Braving the Bridge

A Different Kind of Goodbye: Caregiving, Guilt, and the Complicated Truth About Grief

What happens when losing someone you love brings not only heartbreak, but relief?

And what happens when you don't get the chance to say goodbye at all?

In this deeply personal episode of Braving the Bridge, Heather shares the stories of two devastating losses that changed her life in completely different ways: watching her mother, Suzanne, battle metastatic breast cancer for years, and losing her husband, Ken, suddenly and without warning.

Before cancer, Suzanne was a fiercely independent woman, a respected bank manager, and a mother who wasn't afraid to challenge her daughter. But when illness slowly took away her independence, Heather found herself navigating the exhausting, heartbreaking realities of becoming her mother's caregiver.

There were appointments, medications, sleepless nights, impossible decisions, and moments of frustration that brought their own overwhelming guilt.

And when her mother finally passed away, Heather experienced something she wasn't prepared to admit.

Relief.

Not because she wanted her mother gone, but because the suffering had finally ended. For both of them.

Ten years later, Ken's unexpected death brought an entirely different kind of grief. No warning. No time to prepare. No opportunity for one last conversation. And no relief that a long, painful struggle had finally ended.

Through these two experiences, Heather explores the complicated emotions surrounding caregiving, anticipatory grief, sudden loss, resentment, guilt, and the expectations we place on ourselves when someone we love is dying.

This isn't about deciding which kind of loss is worse. It's about recognizing that grief is rarely simple, love doesn't make caregiving easy, and sometimes the emotions we're most ashamed to admit are the ones we most need to talk about.

Because you can love someone with your whole heart, be exhausted by caring for them, and feel relief when their suffering ends.

And none of those feelings cancels out the others.

Real Stories. Honest Conversations. New Beginnings.

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What if the life you imagined is gone, but there's still a whole world waiting for you?

Two months after losing her husband, Ken, Heather found herself sitting alone in her living room, overwhelmed by grief and wondering how she was supposed to move forward. She knew she would miss him for the rest of her life, but she also knew she couldn't spend the rest of that life sitting in the same chair, drowning in everything she'd lost.

So she did something she'd never done before.

She booked a solo trip to Scotland.

In this deeply personal episode of Braving the Bridge, Heather shares the adventure that took her from the cobblestone streets of Edinburgh to the breathtaking cliffs of the Isle of Skye—and the unexpected discoveries she made along the way.

There are castles, bookstores, spectacular landscapes, new friendships, a few questionable decisions involving cocktails, and more stairs than any reasonable person should have to climb.

But there's also grief. The kind that follows you across oceans and shows up in the middle of the most beautiful moments.

Standing on a grassy cliff overlooking the Atlantic, tears streaming down her face, Heather realizes something she hadn't been sure was possible anymore: the world could still take her breath away.

This isn't a story about leaving grief behind or finding some magical cure for heartbreak. It's about learning to carry love and loss into new experiences, rediscovering who you are when the life you planned disappears, and giving yourself permission to feel joy without waiting for the sadness to end.

Because sometimes moving forward doesn't mean moving on.

Sometimes it simply means remembering that there's still a beautiful life waiting to be lived.

Real Stories. Honest Conversations. New Beginnings.

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What happens when your mind is constantly preparing for the worst, and then some of the worst things actually happen?

This week on Braving the Bridge, Heather sits down with her longtime best friend, Kristie, for an honest, heartfelt, and sometimes hilarious conversation about living with anxiety while navigating life's biggest transitions.

For years, Kris has struggled with the endless cycle of what ifs. What if she gets sick? What if something goes wrong? What if she can't handle what's coming? From health anxiety and a fear of flying to the overwhelming uncertainty of a new year, even life's happiest moments can become sources of worry.

But Kris has also faced things nobody can prepare for. Finding a dear friend who had passed away, losing her father-in-law to COVID, navigating family health challenges, and answering a devastating phone call in the middle of the night when Heather's husband, Ken, died.

And somehow, when those moments arrived, she found the strength to show up.

Together, Heather and Kris explore the complicated relationship between fear and resilience, the guilt that sometimes comes with enjoying life after loss, and the importance of friendship, faith, laughter, and knowing when to ask for help.

