In this moving episode of Widowhood Real Talk with Dr. Tina, Dr. Tina welcomes grief educator, author, and speaker Vicky Edgerly, whose life was forever changed by the loss of her son to suicide, her daughter to cancer, and her husband to suicide. Rather than allowing grief to define her future, Vicky discovered a path toward healing that transformed her pain into purpose. Today, she helps others navigate life’s most difficult losses with compassion, wisdom, and hope.

Together, Dr. Tina and Vicky discuss surviving complex grief, supporting widows and bereaved parents, finding meaning after unimaginable heartbreak, and why healing doesn’t mean forgetting; it means learning to carry love forward. Vicky also shares insights from her memoir, Through Grief-Colored Glasses: A Life Reinvented by Devastating Loss, and the lessons that continue to inspire grieving families worldwide.

I am sharing my experience of loving the same man for 32 years, a mother to two adult children, a retired military officer, a breast cancer survivor, and my connections with others.

Anyone experiencing suicidal thoughts should reach out to a suicide hotline or local emergency number in their country: Psychology Today Suicide Hotlines and Prevention Resources Around the World.

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Through Grief-Colored Glasses: Finding Hope After The Unthinkable With Vicky Edgerly

Widowhood, our conversation with Vicky, she is going to share about suicide. That’s the conversation that people try to shy away from. They do not know what to do when we have no choice but to talk about it, but to experience it and to give you hope of what life can look like. In Vicky’s words, if you choose to, Vicky has dealt with the suicide of her son, her husband, and the cancer death of her daughter. Yet she has found a way to have hope and provide encouragement and support to other grievers. Let’s get into this conversation now.

Vicky, welcome to widowhood.

Tina, thanks for having me. I’m grateful and humbled to be here.

Your story, your life has a lot of layers. When you hear, “Welcome to the Widowhood,” what’s the backstory? What are you thinking about when you hear that?

To be honest with you, Tina, I pushed back against that title when it first was applied to me. I want to say maybe 2 or 3 months after my husband Leo died, I went to attend his mother’s funeral. She passed away. I was surrounded by his family members, and one of his sisters started walking me around the room, introducing me as Leo’s widow. I hadn’t had that experience yet. It slammed into me. I wasn’t sure what I felt about it. I cried about it in my hotel room that night. I wore it like one of his old shimmy shirts that I used to put on just so I could smell the wood smoke from our fire pit, the forest that he always walked in.

Evolving Beyond The Identity Of Loss

I wore the title, Widowhood, as a warm blanket for a while until there came a time and a chapter in my life, about right after the second year, at the end of the second year, that there was an occurrence in my life that made me realize I had to let go of the marital relationship. I dropped the name Widow at that point as well. It still applies to me. I’m not Leo’s wife. I am his widow, but I am no longer approaching the world wearing that title upfront. It just comes out naturally in organic conversation.

Thank you for sharing the evolution of that. I know for myself, when someone identified me for the first time, it was shocking. It took my breath away. Someone who has not become a widow, I think it’s hard to understand. It’s just a word. Why does it matter? It’s just like everything encompassing in that. I was like, “That’s where I am. That’s my life right now.” I can appreciate how you shared that over time your connection with that word changed. For someone tuning into this conversation, to realize the way you feel now versus the way it may change later, it has the potential to shift. That is important because some people feel like their death is final, but the way in which we engage it has the opportunity to adjust over time.

That is correct. Absolutely true.

Your life is layered, and we have an amazing book, Through Grief-Colored Glasses: A Life Reinvented by Devastating Loss, and devastating loss indeed. Before we dive into the book, can you tell us about all three of the people in your life that have brought you to this place?

Reframing Devastating Heartbreak Into Love

It was a crazy ride for sure. Devastating in the beginning, but by the time I traveled through it all, I learned to actually love my story. It is, I think, a romantic story. Think about movies like The Notebook, which is centered around death. Is it not?

However, it celebrates all of life.

We all come away with tears, but our hearts are cracked wide open after witnessing such a beautiful story. I feel, just as a caveat to the readers or the audiences, that my story is beautiful. This is the place I’ve come to at this point in my life. It didn’t start out that way. In 2002, my eighteen-year-old son, Adam, took his own life. Unfortunately, twenty minutes after wishing me a happy Mother’s Day on the phone and telling me he loved me, he was gone. That was devastating. I will not get too deep into it, because we could be here all day with that particular story, but it rocked my world.

I had no inner compass. I had no guidance for how to deal with grief, pain, and loss. Growing up, religion was just something we dabbled in on Easter and Christmas. It wasn’t a regular practice, so I didn’t have a faith-based community to lean on. I couldn’t find help anywhere. My community programs for grief support were very lacking. They threw everybody into the same room, and then the stories just looped round and round. There was no path to healing there. I recognized that right out of the starting gate, and it left me feeling isolated.

I also struggled, Tina, a lot with what people were saying to me. When you lose a child, and especially to suicide, all kinds of things come out of the woodwork. You must be so angry at him for doing what he did, leaving you with this mess. Can you imagine how hurtful that is for a mother to hear when her son apparently was in so much pain that he couldn’t face one more day on this planet, and you want me to be mad at him and angry at him for the mess he left me to clean up? I couldn’t wrap my head around where these thoughts and sentiments were coming from. There’s my favorite one. There’s no coming back after the loss of a child.

