Jennifer Levin
Hi everyone and welcome to Untethered: Healing the pain from a sudden death. I am Dr. Jennifer Levin, and I specialize in traumatic death and helping individuals through the struggles, pain, trauma, and chaos of an unexpected death. In today’s podcast, I interview Tami Millard, who shares with us her grief and healing experiences after the sudden death of her husband and what it was like to raise her teenage daughter while she was grieving the death of her husband, and she was grieving the death of her father. Shortly after her husband’s death, Tami returned to the workplace briefly before the COVID lock down which further complicated how she and her daughter grieved. During our interview, we explore Tami efforts to learn about grief, the different ways she processed her feelings, and where she is now in her grief and in her life, almost 4 years after her husband’s sudden death. Well, Tami. Hi, I am so glad that you are here with us today. And why don't we just jump in and start off? And why don't you just introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about who you are.
Tami Millard
Of course, thank you so much for having me. I am happy to be here with you today. Yeah, so I live in sunny Southern California. I'm in the Pasadena area. And I've been here for about 23 years, I am a Colorado native, very proud of that. And I came to Los Angeles with my husband, we were both going to graduate school, and thought we would be here for three years and go back. But here we are, my life has turned out much differently. And I have a beautiful daughter who's 19. And she attends a college in Washington state, up by you, yeah, Eastern Washington. So she's getting used to the seasons, something we don't really have much of in Southern California. I'm also an educator. So I'm a learning specialist at an all girls school. And I work primarily with high schoolers. Really, my mission is, in my personal mission, if you will, is to bring to the attention of teachers and students the importance of bringing our whole selves. So really thinking about the social, emotional aspects of who we are. And also, you know, our strengths and our vulnerabilities, and how that impacts us and how we see the world, especially for students who have learning challenges, helping them to embrace that and also to find their resources that they need which I have certainly had a lot of experience of personally in my own life and in my own story in the last couple years, with the loss of my own husband. And then I'm also an educational therapist. So I work for a private practice that's interdisciplinary. I do educational therapy, working one on one with students in a similar capacity at school. And then we have speech and language and occupational therapy, assessment, and then mental health. So it's a really rich place for me to again, learn about all the aspects of what makes us whole people.
Jennifer Levin
Very interesting.
Tami Millard
Yeah. And of course, the reason why we're here is to talk a bit about the loss of my husband. So I met my husband Kyron in university, we were both still an undergrad, I was 21 and he was 23 when we got married. We started off as just best friends who, you know, became more than that. And we were married for over 25 years. And it was it was a good relationship, we co-parented well. There were a couple of different workplaces where we were colleagues even because he was also in education. And yeah, we remained best friends. So this was an earth shattering loss for me.
Jennifer Levin
Yeah. So I know your husband, Kyron. Did I say that right?
Tami Millard
You did.
Jennifer Levin
Okay. What a beautiful name. Where did that come from?
Tami Millard
Well, he would tell you, it comes from Kansas. The theory is that it might be Celtic. But his dad grew up in a little town in the middle of Kansas. And he knew someone in that small town with that name. So it just stuck with him. And that's how Kyron came to be named Kyron. Anyway.
Jennifer Levin
So I know Kyron died in early 2020. Can you describe what happened the day he died?
