Ep #374: What No One Warns You About Grief and Your Nervous System: An Interview with Heather Rosser

Welcome to The Widowed Mom Podcast, Episode 374: Widows Unfiltered: An Interview with Heather Rosser.

Welcome to The Widowed Mom Podcast, the only podcast that offers a proven process to help you work through your grief, to grow, evolve, and create a future you can truly look forward to. Here’s your host, Master Certified life coach, grief expert, widow, and mom, Krista St-Germain.

Hey there, welcome to another episode of the podcast. So I’m recording this one actually quite a bit early, but when you are hearing it, it will literally only be a couple days away from the 10th anniversary of Hugo’s death, which is wild to me that it has been 10 years. I’m going to do an episode of the podcast for the first week in August about some of the things, some of the most important things I’ve learned since Hugo died, but grief time is weird. I don’t know what your experience of it has been, but my experience of it is that it is just so weird. It feels like so far away and also yesterday all at the same time, and I can just never quite describe it any way other than that, but that’s how it feels to me. Such a strange experience.

It’s hard to tell you how I never would have imagined then that I would be here now recording the 374th episode of this podcast and getting to work with and then tell the stories of women like Heather, who you’re going to hear from today. It is literally not something I could have imagined. I want you to hear that because there are so many things in your future that you literally can’t imagine. There’s so many things coming, things that you’re going to love, maybe some things that you’re going to hate, but some things that you just can’t even imagine that will blow your mind if you let them. And I did not cry during this interview. I came very close, but it continues to amaze me at how we have this thing called the internet where we don’t have to go through our grief alone.

We have resources. We have tools. We have ways to connect with people that I can get on this microphone and record a podcast and send it out into the interwebs and you can download it on a device that you are listening to or watch it on YouTube if that’s where you are and benefit from it. And maybe we’ll meet and I’ll get to work with you and maybe we won’t ever meet, but still the work that I do will hopefully help you. And that is amazing. So I never could have anticipated it. I know that the same thing is true for you.

And know also that even though you might be in the early days of your story, where Heather was once in the early days of her story, I was once in the early days of mine, and then we have a day like this where Heather comes on the podcast and other people are going to benefit from hearing her story. I want you to know that that’s possible for you too. That even if you can’t imagine it now, at some point you will be further down the road than someone else. You will be the example of what is possible for another widow. And it’s okay if you don’t know what that’s going to look like and it’s okay if you can’t imagine how that could be true. I just want to tell you that it is going to be true. And I think that’s pretty cool. So with that, let’s jump into my interview with Heather Rosser. Enjoy.

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Krista: All right. Welcome, Heather. I’m delighted to have you on the podcast. It’s taken a little bit to get us here, but here we are.

Heather: I am so honored to be a part of it and thank you so much.

Krista: Well, I think people are going to benefit from hearing your story, so thank you for being willing to share it. I know it’s maybe not always the easiest story to share. So I will have you get us started. Tell people who you are, how you got here, anything you want listeners to know.

Heather: Well, I am Heather Rosser and I lost my husband three and a half years ago and I found Mom Goes On through the podcast. I immediately knew that that was exactly what I was looking for. I was about five months into my loss and I felt like I had been buried with my husband. And I was literally trying to claw my way out of that grave. I knew that I was still here and that God still had a plan for my life and I just didn’t know how to embrace it. I didn’t know how to move forward.

And so I found the podcast and I joined and it has absolutely been transformative, has changed my life, the tools that you’ve given us and the work that I’ve done in the program has just revolutionized my life. I too did not believe that I could enjoy life again after losing my husband. I honestly didn’t think I would survive it to be really truthful. But I have. I’ve learned how to live again and I’ve learned how to just feel all the feelings. It’s not always all high, but I’ve learned how to just embrace all of what life has to offer.

Krista: So what do you remember from the early days of grief? I always like to understand like what was your experience of grief before he died? What was it like for you in the early days? Those kinds of things. Because that’s where a lot of our listeners are right now.