Society believes that. However, I had a child to bury, and I was not ready to lay down the torch of my life. I was 40 years old, you know? I had a lot of living to do. I had to fight back against those kinds of belief systems. That set me on a path. Once I started diving into that path, a few years later, my daughter, my son Adam’s sister, Tiara, my only surviving child. I want to say 28 at the time, called me to tell me that she had cancer. That again brought me to my knees because I immediately felt the enormity of it. I knew it wasn’t easy cancer. As soon as she started telling me what the statistics were and whatnot, I dove into some research, and I could see the writing on the wall that hers was a rare and aggressive cancer that people just simply did not survive.

I had to walk through that journey. It took two years for her to give up her life to this disease. I was with her the whole time. We moved her eventually into my home for the hospicing portion of the journey. I held her the day she died. I took what I learned after processing Adam’s death into this journey, and I used it. The cancer itself taught us how to slow down and be in the moment. We had all these precious moments we could share knowing that her death was coming. We prioritized our time together. We focused on each other. We healed a rather difficult mother-daughter relationship while we still had time. We checked off all those things on our bucket list.

Surrendering To What You Can’t Control

I grieved her in little tiny increments along the way. We were saying goodbye and letting go of each other slowly. It’s like the difference between ripping a Band-Aid off quickly, which is what happened with Adam, or peeling one off slowly. They both hurt in different ways. That cancer taught me how to fully surrender to what was out of my control, which is imperative that we learn to do if we are to accept what has happened in our lives.

It also taught me how to live in that now moment that all the spiritual gurus talk about and the importance of that and what it can do for the presence, the body, mind, and spirit being in a safe place, which is this now moment as opposed to worrying about the future or reliving a traumatic event in the past. I got through that process. I found her death actually to be quite beautiful because I was so present for it and allowed. By that time, we were rooting for her to go because of the suffering. Of course, we wanted her. She was ready to go. She couldn’t wait for it to be over with.

It was a day of celebration when she died. Now that does not mean there was no grief. Of course, there was grief. I just lost my last remaining child. She left behind three small children, so I had the grandbabies to focus on. That was a blessing. My husband and I, Leo, had a big property out in rural New Hampshire, out in the woods, a beautiful property. We would host those grandkids every single weekend. We taught them how to hike in the woods. We taught them how to grow food in the backyard. We taught them how to cook the food, all the things. That was beautiful for a while until it wasn’t. My husband, Leo, struggled with a couple of different things.

He had what I believed was bipolar syndrome or some other type of mental disturbance or chemical imbalance in his brain. I’m guessing at this because the man would never agree to any type of diagnosis. He would not expose himself in that way. He grew up in a culture where big, strong, burly men did not reveal their weaknesses. He lived with his disease, which eventually led to alcoholism, which, of course the alcoholism compounded the issues with bipolar. Eventually, this led to a time in our lives where things were really rocky in our relationship. Things were really rocky in his relationship with his own kids and family.

Protecting Yourself From Unjust Blame

There was some family drama that I want to get across upfront. When someone takes their own life, the people left behind should never, ever accept any, and I mean, not even a tiny little bit of, responsibility for that decision. However, I can just talk about these events that led up to his mindset, but in that mindset, it was his choice to put a gun to his head as opposed to asking for help. That’s where the disconnect becomes. It’s no longer the family. It’s not the family’s fault. It’s not a drama. Families have drama all the time, but everybody does not go around killing themselves over it.

My husband did. I think really he was just tired, Tina, and he was just done. That was a traumatic experience for me. I was there. There were police there. There were local authorities there. It was a standoff. They were outside the property on the road. My husband was in the forest on our property, and they were talking to him on the phone, and they kept me at bay just at the top of the street. They wouldn’t let me onto the property, obviously, for my own safety. I was there to hear the shot. I sat and waited in my car for the sheriff to come up and give me the news. That was a tough one to go through. It’s a complex grief journey because there was suicide involved.

It’s also complex because it’s your spouse, and you know very well that when your spouse dies, it’s more than just the grief you have to shoulder. You have to shoulder 100% of the finances. You have to shoulder this big nine-acre property now and the three big dogs and all the things that come with it. I have to shoulder trying to stand up to all the questions and the accusations and the stuff that flies around between people after a death by suicide. I had to take on all of that while also understanding that I was in a codependent relationship with an abusive alcoholic. I couldn’t just live in the land of putting the dead up on the pedestal.

I had to keep reminding myself who he was and what had transpired between us so that I did not skip over or sugarcoat that lesson that was there, that opportunity to learn that I had, to learn to stand on my own two feet, rebuild my own life. That’s what I did, Tina. I rebuilt my own life at that point from the ground up, stripped it right down to the bare studs, built myself from the ground up, and completely dove into taking the controls of that process along the way. By then I had learned that I did have a choice in how I experienced and carried my grief. I decided to participate in it and guide it and control where it would take me.

I’m going to just move into the book because more is to be revealed. I have some post-its in here, and we’re just going to go through the pages and let you continue to share your story. As we have this conversation, for the person listening and considering purchasing the book, what do you think is the main takeaway or how they would benefit from reading your journey?

