've probably painted 500 rocks.
Speaker 3:Oh my gosh and they sit there and people can add their rocks. So this whole process of you know, establishing the wind phone, articles written about it, people interviewing me, getting people's names right, it's very ritual for me, very much a ritual. I sit at this dining room table where I'm talking to you now, I paint and I have 50 pages filled of the person's name, the person's name who's requesting their beloved person who died, and I don't anymore because I have so many requests. But I would ask sometimes, like what was your person's favorite color?
Speaker 3:Yeah, beginning, and then I got so many requests that I couldn't, you know, I just had to believe that, like, the color would be fine, right, just saying their name, right, just saying their name and have it, have it like something about writing it down, having it on a piece of paper, imagining that person and um, and that I, you know, nothing is going to heal the grief, right, but but just like how writing right now is, has become a very passionate project for me. Sitting down, doing that creative work really really just helped me connect with my own grief and with the grief of other people in a bigger way. So the wind phone has been and it's a, it's a beautiful symbol and people have had gatherings there. I have gatherings there. We've had Oliver's candlelight vigils there the past couple of years. And didn't you say?
Speaker 2:people have planted flowers that you don't even know.
Speaker 3:Yes, they're beautiful tulips right now that sprouted last summer, sprouted last spring. I don't know who planted them. I have a feeling it was one of my neighbors, but no one wants to take credit for it, it's beautiful though it's sort of like a garden fairy, it's absolutely beautiful and it's a space. It's a public space, so it's a space for anybody.
Speaker 1:I just love that. Oh my gosh, I want a wind phone somewhere nearby, don't you? We'll help figure it out, I know.
Speaker 3:I want you to, I would love to help and, as I said, it's a very simple concept. It can be. You know how a lot of people have those little mini libraries. Yeah, yes, it can be that with a little receiver on the inside and a sign to say what, this is right, it does not have to be this grandiose.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh, that is just so beautiful and, just like Oliver that you said, that touched so many different people and his energy and spirit gets to live on. And so, going to the wind phone, it's that same thing. Everybody gets that chance to kind of speak their love um into the wind, so to speak.
Speaker 3:And it's very. I just want to say one more thing. It's, it's really this surprised me, um, which is kind of funny that it surprised me, but visiting the wind phone every day and going in and picking up the phone it took me a while to actually go in and pick up the phone and call Oliver and talk to him.
Speaker 3:And I talked to him all the time. You know I'm always talking to, I feel like I'm always having a dialogue. But there was really something different about walking into the wind phone, picking up this heavy receiver, and it was so emotional and it was so kind of cathartic and it felt different. It felt different than all the discussions I'm having with my dad, even when I talk out loud really had this very powerful effect on me. So if you ever do see a wind phone, don't be scared. Right, you run into it. There's no right or wrong, but it is a very, a very powerful experience.
Speaker 1:That is just incredible.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh, thank you for sharing that. I, yeah, I really would love for you to help us get that here. That would be incredible, and maybe there is one here. We'll have to look on that website and see there could be one in Georgia already. Yeah, oh, that is incredible. Well, you know, one of the things that Amy and I talk about a lot and ask our moms and of course, you know we had shared this with you, but you know we want to end our podcast coming back to Oliver. But before we do that, just what's? You know you've talked about so many different things. How would you whittle that down into? You know what's like living this this last three and a half years? What would be the you know kind of one to three sentence? What's the advice of what you've done? How would you pare that down?
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's a great question and I know you asked that sort of for me to think about it and just a few minutes ago, and I think for me, and I think probably this is not a new thought, but the challenge of and we can do this right, I am learning that I can do this.
Speaker 3:It's the challenge of integrating integrating the loss, integrating the secondary losses, integrating all of it right, all of it. Losing a child and how we truly are. I am such a different person than I was three and a half years ago and again, it's not about fixing or making things better. Quote unquote better.