Heather: Well, prior to my husband passing, I had lost my dad and I had lost my grandmother, both very close to me. And that was all I knew about grief and I really had never read anything, wasn’t really familiar with anything about grief other than what I had experienced. And you know, those were grievous, but in some ways, you know, a child expects to lose a father, expects to lose a grandmother. I did not expect to lose a husband. And to be honest, when we first found out his diagnosis because he went for his first colonoscopy at 49. He hadn’t been sick, really very few symptoms. He’d been a little constipated, but other than that, and he went for his colonoscopy and he was stage four colorectal cancer at that time.

And so that began a three-year fight to survive, to try to beat it. My faith, our faith was central to our lives and still is. And so that played a big part in the way that we made decisions and what we believed and what we did. And we fought it with conventional medicine for the first few years and he actually did really, really well and thought we were going to beat it maybe. And we were very hopeful, then things started deteriorating and it went downhill pretty quickly at the end. And you know, something that I think about is that people often think that when you have time like that, when there’s a diagnosis, that somehow that makes it easier. I can’t say whether or not it does because I’ve never experienced the other side of the coin. But I will say that time does not equal readiness. I was not ready, even on the day that I lost him.

So even having time, yes, there were some conversations, some things that were done that we had the opportunity to do and that was a blessing, but I was no more ready than somebody who lost somebody suddenly. I just, I couldn’t prepare for that. And so it just thrust me into a really dark place and just that first year, that whole first year was just survival, putting one foot in front of the other, clawing my way out of that grave, refusing to be buried with him and just grasping for whatever would help me to live. And when I came into the program, what’s interesting is the program, you start out with learning to feel your feelings and the now process. And if you remember, that was extremely hard for me.

Krista: Nobody loves me for doing that.

Heather: No, but it’s so necessary. But I wasn’t able to feel my feelings in the beginning. I had just spent a lifetime repressing any kind of negative emotion, any kind of anger or sadness or grief or anything like that and just being strong and happy and optimistic. And so that was very difficult for me. In fact, I had to kind of take a step back. I couldn’t do the now process for a little bit. You taught me right at first, you know, my nervous system was so wrapped, it was a mess. And I had to learn, you know, bilateral stimulation and tapping and breathing and all of these things to calm my nervous system before I could even start to feel my feelings. And so that was a turning point for me though, when I learned to take care of my nervous system and create safety in my nervous system. And that’s something that I still frankly am dealing with all the time. I mean, I was tapping earlier today, always working through that. And so those are tools that are life-changing.

Krista: What made you stick with it when it was so much work to be able to get more comfortable with feelings?

Heather: Again, just feeling like I was. I didn’t feel like I had a choice. I know I did now. I can look back and I can see that, you know, I could have chosen to do a lot of things and I could have chosen to turn to alcohol or I could have chosen to stay in bed all day, a lot of things that we do as coping mechanisms when we go through a loss like this. But I chose to fight. I chose to apply myself and to, you mentioned post-traumatic growth in one of your podcasts early on. And when I heard that, that was pivotal for me. I wanted post-traumatic growth. And so that’s what propelled me forward and kept me going throughout the whole process.

Krista: Okay, so the nervous system regulation was helpful. Found yourself struggling to feel feelings. If you could go back, like thinking about even before you maybe joined Mom Goes On, if you could go back and give yourself advice, wisdom, love, something, what would you tell yourself early on after he died?

Heather: I think I would just encourage myself to just keep putting one foot in front of the other and you will get through this. Because every moment of every day just seemed interminable. It just, you know, and time is so weird when you have a loss like this and your whole world is turned upside down. And in some ways it feels like it’s been forever since you saw him or in other ways it’s like it was just now, you know? And so it’s just kind of, it’s a weird place to be and you just have to keep applying yourself and keep moving forward and keep taking that next step. And I mean, I really started to move forward when I got into the program because I had the encouragement of the community. I made a promise to myself from the get go that I was going to be on every coaching call I could and get coached as often as I could. And so even if I didn’t know what I was going to get coached on, I would just come on and allow you to coach me and that helped me tremendously.