I’m getting a lot of great comments and feedback from the book, and it spans the gamut. The book is rich with multiple different types of grief, different facets of grief, different phases of grief, and all the things. I’m pretty open about sharing exactly what it was like. You’ve been reading some of it, so you know I’m not pulling any punches. I’m not sugarcoating anything. There’s even a sex scene in there. What it does is it shows my process being completely broken because I was unprepared, all the way to the end of this traumatic event with Leo.

I literally knelt on the forest floor next to his blood and offered Reiki energy healing backwards in time to my deceased husband. I was able to do that for him. I wasn’t a blubbering mess. That shock of the suicide of the first one, I didn’t even know how to speak to people. I literally just shut down. I stopped speaking. My family was worried about me. All the way to the point where now I’m leading the show. I’m cleaning up the property. I’m giving him Reiki the day he died. I am hosting his whole family for a memorial celebration of life on our property. I’m giving the eulogy myself, that kind of thing.

The book shows that progression between being broken all the way to being really present, whole, confident, strong, capable, and learning how to really engage in life. That’s what my grief story did. That’s what I hope people get out of it. Just a little hope and inspiration. It’s also full of some tips here and there that folks have been grabbing on to. As I said, the comments that come in, one person, for example, was floored by a story I have in there. I’ll just say it’s the story of my son’s hat. I’ll leave it there, because I do not know what you plan on sharing. She read this passage where I talked about coveting my son’s baseball cap.

In her words, “That gave me permission to go upstairs in my attic and take down the box of clothes that I have of my brother’s because I really want to wear his sweatshirt, but I have been afraid that people will think badly of me or worry about me if I do. Now you just gave me permission to do that.” That’s just one passage from the book that gave this one person permission to grieve how she wants to grieve and to stop worrying about what it’s going to look like to the rest of society. I love that.

There are people in your community that have been steady. Tell us about Donna and Cheryl, who you talk about in the acknowledgments.

Donna is a friend from many years back. She’s an old family friend who goes back to when my kids were little children. She was the neighborhood babysitter. Back then, we didn’t really have a lot of daycare centers and things like that. Stay-at-home moms took on other people’s children. She made a daycare out of her home. She never had children of her own. Donna was an old-time friend who knew my babies since they were little. What she did the day we buried my son was the best thing anyone could have ever done for me during that time. I do not know if she knew she was doing it or not, but she simply walked up next to me.

When I was standing at his grave, when the priest was giving his graveside prayers, she walked up next to me. She reached out and just touched my hand. She didn’t try to force herself to hold my hand. She just touched it so that I would know she was there. She stepped one step behind me, crossed her arms, and just stood. That’s all I knew. That was like the biggest validation that I was being seen, that she knew. That one little touch told me that she knew she had no right to force her way into my circle, or to try to touch my body, or to force a hug on me.

She knew that if she just stood there and quietly supported, “I am going to just stand behind me. I got your back” is what she was saying. Now Cheryl is a newer friend. I didn’t meet Cheryl until my son had already died, but she was a friend of mine during my daughter’s illness, and then eventually my husband’s suicide. She knew my daughter and my husband and the family by then. She’s been my biggest supporter for this whole book project. The book has been coming for years. People have been asking for years.

I’ve known I was going to write it for years, but you’ve got to wait for divine timing for that kind of thing. She was the friend who always supported, but never said, “Is it done yet? When is it going to be done? When are you going to finish?” By the time it was actually done, and she knew I was working on it, it still took me two years to get it through the writing, the formatting, the editing, the polishing, all the steps till it’s finally in print. She was the first one I sent a copy to because she’s the one, when I announced it was done, who just said, “Bravo, well done.”

She never said, “It’s about time.” She has always just let me go at my own pace. Again, as my biggest supporter, she has had some significant losses herself, so she appreciates when I spend time with her just to let her grief be seen and heard. We took a trip together last year to Europe, and we both had some very profound experiences where we felt we connected to, in her case, her father, and me, my children in different areas of that trip. It was really a beautiful time for both of us to share.

Linda.

My sister, Linda. In my family, there were four of us, three girls and a boy, and Linda is the youngest. I am the second-born. Linda and I were always the closest of the siblings, and Linda and I have always lived near each other geographically, whereas the other two have moved to different areas of the country. Linda was present during all three grief journeys. Linda, unfortunately, God bless her, was the one to find my son after he took his own life on Mother’s Day back in 2002. Linda also came to my house and volunteered one day a week to run hospice care for my daughter because I had a cycle of caregivers coming for her.

Linda was the first on the scene to come and support me. She’s who I called after I notified Leo’s children of his death. My sister was the first one to arrive to hold me up during that process as well. Now we share a home. We actually were roommates here in St. Petersburg, Florida. We have been, which came about because of COVID. COVID shifted how we all live and experience the world.

Many people say that they do not have anyone in their grief. How do you think these three people impacted your grief journey?

I hear people when they say they do not have anyone, and even when you’re surrounded by lots of people who really want to support you, you’re still grieving this thing by yourself. Nobody else has your story. Nobody else is seeing through your lens. Nobody else knows everything that’s bouncing around in your head. The grief storm is just that. It’s a storm of whirring, flying debris. My thoughts are the debris. They just whir and fly around and spin out of control, and I cannot necessarily share them with anybody. You feel isolated even when you’re surrounded by people.