They also celebrate the victories that might seem small to someone else but mean everything to someone living with anxiety: getting on an airplane, taking that first cruise, getting a tattoo, and saying yes to experiences that once felt impossible.

This isn't a story about conquering anxiety or becoming fearless. It's about learning that you can be afraid and still move forward.

Because sometimes bravery isn't the absence of fear.

Sometimes bravery is doing it scared.

Real Stories. Honest Conversations. New Beginnings.

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What happens when two people lose the same person, but lose completely different relationships?

This week, Heather sits down with her 22-year-old daughter, Olivia, for a conversation about grief, growing up, family, faith, mental health, boundaries, flying, and trying to build a future after losing someone who was always supposed to be part of it.

Olivia grew up with two dads. Her biological father has been an important, and sometimes complicated, part of her life, while Ken came into her world before she was two years old. Technically her stepfather, Ken helped raise her, showed up for her, and loved her as his own. When he died, Olivia didn't simply lose her mother's husband. She lost one of her dads. 

What begins as an interview becomes something more personal: a mother and daughter having a conversation they may have needed to have.

There are uncomfortable moments. Olivia shares things Heather said in the depths of her own grief that unintentionally hurt her. Instead of editing those moments out, they talk through them—about the difference between intention and impact, about listening when someone you love tells you something difficult, and about how two people can experience the same devastating event and carry very different grief afterward. 

And through it all comes one simple piece of advice from Olivia:

Allow yourself to change.

Because maybe moving forward isn't about becoming the person you were before.

Maybe it's about getting to know the person you're becoming—and sometimes getting to know the people you love all over again, too.

Real Stories. Honest Conversations. New Beginnings.

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Sometimes the moment that changes your life isn’t a tragedy.  Sometimes it arrives as an opportunity you never expected and asks you to completely rethink the life you thought you had planned.

In this episode of Braving the Bridge, Heather sits down with her sister and best friend, Sarah, to talk about the unexpected journey that brought a newborn baby into her family.

At 38, Sarah was already raising two children, including a daughter whose significant medical needs had shaped much of their family’s daily life. Starting over with a newborn certainly wasn’t part of the plan. But when Sarah was given the opportunity to foster a baby who needed a home, saying no proved much more complicated than she expected.

Heather and Sarah talk candidly about those early conversations (including Heather wondering whether her sister had completely lost her mind), the realities of opening their family to another child, and the moment holding that tiny baby made the decision feel inevitable.

It’s a conversation about motherhood, adoption, family, fear, sacrifice, and what happens when life asks you to cross a bridge you never intended to take.

Because sometimes the unexpected path doesn’t take something away from you.

Sometimes it gives you something you never knew was missing.

Real Stories. Honest Conversations. New Beginnings.

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What happens to you after the thing happens?

When life changes in an instant, it doesn’t just change your circumstances. It changes you.

In this episode of Braving the Bridge, Heather talks about the strange experience of getting to know yourself again after loss.  The parts of the person you used to be that you desperately miss, the pieces that are still very much there, and the unexpected parts of yourself that begin to emerge.

From struggling to read a book or remember whether she ate dinner, to renovating her home, booking trips, getting tattoos and holding onto seemingly insignificant things simply because Ken touched them, Heather shares what rebuilding actually looks like for her: messy, funny, painful, contradictory and very much still in progress. 

This isn’t a story about “finding yourself” after loss. Maybe you were never lost.

Maybe the real challenge is learning how to make room for who you were, who you are now, and whoever you’re becoming, without believing that moving forward means leaving the life or the people you loved behind. 

If something in your life has drawn a line between before and after, this episode is for you.

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Grief is something almost all of us will experience, yet somehow, we still don't really know how to talk about it.

In the first episode of Braving the Bridge, I share why I created this podcast and what life has looked like since the unexpected death of my husband, Ken.  The unbearable first days, the physical side of grief nobody warned me about, the ridiculous things grief makes you do, and my late-night search for some kind of proof that people actually survive this.

But Braving the Bridge isn't only about death. It's about what happens when life changes and suddenly you're standing in a life you didn't expect.

We're going to talk about the hard parts, the funny parts, the things people say that make you want to scream, and all the things life throws at us.

No timelines. No pretending everything happens for a reason. No pressure to grieve, or survive, beautifully.

Just honest conversations about what happens next.

Welcome to Braving the Bridge.

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