Tami Millard
Yeah. So I have to say that it was highly unexpected, and of course, tragic. We knew he had some underlying heart condition that was being monitored by his cardiologist but nothing that made it seem like it was significant or severe or immediate. Two days before my daughter turned 16, we invited all her girlfriends over for a sleepover. So we woke up the next morning, or the morning that he died, we woke up to a house full of girls all over our living room floor and you know, taking every inch of that and he made them breakfast burritos and coffee and while the girls were eating in the, you know, in the dining room, we were sitting outside on our patio, just enjoying each other's company and he said I don't understand why feel so tired. I haven't done anything today. And of course, I just, you know, heard him and didn't think anything about it. And then we finally got all the girls off and cleaned up. And then we went down to an appliance store because we were just getting ready to renovate our kitchen, which was a big dream for both of us. Kyron was an amazing cook. That was where he lived in the home. And so we were starting to realize those plans. I just remember being in the parking lot before we walked into the appliance store and just wanting to hold his hand. And then we came home after we did a little window shopping, if you will. And as we were getting out of the car, he said, I'm going to go on a bike ride, and I will be back by dark. Kyron loved the outdoors. It was never a bad day when he was outside. So he was a mountain biker. He rode about 20 miles every weekend, he rock climbed. He, you know, mostly in a climbing gym, hiking, golfing, all of that that was just his joy. So this was not unusual for him to go on his bike ride. And I thought, intuitively, I wanted to ask him not to go. But I didn't say anything because I knew him. And I knew how much he would want to go. And I wasn't sure he'd really listened to me. But there was something inside of me that wanted to ask him not to go. So we went our separate ways I went to to the gym and worked out and you know, he was out and about and then dark came. And he hadn't shown up. I hadn't quite registered it as anything to be alarmed about right away. But I began calling his phone number and I wasn't hearing anything and he wasn't answering. And then my daughter and I started both taking turns trying to call his number. And then on I don't know, maybe the fifth try a stranger answered the phone and said who is this? And I said, Well, this is my name is Tami Millard. And I'm calling for my husband, this is his number. I'm just trying to figure out where he is. And it was a police officer who said I'm so sorry, he passed out on the mountain bike trail, he went into cardiac arrest. He was taken to the hospital, but because they couldn't save him, he passed. And I said "he passed?" out loud. And my daughter just started wailing in the background. Like a sound I've never heard. And I said that's my 15 year old daughter. She's turning 16 tomorrow. So he told us that we needed to meet him at the hospital. I remember hanging up, I called my mom. And I told my mom and I called Kyron's dad and I told him and then Anya and I, my daughter, started putting our winter clothes on and and I just stood and hugged her and we cried for a minute together. And I just said, we're gonna do really hard things right now. But at least we're doing it together. We got in the car. And I just remember driving down the hospital, we were holding hands as I was driving, and we went down to the hospital. A lot of that after is always a blur. I had the mindset to know or at least the awareness to know I needed help. So I called a friend who came and was with me in the hospital and then asked my daughter, who would you like to be with you? And she really wanted the youth pastor from our church. So we both had people come and be with us. And then when we were asked, Do you want to go see him? Do you want to go see his body? My daughter said, I don't want to do that. And she had this real worry, she said, But what if I regret it? And I said, Oh, my love. There is no, no wrong choice here. She said, But what if I'm 21 and I wished I would have? And I said well, when you're 21 you will process this. You will have time to process that. But whatever decision you're making right now is the right one. So I went into this little room and I saw him and I didn't stay very long. Thinking that I would have more time but it turns out that he didn't have any ID on him when he was on the mountain bike trail. And when that happens and someone comes in as a John Doe, it becomes a whole coroner's issue. So he was then eventually his body was taken to the LA coroner's office and that was just the last time I ever got to spend time with him. Which is sad, but I am glad that I had a moment with him and and a chance to say goodbye. So those are the things that I remember about that day.
Jennifer Levin
Just listening to you share that story, I mean, first of all the blood drains, just the shock and the maturity in which you handled your daughter when you were in shock from what happened when you get this phone call, something you absolutely never expect, your life is all of a sudden change, you had no idea. But the maturity you had as a parent, and how you responded to your daughter's needs is absolutely unbelievable. And I know we'll talk more about that. How did you cope with your grief early on?