I will tell you what, Tina, one of my biggest saving graces is, and it’s one of the first blessings I grabbed onto and held dear and was appreciative of after my son Adam died. That was a continued connection with them in spirit. It came about pretty strongly in the beginning with Adam, and I cultivated that. I needed to learn about that. I know you’ve talked with other mothers on your show who have lost children before, and I hear them all say the same thing. We need to know where they went. We need to know that they’re okay.

I am literally going to follow him to the grave if I cannot discern for myself where he is right now and that he’s okay and that he’s not, in this case, that he’s no longer anguished and tormented and suffering. I needed to know those things. Luckily, I was able to feel him. I had a little bit of an interest in the paranormal and the mystical. It was an entertainment thing for me, but I did understand that some people believed they could talk to the dead after they passed.

I had never really experienced it myself. I dove into studying that thing and had some really wild experiences. They all helped me to release my need to follow him, which was becoming dangerous for me. I know a lot of mothers and fathers too, parents who lose children, feel that way. It’s not that we do not want to live anymore. It is that we need to continue to parent our child.

It’s almost an instinctual, it’s a physical, it’s like that phenomenon when you stand on the edge of the Grand Canyon, and you look over, and you have this really bizarre sensation that you want to jump, but you know you do not want to jump, but it’s like this sensation that comes over. That’s what it’s like for us as a parent to have our child die. If you do not have a strong faith in knowing where they went, everything in your being wants to follow behind. I will just go so that I can, and we get a little suicidal ideation ourselves going on. Luckily, I never followed through with it, but it was there.

How would your grief look differently if you did not have those three women in your life?

My sister definitely gave me an anchor. She was family, and she was someone I knew from childhood, obviously. They gave me an anchor to keep coming back to. All three of those women. Donna was, at that point, she was on the outskirts of my circle because we were not geographically close anymore. I would not say she really affected my grief except that that moment at the grave that I described and thanked her for in the book was something that stuck in my head from day one, and it’s something that I leaned on as I began to study how people respond to grief and different approaches to the grief work that we’re doing to support people.

I began to understand she’s the one who taught me the very first basic principle that grief needs to be seen and witnessed and heard. That’s all that’s required of our support system in the beginning. Just listen, just be there, be present, stop trying to fix us, do not interrupt our release with a hug too soon, shutting off our faucet, trying to force us to feel better. We do not want to feel better right now, and quite frankly, that’s the wrong approach, as we have got to let this thing move through us. If we do not feel it now, then we’re just going to bury it somewhere in our body and have to deal with it later. Folks think they’re helping.

They come over. They want to cheer us up. They want to take us out. They want to force us to engage in life. I might not be ready to engage in life yet. All the things, those women let me feel it. Those women also let me talk about the things I felt that were contacts from my son. If I felt like I was hearing from him, I could tell these people, and they wouldn’t try to explain it away, and their eyes wouldn’t glaze over. They wouldn’t give me the you-poor-dear look. “You poor dear, you’re just reaching for straws here.” That thing. They were genuinely interested in my stories. They even became excited about some of my stories. They laughed with me, and that’s what I needed.

Thank you for sharing that. I want to go to page 23 of the book. If you would read starting with if and then to the next page, intimidating.

“If you have suffered a painful loss, you will undoubtedly see yourself within these pages. It is my hope that you will come away with a deeper sense of peace and know you too can enjoy a fulfilling life while experiencing grief. If you haven’t lost anyone close to you, but expect to one day, your curiosity has also brought you to the right place because you will gain insights within these pages that will help shape your perceptions of death and grief, making your future journeys through the pain of loss less intimidating.”

What does that mean to you now to read that after so many years and thinking of the person on the other side receiving this book?

I have so much. I have a much larger capacity to love. Having gone through all these grief journeys, I have a much larger capacity to love and hold space for others in this pain after helping so many people over the years. That sums it up to me. It is my biggest desire and hope. Just a simple story like this one where they can actually see by example, by living example. I do not know about you, but I dove into research, of course, after Adam died. By the time that Tiara died, I was well on my path.

I did not research grief per se after Tiara died, but I read a lot of books after Adam died, and I would get some help. I would get a little bit of help here and a little bit of help there. Nobody was pulling anything really together. The memoirs were great because they gave you a glimpse into, like, “She’s experiencing that too, so maybe it’s normal.” That takes a little bit of fear off my plate that I’m losing my mind. “No, you’re not losing your mind. You just fried your circuits for a minute. They will recover. Do not worry.”

If someone had just told me that in the beginning, I might not have had so much fear of having to struggle through on my own. That’s what that phrase is. It’s really just setting the person up to, “This book is going to give me what I need.” I’m hoping it opens them enough that when they turn the page, that’s how they receive the story as genuine, the life room.

In part one, I want to talk about the artwork where it says, let’s go to page 29. How did you come to that being the pictures to the left of page 29?

With the dragonflies?

Yes.

Actually, I hired a book designer, so I cannot take the credit for it. However, I did tell her I wanted dragonflies somewhere in my book because the name of my grief support system that I have developed is called Dragonfly Wisdom. I named it that. Are you familiar with the children’s dragonfly story?

Please share for everyone.