I was just determined to just do the next thing until I found myself out of all of this, you know? And you know, honestly, I’m still there. I’m still doing that. I’m still just one foot in front of the other, just showing up and still getting coached and I’m still in the program. I’m a lifer.

Krista: But it feels like now a lot of what you get coached on, you know, in the beginning, I think there’s a lot of like new concepts and new ideas and, you know, is a steeper learning curve, whereas now it’s just like sometimes I just need to remind you of something you’ve already done, something you already know, or just kind of show it to you in a slightly different way. And you just go, oh, yeah, okay, that’s what’s happening. I see it. And then the pivot time is like so much faster.

Heather: Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I do so much self-coaching and there are women in the community of Mom Goes On that I am friends with, personal friends with now, and so we talk all the time. And so we all talk the same language. We all understand where we’re coming from. And so just that support is amazing. And yeah, but I do still get coached because there are times that I can’t see the forest for the trees.

Krista: Same. That’s why I get coached.

Heather: Exactly. Exactly.

Krista: Can you talk to people kind of like about what life was like together, you know, in your marriage, what it was like, I mean, obviously there was a battle of cancer and, you know, that definitely has its own rhythm and needs. But what was your life together like? What had you envisioned your life was going to be like? And then where did you find yourself?

Heather: Well, I met him when I was 19 and we married a year later. So we married young. We were married, was just shy, a few weeks shy of 33 years. And he was my best friend. And we were always together. We worked from home a good part of our marriage. And so we were always literally physically in the same house together. And we shared so many common interests and did everything together. We were true partners in our marriage and best friends. And the biggest thing, I think part of the reason why I struggled so much with my nervous system when he passed away was we regulated one another. Our nervous systems regulated one another. And I had never done that on my own. And I literally, before I met him, I had had a period of time where in high school, I dated a guy through high school. And then after high school, we broke up and so I was without someone for a few months. And I didn’t know how to regulate my nervous system then either. But I was a teenager. That was kind of normal, it seemed like at that time, you know, I was kind of off the rails emotionally.

And then I met him and we basically just grew up together. And we never discussed it. We didn’t talk about, you know, regulating one another’s nervous system or anything like that. That was just who we were. And so once he was gone, I felt like I reverted back to teenage Heather in the way that it was like losing him didn’t just break my heart, it like filleted it, it like opened it wide up, you know? And everything that I had ever struggled with, every insecurity I had, came rushing back in and I felt like, I mean, I felt like that teenager, you know, that insecure who had been suicidal, all of that came back. And I was, you know, surprised by it. I didn’t expect that. I mean, I’d lost my husband, but I didn’t realize that that stuff was still part of me. And emotional childhood wounds and all that kind of stuff just all came back to the surface. And so after he passed away, I had anxiety attacks all the time. I was just, I was a mess.

Krista: I think people just listening to that, Heather is going to be really helpful because I think that’s how a lot of people feel and it’s so unexpected because we’re not taught and we’re not prepared. And then it feels like so overwhelming and so much. And then we can’t talk about it or don’t have people to talk about it with. And so then we assume there’s something wrong with us and that we’re abnormal or broken in some way. And so just saying that, I think people are going to feel relieved to hear it. It still sucks, but…

Heather: Yeah. But feeling it too. My personality, we all have an inner critic, but my inner critic is especially loud and especially mean. And I shame myself for having these feelings or for, for feeling all of this. And so that was a huge battle for me where I had to learn to quiet that inner critic and be kind to myself and be compassionate with myself. You helped me tremendously with all of that. And I’m still again, that’s something still I’m working on. And so it’s like grief, you know, this is the starting point or was the starting point for me in this total realization of who I was and this next chapter of my life. Grief opened that door. It opened all of these wounds and now I’m working on all of these things and I’m actually showing up more in my relationships and being kinder to myself and just learning how to be quite honestly what Chris was to me.

He truly was like the wind beneath my wings. He was, I got my confidence from being with him. I always felt safe with him. And all of these things that now I look at it and I’m like, I never really had certainty for my future. None of us have that guarantee, but I thought I did. And so when I lost him, I lost all of that. And now I’m having to learn that I can create this within myself. I can create safety for myself and that I can regulate my nervous system. And so it’s just, it’s been a huge lifestyle change for me, a huge, definitely a post-traumatic growth.