Tami Millard
Yeah, I mean, I think that's often when we imagine these scenarios, we think about how we would be and how we will respond. I certainly thought that I would just crumble into or hide in a cave for a year when I would imagine that. But actually what happened was much different. There was something internally about me, that mobilized. And I'm sure a lot of it had to do with my fierce love for my daughter. But I, the things that I really remember about early grief was this thing that our bodies naturally do to help us survive. Of course, I could didn't have the language for it at the time, but everything gets very small, right. So I thought of it almost like, like a camera lens, where we have the ability to have panoramic shots and wide shots. And then all of a sudden, when our body starts shutting down in order to protect us from the trauma and the grief, it becomes almost like a pinhole of a viewpoint. And so I just remember feeling like I was living in a play. I know that's a really common thing for people to say, I felt like I was living in a dream. I was living in a movie. I definitely was feeling all of those things. And at the time, I didn't understand that there was trauma involved. So my nervous system was all over the map. But I almost felt...Yeah, I almost felt like like, like the ends of electrical wire. Right? That are just still burning hot inside. Yeah. So I had a lot of that going on. And then I think the other thing that was really tough right away was, you know, I had spent so much time with my husband, like we were together as a family a lot. And all of a sudden, I didn't have any sensory memory of him, almost immediately, it was as if he had vanished. And he was just something in the abstract for me. And that was, I just didn't even know how to understand that. That that would be true that you know how this and he's gone and the space that was shaped like him on the bed is still there. And I just have no connection to him other than in some abstract way. And so I did a lot of different things. I mean, in the immediate, I was so blessed to have so many people around me that were so generous, right? People who would ring the doorbell and just leave something at the door like yogurt and fresh fruit, family started coming in, my husband's family came in and were kind of my triage team. And I felt so much terror because my whole financial picture changed overnight. And like so many, I didn't have full access to the passwords because my husband had a cryptic way of reminding himself. So there was just a lot of everything in the mix in those early days of talking about autopsies. And oh, how are we going to hold space for my daughter's 16th birthday? And you know, how am I going to, am I going to lose the house, all those different things. So there's a lot of fear in the mix of all of this picture too, fear and anxiety and, of course deep sadness. So my water bill was really high for a couple months because the only thing I could do was get in a hot bath. And I had this wonderful friend who would keep bringing me these lavender bath bombs and then that I would put in there and so I have this sort of association with the smell of those bath bombs. It's grief, but it's also like, sort of in the healing space too of all that but, you know, I just sometimes was beside myself with that frayed burning edge. And all I could do is get into the bath in order to sort of create equilibrium and reset. So I slept a lot. And I asked for a lot help. Which, yeah.
Jennifer Levin
Good for you, you really took care of yourself. As you got further along in your grief, what did you do then to cope?
Tami Millard
Well, so it's really I think important to know that Kyron died in February of 2020. And then COVID was just starting to be a big thing. And, you know, we went into lockdown in March. And so I bring that up, obviously, because it was another layer. It was a layer in that I was the surviving parent. And this was a scary time where we didn't know why some people were not making it, why they were dying, or getting, you know, a lot of health complications. And so there was something in me that realized that I needed to take really good care of us because our immunity was not as strong already, I read enough already to know that the percentage or the chance of death is higher in the first six months for widows and widowers. So there was just this awareness of that. So again, I started asking for more and more help, I didn't know how to cook. Kyron was an amazing cook. And I had to figure it out. So for a while, people gave me meals. And then I went with a subscription service for a while. And then I just got down to it. And I just started practicing it. And so I tried to feed our bodies well that way, I said yes to friends. I often didn't want to, I wanted to kind of stay in my little cave, and not come out. So I would sometimes go out and you know, still be feeling resistant to doing it. But connection was really, really important. And I'm glad I said yes to a lot of that. Nature. Being in nature is so powerful. At our house in our backyard, my husband had built this beautiful little patio space in the very back of our property under a lemon tree that looks up into the neighbor's palm trees. And I had a hammock there. So I spent hours and hours just laying in that hammock either alone or with my daughter rocking and just being in nature, in our backyard. I slept a lot. You know, for me, I almost think of my my nervous system and my body is like a computer that needs rebooting. And sometimes the best thing I can do is just shut down and sleep for a while. That's still really helpful. And then I would say the final thing for me was I learned how to live my grief out loud. That ended up being probably one of the most important things that happened, which is from the earliest of days. You know, I remember reading option B that book and Sheryl Sandberg talked about how she trained her colleagues to say how are you right now rather than how are you? And I did the same thing. I asked my colleagues to if they wanted to know to ask me in that way. And that was really helpful. And I'm incredibly private. But I think there was something in me that recognized and was really frustrated that in this culture we don't talk about grief. We don't know how to hold it. We don't know how to talk about it. And so I had something in me that wanted to model and to be really authentic in the world about what grief is and what it isn't. And so, yeah, I I've been very open about all aspects of what it's like to lose someone and to feel your whole world shatter.