It’s a story that I use to help children understand death, but it goes like this. In the bottom of an old pond live some grubs who could not understand why none of their group ever came back after crawling up the stems of the lilies to the top of the water. They promised each other that the next one who was called to make that urgent climb would return and tell them all what had happened to him. Soon one of them felt an urgent impulse to seek the surface. He rested himself on the top of the lily pad and went through a glorious transformation, which made him a dragonfly with beautiful wings. In vain, he tried to keep his promise.

Flying back and forth over the pond, he peered down at his friends below. He realized that even if they could see him, they would not recognize him because now he was such a radiant creature. The fact that we cannot see our friends or communicate with them after the transformation, which we call death, is no proof that they cease to exist. My whole program resides upon opening yourself to the possibility that there is something larger out there than what we can all see, feel, hear, and touch.

Talk about the program a little bit and the work that you’re doing to help other people.

The book finally just came out this last year, but since 2016, that was the year I left my full-time job back in New England when I was living in New England, and I took up space in a wellness center. I had a yoga studio. I was teaching classes and whatnot. I was offering grief support groups. I’ve been working with folks around grief since 2016. I hadn’t really developed a comprehensive program. I was winging it, just servicing the folks who came to the metaphysical and spiritual workshops I was teaching. Those who were interested in the grief support would come for that.

Creating Healthy Spaces For Grief

That period of time that I was doing actually served as a classroom for me because I started noticing that I cannot run a grief support group, an effective one, with everybody in all phases of grief thrown into one circle in front of me. When you have, I developed a two-phase grief support system because when you are fresh in your grief or even if it’s not brand new, but you have not been able to move past that initial acute phase, if you are still in that acute phase where the pain is overpowering and you do not see a way out of it, I cannot throw you into a room full of people who are being taught how to look for the gifts in grief.

I want to hear that. When you’re in acute grief, if someone says that to you, you’re going to get slapped or they’re going to walk out. They’re not going to want to come back to your group. I have created a program that supports and holds the acute griever in a place of storytending, but storytending with a purpose, not just a looping story that becomes more deeply ingrained in your whole being. The more you tell your story without adding ways to stretch your mind around reframing it, the more that same story will just, it’s like the old LP records we used to listen to, and that needle would get stuck in a skip.

If we just let it skip, that groove would get deeper and deeper and deeper, and then it’s harder to knock that needle off its path and send it on a different trajectory. That’s the same thing with your mind. The longer we allow the damage. Have the system, the Dragonfly system walks what it is. I’m going after the peer-led public grief support system, which is either nonexistent in rural communities, or you end up with large corporations running or large organizations running grief support systems in larger communities, but the rural people cannot get to them.

I didn’t have the help when I needed it. I want to make sure people coming after me have some help and help that actually will lead them up and out of it. The system is designed. I’m writing a manual now, which people can purchase, and it’ll be like a field guide for them if they want to run their own groups, and they’ll have this manual, and the manual will break it into two phases. They would have two separate groups, one for acute grievers and one for people who are ready to, who are curious enough to, and willing to participate in their grief.

There’s a difference, and you’ve got to get to that point, and not everybody gets to that point. Some people just will go through the storytelling part and just say, “I’m less fearful. I have less anxiety. I’m just going to go live with this now.” That’s fine. There are lots of people, myself included. I know you’re one of them, who are curious. They’re like, “No, there’s more. I can climb up out of this. I know I can. This is not going to take me down. It’s not going to hold me here. It’s not going to be my identity for the rest of my life.” When that curiosity starts budding in you, then you jump to phase two. That’s where the real work begins. I’m going to ask you to engage in your grief.

I’m going to ask you to feel it. I’m going to ask you to participate with it. I’m going to ask you to take control of how your life will be rebuilt because of it. There are different sets of exercises that I use, and the way I’ve laid out the manual is in an à la carte menu form. I’m addressing it holistically, so I’m using little icons to show you this little exercise or prompt will help the body, mind, and spirit in these ways. I give you the different ways, and I train the people who are encouraged, the people who are facilitating, to read the group. Take your cues from your group.

If your group is predominantly fearful around the physical aspects, “I cannot think anymore. I cannot sleep. I’m not eating,” then you go see page 42, and that’s where you’ll get your list of exercise events and different things that you can do with them. Journal prompts, there’s meditations, there’s QR codes to link to meditations. There are different website links I can go to for more information. There are invitations to have and suggestions for guest speakers.

Public grief support groups would be able to get guest speakers to come in and volunteer their time to speak to your group. I’ve seen it happen all the time. I’ve been able to pull people together, people who come in and do yoga for grief, massage for grief, somatic breathing exercises. All the different things that the practitioners are doing to help us body, mind, and spirit. That’s the premise behind the book, the manual. I hope to have it published by the end of this year. I’m plugging away at it, Tina, as I’m still just one person working on all this stuff.

You are doing an amazing job, and you do provide insight about the dragonfly wisdom in the book. If someone wants to reach you, how do they contact you?

My business name is White Elephant Wisdom. My website is WhiteElephantWisdom.com. If you go there, you can reach everything else. If you go to WhiteElephantWisdom.com, you’ll find links to buy the book. There are, of course, pages on my website giving you my services and options. You can work with me directly. I do one-on-one sessions, working as I call myself a grief journey guide. I do not want to really be a coach because I’m not coaching you how to handle your grief. I’m guiding you through your grief.