Krista: Yeah, in so many ways. I still, because so many people are not willing to jump in like you jumped in, what was it that made it so, it sounds like it was, I don’t want to say easy, but the way you’re kind of talking about it, it just, it does sound like it wasn’t a question. Like you were like, no, I’m getting, I’m figuring this out.

Heather: I think it was just desperation.

Krista: Desperation. Okay. Yeah.

Heather: I was desperate. I literally had come up with a plan on how I was going to kill myself because I couldn’t live without him. And so I was desperate. If I was going to live, I had to figure out how I was going to do this. And I had to, I had to

Krista: and then you started to searching for resources?

Heather: Yeah, I mean, I had done some other grief work through my church that was helpful with raw grief, just opening up and sharing my story and stuff, but it wasn’t like propelling me forward. It wasn’t pulling me out of the grief per se. It was just helping me to manage it at the moment. But I needed something to grab on to that would help me to pull myself together and to want to live again.

Krista: What did you imagine it was going to be like and how did that compare to what it was actually like?

Heather: Oh, well, I mean, ideally, I thought it would be linear. I thought I would just start to make progress and move in a direction and grow. And I have since found that is not linear. In fact, a lot of the things that I’ve already worked on and that I thought I had already kind of gotten under my belt and knew how to deal with had come back up again in recent years, just as life progresses, as I’ve, you know, started dating and, you know, I started a business and so all of these things, it’s like you go back through, you cycle back through this grief cycle. You’re always working on these things, but you’re in a different place each time you face them.

Krista: Same devil, next level.

Heather: Yeah. And you have the tools now. So it’s easier and, but it’s still not fun. I don’t enjoy it to be honest. I’m always looking for the easy button.

Krista: But what I see with you is like, I mean, nobody enjoys it. None of us enjoy, it’s just hard to be a human sometimes. But also, I see you kind of leveraging, like every time you’ll come with something which does seem like revisiting something that’s already somewhat familiar because you keep doing it and it’s because you expand, right? You start the business, you start dating, then you get the benefit of leveraging all of the change and work that you already did, and then you just move faster. And so, I don’t think I’ve fully been able to express to people what I mean, but this is, you’re a good example of it. When I talk about that healing grief spiral, I’m really talking about the same three things over and over and over. It’s just that we get better and faster at it, but it’s not that it stops. It keeps happening because we’re humans and we just, we kind of develop some muscle memory about how to support ourselves. You know, we just keep, can I calm my nervous system down and settle the storm? Can I choose my thoughts on purpose? Can I take action in that direction? Repeat, repeat, repeat. And I just keep finding myself taking the same steps over and over, but then in a new challenge.

Heather: And as you say that, what comes to mind too is another key component for me was not only learning how to feel my feelings, but recognizing what it is. That’s a step there for me that was not, it wasn’t automatic. I couldn’t see it a lot of the times. And I still, I find that now I can catch myself a lot quicker. I catch myself when I’m being mean to myself, when I’m shaming myself or judging myself. I catch myself when I start to feel anxiety or overwhelm build.

And in the beginning, I didn’t know what any of that was. And it was just a tsunami of feelings and a tsunami that just, it was so overwhelming, I couldn’t differentiate. I couldn’t separate and say, oh, this is grief, oh, this is anxiety, this is sadness, this is even happiness or excitement feels a lot like those things. And so as I go on with these tools that I’ve learned, I’m still spiraling, but I’m spiraling up and I’m repeating these same things, but I’m getting much better at seeing them and much better at catching myself quicker and calming my nervous system and then and going through the process, you know?

Krista: That’s what I love to hear. That’s what I love to hear. Can you talk about how your vision for your future has changed over time? Like, you had one vision with him in your life and how is your vision for the future changed since all of this?