Jennifer Levin
I know, you also did some writing. And I've had the privilege of reading some of your writing that you shared and some of the letters that you wrote to your husband after his death. And you talked about how you committed yourself to a process of self discovery, and kind of you threw yourself into understanding grief and trauma. What was that process like for you?
Tami Millard
I think we all bring whatever part of our temperament or our inclinations are and I think I have a tendency towards being an investigative journalist. If you want to think about it that way. I really, really needed to make sense of things. And so I spent a lot of time listening to podcasts and following different people on social media, but also reading just a vast of different kinds, different ways of not only thinking about grief, but thinking about healing, because I really wanted to integrate that. It felt like a bunch of just loose threads for me. And I somehow had this feeling like I needed to pull them together and make some kind of tapestry, some kind of sense of this for me. So I spent a lot of time reading about the neurobiology of grief and loss, reading other people's memoirs about that, all these different things, you and I, early on in my process connected because I knew you as a professional who specializes in grief, you were the first person to name that there was trauma involved, that an unexpected, unexpected, out of order death like this is traumatic. And you did this great job of giving me a little bit of a roadmap. And I know one of the first things you said to me is, based on the book, I Wasn't Ready to Say Goodbye, this whole idea of being an emotional ICU, and really thinking about that, and how to work through that. So here are the things though, beyond that. Beyond just making sense of it from more of an intellectual way, therapy, lots of therapy. So I spent time in a traumatic grief group, which was really important because even though the stories of the all of us who were in there were very different in what had happened to us, I think there's a language that you share with other people who kind of live in the shadows, as I like to say. And I also think there's just this beautiful healing aspect of holding each other's story. Yeah. And some people are further along than you. And you can kind of see what their path and journey has been like, right? So I found that to be really helpful. And then I went to real therapy. And I remember telling you, I gotta take my dead husband to therapy.
Jennifer Levin
To marital therapy. I loved that line. Got to go to marital therapy with my dead husband. I just thought that was great.
Tami Millard
Yeah, I think we had a good marriage. But you know, what they're all there's always things that are themes in a marriage, things that we regret, things that we're unaware of. And it just for some reason, felt really important for me to be a whole person and to really explore that along with just the expressing my grief and processing that. Yeah, and antidepressants. I'm a fan. I was very flooded all the time. I looked so functioning on the outside, you know, people were always like you're so strong. And to your point you look, you seem so mature and how you're handling it. But I was flooded all the time and feeling physically sick around it. And so I went to my my doctor, and my doctor said, would you consider an antidepressant? And I said, Well, I'm not opposed to it. But I said, it's really a tough call. Because if you look at my life, I seem so functional. And I said, but if you asked my daughter, she'd say, please put my mom on meds right now. And my doctor said that's blue, that's telling. So I started a low dose of antidepressants. And that gave me the flooring for all these different things that I've been talking about that I found along the way to make sense of. Does that answer to that?
Jennifer Levin
Absolutely. So when you shared a little bit about yourself, in the beginning, you talked about your professional work, and with adolescents and teens and how you have this professional understanding of grief and teenage development. So here it was playing out in front of you at home, and you're watching your daughter struggle. So how did you, you had this parallel process, you were going through grief. How did you go through your own grief and then guide your daughter? How did you support your daughter in her grief as her mother?
Tami Millard
Well, we can know all these things. We can practice them in our own lives professionally and still be completely lost and mystified when it's our own life?
Jennifer Levin
Ah, yes.