Speaker 3:I know in the moment sometimes we need to do that for ourselves, to get out of a certain state of mind or but it's, it's allowing the grief in at all different times and knowing that it's it's going to look different every single day, every single moment and that I need to, and I have been, and it's a slow process, again, there's no timeline for it, but like integrating this new life without our child physically present.
Speaker 3:I do feel Oliver's with me, but it's like learning a new language, right. So it's a learning process. And again, I don't think that I understood that about grief before and there's no sort of before and after. It's sort of like we're in the middle, I'm in the middle of this process, so I don't know that. That answers a question, except that when I feel stuck, when I feel like I'm having a really hard day, excuse me, I just need to remember that this is sort of temporary in terms of feeling the stuckness, feeling the sadness. I know that it's not like that all the time, like it was at the beginning, right, it shifts all the time. Like it was at the beginning, right, it shifts. I get a lot more joy. I'm so excited to meet and to talk to the two of you, right, so letting those glimmers in also is really important that it doesn't take away from the grief, but our lives can become more whole, yeah.
Speaker 1:And I love that term integration because, yeah, amy, and I talk about that a lot of you know it is about being so intentional, with one facing your grief, but two really seeking joy and light and life again. And that word just really connects with me today, that integration, because it isn't just a or you know, it's like okay, right now I'm going to be sad, but in a little bit I can do this. It's actually both right, you're going to be sad and you're going to experience this happiness, you know.
Speaker 3:And that's what I loved when I was first introduced to you, michelle, and then to Amy. Very quickly you were so responsive to me. I love the idea of celebrating right and not celebrating the loss. Right and not like needing to find again in quotation marks, meaning like there's no reason why Oliver died. I mean I do not right.
Speaker 3:And life is not better in any way. There's no silver lining here and connecting and meeting new moms and meeting new wonderful people and how we, whatever that next thing is. What is the next thing we need to do?
Speaker 1:What is that?
Speaker 3:next thing if it's literally taking our next breath or going outside and listening to the birds, right. So I think it's a constant process right now of integrating.
Speaker 1:I love that. Well, before we go, let's bring it back to your incredible son, Oliver. And, like Amy said, we love to ask our moms what are three or four, what are some words that you want to leave us listeners just thinking about this beautiful conversation we had with you. I always get choked up when I think about it. But just so that we can carry a little bit of Oliver with, us?
Speaker 3:Yeah, thank you, I do too. Curiosity he was so curious about his world, how things worked, how to help people. And I think again about into back to integration, what I was you know what we were just talking about sort of the idea of, yes, I'm grieving and I still want to remain curious in this world. Right, I always want to help people. That's always been just who I am.
Speaker 3:But his curiosity, his passion, he had so much passion for life, for his friends, for people, you know, for his bird. He loved his bird, his cockatiel Maxie. He just, whatever he did, he imbued it with so much passion. And I hope that we can find passion right, even if it's like the little glimmers. And he had the we don't I don't have the dimples, he had the most amazing dimples and I just want to think he had this beautiful face and these incredible dimples. And when he was little I would say, oliver, I'm just going to curl up and take a little nap in your dimple. And he didn't believe it was going to happen. But he kind of would look at me like how is that Did she? How is she going to do that? And I just I love that, I love just thinking about like his little dimples. So just our children's beauty right.
Speaker 3:So those are a few things His curiosity, his passion, his dimples.
Speaker 1:That's so precious, oh my gosh. Well, I know I have just thoroughly enjoyed this conversation and thank you, thank you for being here.
Speaker 3:Oh, thank you so much.
Speaker 2:Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 1:Yes, and I don't know about you, amy, but I heard at least three different topics that, mary, we would love to have you come back and talk with us about, so I've got them listed. We'll be in touch.
Speaker 3:I am here to see Dial ladies? Yes, we would love that.
Speaker 2:Well, we will thank everyone for being here and thank y'all for listening, and I can't wait to have Mary back another day.
Speaker 3:Oh, thank you so much and I'm sending my love to all the listeners right now, truly.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:Till next time, till next time Bye.
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