Heather: Well, that’s kind of interesting because I’m a romantic at heart and my fantasy was just to always, I knew we were going to hit 50-year marriage, you know, 50 years of marriage because we married so young. Giving that up, not having a choice, but losing that opportunity was so grievous to me. It was just a huge secondary loss for me. It was on top of losing him, it was losing that dream and what that meant to me. And our future, we were on the verge of being empty nesters. I became an empty nester around the same time that I joined Mom Goes On. And so we were on the verge of being empty nesters and we had plans to travel. We had several big international trips planned and things that we were going to do and just looking forward to, we’d started to reconnect on a couple basis without the kids being the center of everything. And losing all of that.

And then now, I feel like I am built for companionship. I have been a wife and I was a stay at home mom. I homeschooled my kids. I very much fit the domestic female role and never aspired to have a career or to do anything like that. I’ve never been one who pursued like her independence. I loved being married. I loved my husband handling the finances and making all the decisions and that not being on me. And I know that may not be the popular view today, but that was me. And I can’t even say that I was, I still feel so lost without that identity, without that role. You know, I’m still a mother, but it’s not the same. My kids are grown. I’m not a wife anymore. And then starting to date, I don’t know how to be a girlfriend. I haven’t been a girlfriend for so many years. So this has been challenging for me. It’s like my future, what I thought it was going to look like was just gone and my identity with it. And honestly, I’m just writing it one page at a time right now. I still don’t know exactly what it looks like. I want back what I had.

Krista: What are some of the ways that you’ve experimented with thinking about it? Because we have, I’ve seen you create a business for yourself. Now you’re dating again.

Heather: I have. I have. And the creating the business is part of Mom Goes On, through the program when you challenged us to do audacious adventures, that was how that kind of started. My husband and I had talked about starting, me becoming a travel agent at some point in time, because we traveled, we actually cruised on Disney all the time. And so he wanted me to be a Disney travel agent so we could get discounts or whatever. But we were going to do that together, you know, it was never something I was going to do. But the audacious adventure, what I challenged myself to do was all those trips that we had had planned, those international cruises and stuff that had been canceled, I decided I was going to still do one of those. I was going to go.

And so I went to Norway. That was within the first year, I guess. No, it wasn’t. It was in the first 18 months of him passing. And so I decided that, and I had never, you know, traveled internationally by myself or anything, but I flew by myself to London and got on a boat and went to Norway and went to Bruges and all by myself. And my audacious adventure was not only to do it, but to do it alone because I really didn’t like my own company. I didn’t like being alone. That’s what’s been the most difficult for me. And so I decided, no, I needed to prove to myself that I could do this and that I could do this alone, that I could still live my life and I could still travel and I could still carry on with some of the dreams that he and I had had without him. And so I did.

I went and did that trip. I’ll be honest, it was kind of miserable. I mean, it wasn’t fun being alone and eating alone and all of that. But I was so proud of myself and it really moved the needle in my life as far as me beginning to see myself as capable and that I could do this. And in telling the community of Mom Goes On women about this, they all, you know, several of them said that they would love to travel too, but they didn’t want to travel without their husband. And so that’s what caused me to start Plot Twist Travel and to plan group travel that we could do together as widows. And that has been a major blessing. I honestly don’t see it though as a career or it’s just a hobby. But I love it. I love being with these ladies. There’s just such a special connection. We don’t know each other. We’re from all over the country and we come together, but we all have this shared thing that we’ve experienced in our lives that we’ve been through. And it’s like this immediate connection and it’s healing for my soul and it’s healing for theirs.

Krista: And you get to see great places and do cool things.

Heather: Exactly.

Krista: Plot twist. It’s the best name ever. Well, and I know, you know, even if it’s not a full-time career or it’s not something that, you know, takes up the majority of your time, having been alongside you as you did it, I can say you really pushed yourself beyond what was comfortable for you, right? Like I watched you do that and tackled things. Starting a business is no joke. Even if it’s not a full-time thing, it’s no joke. There’s a lot of tech, there’s newness, there’s skills you don’t have, there’s stuff you got to learn, wade through. And there’s just really kind of no other way to do it than just to commit to doing it and figuring it out. And so, you did.