Tami Millard
So I'm going to be really honest that it was really rough. It was rough for both of us because first of all, we had the added dynamic of being in shutdown. And Anya was in her adolescence, needing her friends, regular structure. She needed differentiation. That's her job as an adolescent. is to start pulling away and figuring out who she is in her own person. And here we were on top of each other 24/7 in this really hard in meshed way that wasn't necessarily our choice. So there was that and the other part of it is recognizing that an adolescent's experience developmentally of loss can be very different than a full grown adult. So I think I'm conflating like mourning with grief. So I think about this in my own work now, professionally, where when we have a student who loses a parent, all the adults hovered around and are waiting for them to cry and to want to talk about it. But that's not typically what they want to do. Or I don't think they can always even access that. So I say that because for my daughter, her grief was very embodied. So we had a lot of health things happening, she was having a vasovagal response and fainting. She started having panic attacks on a regular basis. You know, she got depressed for a while, for the first time, and even her own therapist didn't recognize it right away. I was the one that had to say, no, no, I live with her. School started slipping a year after her dad died. So there were all these things that, you know, over time, were happening for her in her body. And it wasn't that she was necessarily crying or wanting to talk about it. And then here's the other tricky part is we have different relationships with the same person when we lose them or when you know. And so I had a long relationship with Kyron, and with a lot of good memories. And she had a very present father, but they were not quite jiving when she was hitting adolescence. And so they're two personalities were a little bit in friction with each other. And I think she knew he was proud of her and that he loved her. But I don't know that she always felt like he approved or liked her for who she was, at the time. And that was something that she had to deal with, that she did not have that closure, she did not she does not have the luxury of popping up on the other side in an adult relationship with her dad. So even our own experiences were really hard. So, you know, I'm trying to take care of my own business and go to therapy and try and be as present as possible for her. I could not always reach her. You know, it was just really, really messy for a really long time.
Jennifer Levin
How did your relationship with your daughter change during this time?
Tami Millard
Well, I think that she got really good at saying what she needed. She was also really good, she's a very wise person. And she was the one that said, Mom, I think, I think you need to go back to therapy. So I remember being at the store with her and you know, we're kind of in the middle of stuff. And she said, Mom, I think it would be really good for you to go back to therapy. And I said, Oh, honey, I appreciate you saying that that's down the road for me. Like, I just want you to know, like, I take these things to my friends. And she said, Mom, I trust you. I know that your friends are good to you. But she said I think sometimes if, she had never been to therapy, by the way, I think sometimes that therapists can reflect back things to you that your friends or family can't. And I just went dang, she just nailed it. So I say that, because I think that she helped me figure out my place in that. But also, I learned to sort of point her towards research sources outside of me. Because she was at that place where she was going to naturally bristle at things that I might know and try and help her with. She needed her own therapist, she needed the grief group at school, which she did have, which was awesome. At her high school, there was actually, the school counselor specialized in grief groups, so she got to be in that space too. So I would say that I think things started getting better when we started being able to find our own journeys and hold space for our own way of being and being able to be gentle with ourselves about where that was. And I think that began to help us come back together. So what I would say now is it's like the two of us against the world.
Jennifer Levin
Oh, wonderful.
Tami Millard
Yeah. And I remember talking to a friend not too long ago who said, you know, we we say the harshest things to our family members. And I thought maybe we do but not in this family unit because we know the importance of kindness and we have ruptures but we're really quick to repair. So I think we know that life is incredibly short.
Jennifer Levin
Yeah. Anything can happen at any time. So your life has changed incredibly, since your husband. Walk us through some of the changes that you've been through.
Tami Millard
Well, and this is not my phrase, I have a friend who's widowed and further down the journey, I remember her saying, your whole DNA changes. And it does. It does. It's not just, it's not just the external world that changes so much. It's also who we are, who we're becoming what we've lost. So I think I spent a lot of time feeling lost. And feeling all the losses and recognizing that even things like when people say, trust your intuition, you think what does that mean? Because when you're with someone for a really long time, you're mirroring things back and forth. And that's part of trusting your intuition.
Jennifer Levin
They become part of it.
Tami Millard
Yeah, yeah. So I think I had to learn how to find that. To make decisions within that. That resonated with me. I sold my house recently, I sold the family home. I'm so grateful that I got to hold on to it for as long as I did, and provide consistency and stability, but it was time. It was time to say goodbye. So I'm in a big massive transition right now I'm living in a little tiny 400 square foot rental. And I'm still in a liminal space. I'm in the hallway. I don't know what the next room looks like for sure. I'm trying to think.
Jennifer Levin
Did you wait until, your daughter left for college so your empty nester completely did you sell it after she left?
Tami Millard
Yeah, I held on to it for sure while she was in high school, and then I had someone say, it's really great for your kid to be able to come home to their home the first year. So I did hold on to it through her freshman year. And then she was a part of that whole process with me the whole summer we were selling the house, going through things, making decisions about them. Is this a maybe, is this important to you? What do we want to hold on to? What do we want to say goodbye to?