I’m walking next to you as you walk through it, and I’m showing you the different doorways available to you that you might not have realized you had as options. You get to choose those kinds of things. As a grief journey guide, I have private sessions, and then I do public speaking. I’ve been starting to fill my calendar with some book signings and readings and things like that. I will eventually develop an online course. It is going to take me, it’ll be at least another year or so before I can get to the online course.

Once that Dragonfly Wisdom Manual is out, published and available, I’m going to start working on that. There will be an online course that people can sign up for if they want one-on-one help from me. Most people can just grab that book for whatever it ends up being, $15 or whatever, on Amazon. They can grab that book, and they can take it into their own preexisting support group, and they can run with it, and they can just pick and choose what they want to use out of it. They do not have to follow it.

As I said, I’m setting it up as an à la carte menu so that the facilitators take their cues from the griever, then use what fits their group and discard the rest. Once all that’s in place, I plan, I’m still working full time, and I have a long commute back and forth to work each day, a city traffic commute, which is not a lot of fun, but within the next 3 or 4 years, which will come really fast. Time is going really fast right now. During that time, I will have the manual out. I will have built the online program.

I’m going to start working on the program here in my local St. Petersburg, Florida community. I have talked to a few people around here who are interested in bringing it on. Basically, what I will do is offer my time up more and more as my time becomes available to go out and start facilitating and getting some of these groups up and running in my local community. There are senior centers here that want it. There is a local church that’s interested and so forth. We’ll go from there, but once all that is in place, then I take myself on the road.

I have two more parts of which I have many, but I think I’m going to have us cover two more sections and see where we go from there. If you would go to page 29, I think this is everything is so important, but I hear people speak about this a lot. It’s super important. Chapter one, if you would start with the name of the chapter and then end with the second paragraph back.

Challenging Societal Myths About Loss

The name of the chapter is Do Not Believe Everything They Say. “They say that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. They also say there’s no coming back after losing a child. Statements like these are prevalent in our society, made evident by our ability to recall and recite them word for word whenever fitting circumstances arise. We innocently parrot back such sentiments to each other without really taking a moment to think about where the statement originated and whether it’s actually true.”

“We certainly never consider the lasting imprint that hearing such statements might leave on the recipient, especially if they are in a vulnerable state. By now you know I’ve lost not one but both of my children, and yet here I am still standing and enjoying a life full of rich experiences with a childlike sense of curiosity and wonder when faced with the unknown of what my own future may bring. I think it’s safe to say that I am living proof that the no coming back from losing a child statement is undeniably a lie, for I most definitely have come back.”

For the person that’s leaning into this conversation, and they are hearing every word of this, they’ve heard for years or months or days. They’re thinking, “How can I come back? Am I not offending them? Wasn’t I a good mother? Why would I be happy?” You bumped into them in the grocery store. What would you share with them?

I’ve come to learn and believe with everything in my being that we are all individually responsible for our own lives. Yes, we guide our children when they’re little, but we cannot stop them from making mistakes, can we? We can try to teach them that the old adage about the hot stove, you cannot really learn or teach a child that that stove is hot until they actually touch it themselves and get burned. That’s when they finally learn that it’s hot. I cannot be responsible for even my children’s actions. When I look at what has happened, Adam was eighteen years old. He was in a lot of pain.

It was just, I can go back to him being an infant, and he was colicky and just screamed, and nobody could make him happy, and people wouldn’t babysit him for me because they didn’t want to be left alone with him and all those kinds of things. He was always uncomfortable in his own skin in this life. When I look at that, I have to wonder what he came into this life for. What purpose did he come here to serve? Meanwhile, simultaneously, I’m again diving deep into these spiritual studies for the metaphysical and spiritual and esoteric studies and the whole thing around the acolyte.

I developed a spirituality, a practice, and I developed a specific faith and a specific belief system. My belief system allows me to understand that every individual soul is responsible for creating their own life. I’m also responsible for creating my own exit point. Adam was not taken from me. Adam was done. Now, if I want to continue to believe my son was ripped from my life, taken from me, and died too soon, it’s not fair. If I want to believe those things, fine. I am going to suffer the consequences of believing those things, which is to live a life in bitterness, depression, and anger.

I didn’t want that for myself. I do not think my son would have wanted it either. When I connected with him the first time through a medium, and he let me feel the joy he felt as soon as he released from his body and started bouncing as a free spirit all around the room, I felt that. It was visceral. I felt it in my body. I felt the joy. It shocked me. It slammed into me during a mediumship reading, and I felt his joy. It felt like my son. I could literally feel him inside my body. That’s when I realized that Adam was okay and he wanted me to be okay too.

His death led me to my spirituality, which saved my life and allowed me to walk through those other two journeys. My beliefs also helped my daughter during her illness come to terms with her own pending death. There was a lot of anxiety and fear around that for her, and she was able to release a lot of it just by understanding the path of the soul and understanding the soul and the over-soul’s ability to choose what the human experience needs to be for that soul.

Running into people in a grocery store, it’s hard because you do not know where they are in their own belief system. Sometimes I tell them, “You just have to stretch your mind around.” In the beginning, it was always, “You’d be surprised what the human spirit can bear when it’s given no choice.” That was the only answer I had in the beginning, Tina.