Jennifer Levin
Huge transitions.
Tami Millard
Yeah, so I'm, it took me a long time to identify as being single. I really felt married, you know, for a long, long time and was very confused that the world didn't see me that way anymore. And then I realized, at some point, a shift around the third anniversary of my husband's death that I needed to probably not, I wanted to stop memorializing, like it was time. And now I have to figure out what part of me in the "we" is still mine. What is, what is me? So I've done a lot of self exploration, I traveled, I got a tattoo, you know, I've had all these things that I've tried to say yes to, in order to understand myself now, who am I? Who am I becoming, but also what parts are not lost? And what parts of Kyron do I want to honor? And love? How do I carry that forward in love in my life? And I'm certainly in that that journey right now.
Jennifer Levin
So when you reflect back on the last three years, what have you learned or what stands out the most for you?
Tami Millard
Yeah. I think the first thing I learned early is people show up for you based on their capacity.
Jennifer Levin
Oh, that's so well said. That is so well said. Yeah. You don't always, I'll add to that. You don't know their capacity. Or we miss. We misread it or we don't we just don't know what that capacity is going to be. Sometimes we think it's one thing but we just don't know. Well said.
Tami Millard
I think there's some grief and there's sadness in that and maybe there's disappointment for people we thought, oh for sure they're going to be there people, or people who aren't and and also just the things that people say that are helpful or not helpful, but the not helpful part of that is I realized that because we don't embrace or understand loss and grief and discomfort. That it's really about the person feeling that, it's not about me and my story. It's not about even me at all. It's really they're showing me that they have a level of discomfort with my struggle, that to bear witness to that is really hard for them, because that's something that's very unsettling to them. And to be able to hold that with compassion. And also figuring out what I want my choices were in that, what do I need to do with that? How do I let that go? How do I grieve that? How, you know whatever my decision making for what I need from my own inner peace, but I felt like that was a really important lesson for me to learn. And some people come back around, at just the time when we need them to when they have different capacities. And that can be a blessing too. The other thing that was really meaningful to me is in my investigative journalism, you know, and oh, my gosh, it's so humbling. I have a theology degree, I went to seminary, and I had so many existential questions. I had so much going on, I thought, I thought I did all that already. Oh, no, it all came back, right. But I also just wanted to understand what this separation anxiety is about in our bodies and our brains, like, Why does it feel the way it does? Why does it feel like a phantom limb, or something for us? And I came across Andrew Huberman who is a neuroscientist and professor at Stanford who does a podcast called The Huberman Lab. And he had a whole podcast devoted to the process of healing and grief. And this is what finally clicked for me, he said, part of attachment is how our bodies and our minds map the other person. So our brains are association machines. And when we lose someone we no longer have the capacity to place them in time and space, you know, and he said, you picture someone who's really important to you. And then think about how quickly you can get a hold of them. Think about, if you travel, and you land your plane, you know, even if you're in another space, think about how you can picture where they are and when you can reach them. And when we lose our person, our map doesn't work anymore, but it wants to try it keeps trying to make the association. And that's why it's so painful for so long. That's why there's that separation anxiety around it. Because it's not just about our attachment to that person, it's also connected neurobiologically, to the way that we are wired. And a lot of those based on all the episodic memories we have of knowing that person and all the time and space, and that it takes a really long time for us to create these new episodic memories that starts remapping the brain. And for some reason, that was like the missing link for me, I just needed to understand that, why is this this experience? What it is in my body? What is that about? And then I would just say the last thing is, the best way to honor someone, in my opinion, is to sort through all of this, find a way to bring meaning or integrate it. And then to choose aliveness, and love other people to truly be choosing things that make us feel alive. And I think loving other people is an act of courage when we lose someone because it means we have to be open hearted and vulnerable. And risk being crushed again, but I think it is the way to feel all the edges of all of the human experience, not just the pain and the grief, but also all the joy. All the parts of that that are alive.
Jennifer Levin
And you're right, it is a choice. It's a risk, and it's a choice. But it's the only way to truly live again. So final question here. What advice would you give to another mother with a child, particularly a teenager, just experienced the sudden death of their spouse?
Tami Millard
Grace, give yourself a lot of grace, it's going to be messy. It's just messy. And it's so hard. It's so hard to find a path to take care of ourselves so we can be present for our kids. But they're both important. I think our tendency is to pour all of our energy into making sure our kids are going to be okay. That's all we want is for them to be okay. But part of them being okay is knowing that they're seeing us working through this too and taking care of ourselves so that we can really be there when they need us. So that's a big part of it. And then I In tiny rituals, find new spaces and places. I wasn't a great cook. But one of the things I stumbled upon is I made us brunch every Sunday. For a long time, because it was just something that was predictable that we could count on that was bonding, right? So little rituals around that with your kids, especially your teenagers, because they need that, whether they'll say they do or not, they need it.
Jennifer Levin
That's a different story.
Tami Millard
And I feel like the last thing that stands out to me is find your village around your kids, especially in adolescence, they're probably going to struggle to want to share things with you in part because they're worried about you. They're worried about if they share these things, how you're going to take that and how you're going to feel and what that's going to do to you. And is that going to add more burden. And so they really need other trusted people, adults of some sort in their life that can bear witness to their experience with that grace, grief, and also give them guidance.
Jennifer Levin
I just cannot thank you enough today. You have just done such a deep dive in your healing and self discovery and reflection. And when I did some of your reading, when I read some of your writings, you talked about that investigative work. And it's so obvious how it's benefited you and your daughter, and this audience, the things that you shared today and illustrated for us and I'm going to put that podcast in our show notes for everyone. So thank you so much for your time today and your willingness to open up I know you said that you were a private person. I think when people have been through an experience like this, there's a willingness to kind of share this with others so that you can ease the pain and connect. Because this is such a life shattering experience and we need a safe place for other people to be able to hear and realize the impact that this has. So thank you, Tami.
Tami Millard
Thank you. Thank you for letting me share this space with you and for all the work that you do.
Jennifer Levin
Thank you. So thank you everyone for listening today. At the beginning of today’s podcast, Tami introduced herself and her personal mission, which is to increase awareness of the whole self, specifically the social emotional aspects of who we are as individuals. Listening to Tami, it is no surprise, she took a whole self-approach to her grief as she described the multiple efforts, she engaged to explore her feelings, connect with her inner thoughts, and monitor the relationship between her grief with her ability to parent, work and meet the other responsibilities in her life. After the immediate onset of Kyron’s death, Tami felt the trauma in her body, lived with financial fears, and both she and her daughter were surprised to notice how quickly her husband’s presence left the house after his death. To cope Tami went all in as she described it – she began to investigate grief; she read about it and wrote about it. She turned to her faith, relied on her support systems and her internal beliefs to guide her and help her cope with the most difficult experience of her life. As she spoke today and reflected on her learnings and thought processes in grief is clear that Tami has benefited from her whole person approach and the different healing modalities that she used. She shared that she is now stepping deeper into carving out her identity, figuring out who is as an “I” instead of a “we” and envisioning the next chapters of her life that will include the essence of Kyron and her previous existence and what will present as open frontier with new options and new possibilities. Tami shared a sample of her writing along with a short video and family pictures that are posted in our Facebook group – talking about the podcast Untethered with Dr. Levin. I hope you will join and take a take a look. In closing, I would like to read an excerpt from Sarah Nannen’s grief manifesto that was meaningful to Tami during her healing process and it goes…. “I remain open to learning from my pain. I remain open to experiencing true joy. I remain open to experiencing longing. I remain open to practicing gratitude. I remain open to knowing that gratitude and longing are allowed to walk hand-in-hand. I trust that the depth of my pain is not a reflection of the way I honor you, my life is. I remain open to receiving what comes next on this journey of life, knowing what has been will always be part of my story, and therefore, me.” Thank you so much for joining today’s episode of Untethered Healing the Pain After a Sudden Death. My next podcast will be on January 24th, when Tami’s daughter, Anya, invites us into her grief experience after her father’s Kyron’s death. During her interview she shares her perception of her mom’s, Tami’s grief, the lessons she learned while she was grieving in high school and reflects back on being a teenager her father. To learn more about hope and guidance after sudden or unexpected death please visit therapyheals.com and sign up for my monthly newsletter Guidance in Grief at www.therapyheals.com. Bye for now.