No, that’s fair. I had no choice. In your choices, I’d like the last section of the book, page 151. If you would read that page, I think that shows a lot about the choice you have made in this entire process.

Chapter 7, Surrender: Giving In, Not Giving Up. “Typically, we see two trains of thought when it comes to the word surrender. Some view it as giving up when they feel they cannot possibly go on or they believe they have no choice, leaving them feeling depleted and often ashamed they couldn’t push past their struggle. They feel beaten and can easily become sullen, bitter, and even depressed, depending on how intensely the experience affects their lives. I am of the second group who sees surrender in a more empowering way.”

“When those like us say we have surrendered to an experience, it’s simply our way of saying we vow to stop fighting what is happening and allow it to unfold in divine timing. We trust ourselves, the universe, or God to see us through. We evoke our faith that everything happens for a reason and we relax into it. We give in and release the struggle, leading us to acceptance and leaving us feeling more peaceful and capable of handling what comes our way. Which group do you find yourself in?”

How long did it take you to find yourself in group two, or do you think you always were a group two person?

I’ve always been a look-on-the-bright-side-of-life person. I’ve always had friends comment on, “Vicky, you always just seem to find the right thing to say.” I’ve always been the person that people flock to and dump their problems on. I was the go-to person. When this happened to me, I had no go-to person for that, because I was the go-to person. I always had a certain penchant for it. That is true. The trick with us when we come forward to try to help grievers is, we’re faced with folks who that is not their underlying personality. You have a lot more work to do with those people.

Those people are the ones who I really want to take back into phase one and stretch their minds and open their hearts a little bit before ever exposing them to the work we do in phase two. It would be cruel to throw them into phase two. There are ways we can do that. There’s one thing I will say that I learned very early on in one of the books I read after Adam died was that grief is an amplifier. What that means is any personality trait that you have or any preexisting conditions that you have.

Any preexisting chemical imbalances in the brain or mental illness or anything that you’re struggling with, history of depression, all of that stuff is going to be amplified. If you are having a really hard time with grief and you do not understand why, all these other people in your group seem to be moving on, but you’re still stuck, it’s time to go back to your previous life. What were you struggling with before? Have you ever done the work to climb your way out of depression before? What worked for you then? Let’s start applying some of that stuff now.

At the end of the day, they’re really tough cases. You have got to go right into the PTSD treatments. They have got to go right into therapy for post-traumatic stress just because this is a trauma event. It is. When it happens suddenly, or there are other experiences around, such as my daughter’s cancer death, expecting death can be very traumatic for people. I chose to view it as a sacred honor. How many parents and mothers are there to watch their child take their first breath and their last? That’s beautiful that I can say that, I think. That’s the perspective I’ve decided to take on it. It’s the spin I’ve put on it.

It is about choices. I want to circle back to something you just said. You said “Your previous life.” Are you speaking about the life before the people passing or a totally different life of existence?

Just before the people pass. Whatever personality traits and disorders, mental disorders, emotional disorders, or physical ailments, anything that you had going on before the death occurred is going to be exacerbated and amplified. A lot of what people think is, “My grief is so complex,” it’s not really that the grief is so complex. It’s that you had these other problems that you weren’t dealing with that are complicating your ability to handle the grief.

We have got to go back and deal with those. I cannot just put a Band-Aid on your grief. This is where, when you see this happening in your groups, and it’s talked about in my book, I discuss it. There’s a whole chapter on it, trying to identify when someone needs more help than your group can give them, and then be ready to make recommendations. We never give out the names of, we’re not going to recommend certain therapists and whatnot.

That’s not what this is about, but just to say, “You might want to explore private therapy.” You might want to explore, if you have someone in the past who helped you with your depression or your bipolar or whatever it is you’re dealing with, you might want to go back to that doctor and say, “This has happened in my life, and now this condition is really rearing its head. What can you do to help me get through?”

We could go on for hours and hours and hours, probably could. Thank you for trusting me to share your story.

You’re welcome.

Thank you very much. I try to give my guests an opportunity to be the show’s host. Do you have any questions for me?

I’ve tuned in to your episodes, so I knew you were going to ask me that. I’ve been wondering what I might ask you. I do have a question. I ask this of a lot of people I face when I run into people organically with grievers, and we have these conversations. I pick their brain a little bit. I would like to know, is there something like 1 or 2 things that somebody might have said to you when you first lost Mark that would have dispelled a big chunk of the fear you had going into this grief journey with him? Is there one specific area, like, “I’m experiencing this, I feel like I’m going crazy,” if someone had just told me this was normal? That kind of thing. Is there one thing?

Thank you for tuning in to the show. I appreciate that. For me, I immediately started reading, researching, trying to get more knowledge, because for me, knowledge is power. Obviously, I’m not the first person in the world whose husband died. There must be information out there. My ability to normalize and say, “This is what you should expect. I cannot change it. I cannot fix it.” Knowing that this most likely has the potential to be something I would experience helped me understand what that looked like.

The two things, one, to understand the concept that grief is not just me being sad. There are a lot of mental and physical impacts of grief. It is going to impact the way my brain may become sluggish. It impacts the way my prefrontal cortex versus my amygdala. This is not just, “I’m an emotional woman over-exaggerating.” Grief does this. My body is trying to protect myself from a profound trauma. My husband had a heart attack on vacation in our hotel room. I’m not walking out of there the same woman. The ability to understand. I will be sleepy.

I cannot make conscious decisions. Some people may, as you talked about when Adam passed, how that impacts you versus when your husband passed, what we learned from that impacts how we show up in situations. Understanding the mental and physical part of what that looked like and going, “You just have to give it some time.” Keep doing the things you’re doing, working out, eating healthy, and you’re not sleeping. Since I’m not sleeping, I brought the elliptical into the front room because both the kids were in the military. I was in the house by myself.

If I’m going to be here, I’m going to be doing something. Knowing that empowered me to not have to try to project-manage it, or rush it. Honey, your whole husband died. You’re not a fan of this, but you too will eventually keep living. In that process, as we’re going through this, this is how I’m going to manage that. That’s the knowledge that I found that was helpful for me. The other thing that was extremely helpful for me was my faith in my tribe, rediscovering, researching what I had believed in God beforehand and seeing, does this still fit this version of my life?

When people in your life leave, like you said, the things that you leverage or the coping skills or things you did, if they didn’t show up, they’re going to amplify now. My faith amplified to remind myself what I believe, to not just be the “Woe was me, this happened.” Everybody’s dying. This is how this goes. This is the process. What have you believed in, and let that be the rock, the tribe, the representation of my siblings and my friends, which has driven me to this work to some extent. I talk to so many people who say they literally have nobody.

People have not learned how to witness their grief without trying to fix it, or they cannot handle it, cannot stand beside them. My siblings and my friends stand just as strong now as they did nine years ago when my husband died. I didn’t know how to tell them how to show up all the time, and they were not always needing that, but they knew me and loved me enough to see what things didn’t look like well. They inserted themselves in the process to be there, similar to your friend, knowing to gently touch your hand and stand back. Sometimes it was not talking about it.

Sometimes it was letting me talk about it. Sometimes it was just being there to let me know, “I am grieving with you.” They never tried to say their grief was bigger. He was my husband. The ability for them to tell me it’s still hurting them, it was so comforting in the way that they said it, that my life is never going back to what it was. It’s going to be something different. I do have a life now that I love. Sometimes I just pause in all of it. Those would be the things that I know that were impactful for me and that were allowing me to be where I am today.

That’s beautiful. Thank you.

Closing Thoughts And Anchoring Your Body In The Present Moment

Thank you. I would like to give you the opportunity to close this conversation. Maybe there’s something that we didn’t cover, something else you’d like to share, or just final words.

I guess I just want to encourage people to know that you’re not alone. There are so many of us out here who are holding space for you. Even if you cannot see us, open your heart, and you’ll be able to feel us. I will give you a little bit of, if you’re in that phase one group, my heart breaks for the folks that are in acute grief. I remember how bad it was. It was bad. It was really bad. I know what it’s like to be in that space. If you can do one nice thing for yourself today, I would ask you to just go outside and be present with your body. Go outside and stand, sit, or lie.

I do not care if it’s for 1 minute, 2 minutes, 10 minutes, as long as you can manage it, but I want you to just be in your body. Do not take your phone with you. Do not take another person with you. Just feel your body. Feel your feet on the surface you’re standing on, or your butt on the surface you’re sitting on. Feel the breeze lifting your hair. Feel the sun on your face. Acknowledge it and feel it. This is how you begin to teach your brain and your body that you are safe and that you are here, and that you are alive. Let’s face it, it feels like part of us left with them when that first happens.

In a sense, somewhere up here, our brain believes that we are also dead. That’s why one of the chapters is called Zombies Chasing Ghosts, because you’re literally like a zombie walking around with zombie motions. You cannot even remember that you’re supposed to brush your teeth in the morning and you’re supposed to forge a new path in the world. Just be present in your body. Five minutes a day. That’s all. Start there. That’s all. You just have to start.

Thank you, Vicky, for being here and sharing.

You’re very welcome. Thanks for having me, Tina. Bless you.

Important Links

• Vicky Edgerly on LinkedIn
• Vicky Edgerly on Instagram
• Through Grief-Colored Glasses: A Life Reinvented by Devastating Loss
• White Elephant Wisdom

About Vickey Edgerly

Vicky Edgerly is a well-loved and sought-after expert in her field. With over 25 years of study, observation, and personal experience, she is the go-to girl when you need a living example of what living with grief can look like.

Finding no real help in her community for processing the complexities of grief after her 18-year-old son, Adam, took his own life, Vicky made it her mission to find healthy ways through the experience. Imagine her surprise to learn that her willingness to explore her grief would result in an expanded awareness of the meaning of life and the ability and desire to help guide others through life-changing events such as the loss of a loved one.

Vicky speaks openly and authentically about all aspects of the grief journey with a particular focus on reframing her story of ‘heavy burden’ to one of ‘sacred contract’. In this lead-by-example way, Vicky’s story becomes a tool to help others struggling with the pain of loss find their own way through. She brings light and hope to an otherwise dark and hopeless situation.

Blazing the trail through complex grief journeys after losing both of her kids and her husband puts Vicky Edgerly in a unique place of expertise…

Offering hard-earned wisdom for navigating the pain of loss.