Heather: And doing it without your person.

Krista: Yes.

Heather: Who was your rock and the one that you would talk to and share everything with and would encourage you, you know? So, yeah.

Krista: What was it like to decide to date again?

Heather: That was similar too. I mean, I always knew that because I don’t like being alone and I do want to be married again. And he and I had talked about this even before he was diagnosed with cancer that if something happened to one of us, the other one should remarry. So there was no guilt or anything like that. But I waited three years before I started to date. And I dipped my toe in the water. I wasn’t real sure if I was going to like this online dating stuff. That was really scary to me. But I found that it was actually pretty invigorating, pretty exciting because I love people and it was nice. It’s incredible how much I missed a man’s voice and just a man in my life. They think different than we do and it helps kind of balance out my emotions and, you know, and so I actually kind of had fun with it. And not that I want to go back to that, but I’m in a relationship now, but it has opened up everything again.

It really has taken me back through, cycled me back through a lot of the emotions and stuff that I had learned to handle being on my own for those three years. Now I’m having to figure out how those mesh with being in a relationship now. And just the whole dating thing, it’s nothing like what my marriage was because that had 30 plus years in the making. And I’m just getting to know this person. It’s totally a new experience, but another growth experience and another growth edge and not the most comfortable place, but well worth it, I believe in the end. And so I just, I press on.

Krista: So it sounds like it kind of surprised you that it would be invigorating?

Heather: Yes, definitely.

Krista: Yeah. How did you expect it to be?

Heather: I just dreaded it and I thought, I don’t know what I thought. I mean, because I love people so I, you know, I shouldn’t have been surprised by it. But I think it was just, I don’t know, it’s weird dating in your 50s anyway. It’s nothing like when you were a teenager in the sense that then we had no worries, no cares. I met my husband and we liked each other. Okay, let’s get married. And we just grew up together. But now, you know, I have a house. They have a house. I have a family. I have kids to think about now. I have a grandbaby. I have financial things. I have all kinds of stuff that I’m bringing to the table. They’re bringing stuff to the table, a lot of them divorced and hurt and pain and, and now trying to figure that out is a whole new experience. But I still think it’s worth it. It’s hard. I think before, like I said, before my husband passed away, I just felt like that it would never end. I wasn’t afraid. Now I’m, I’m fearful and I have to fight that all the time because there’s so much uncertainty. Now I know what loss feels like. Now I know what it’s like to love and lose and I don’t ever want to go there again. And yet that’s the risk that you take when you fall in love.

Krista: Yeah, requires so much bravery.

Heather: Yeah. It feels like a lot of recycling the same stuff, but like I said, it’s from a different position. And that’s what I have to keep reminding myself. I’m in a different place and I have the tools now, but there is still a part of me that wants desperately to just go back to what felt like so easy before.

Krista: Wouldn’t we all? I mean, of course. Of course, we would. And yet we can’t. And here we are.

Heather: That’s the reality.

Krista: What are the tools that you rely on the most? Like on a regular basis, what do you find to be helpful with where you are now?

Heather: I use a lot of like bilateral stimulation. It’s taking something small and passing it back and forth from right hand to left hand because I find that I often get caught just in my amygdala and just I don’t have my right and left hemispheres talking to one another. And so I have to constantly, that’s my starting point. I have to do that before I can tap or anything because I can’t think. So I have to calm my nervous system. Sometimes it’s this hand to heart. I do a lot of heart holds because I am still working through creating safety in my nervous system.

Krista: Well, and it’s something we have to do over and over and over. Like even once we do it, our nervous system picks up on something else in the environment and we’re right back to feeling unsafe.

Heather: So, well, and I think as widows, our whole perceptions of what safe is have been blown to smithereens. We never had the safety and the security and the certainty before.

Krista: 33 years of feeling safe with someone and co-regulating with someone and not a whole lot of lived adult experience taking care of yourself in that way is no small feat. So A, just to have the language about it, I think would help people in advance. Like because how long did it take you to get the language for what had happened?

Heather: Probably a year at least.

Krista: Yeah, right? Yeah. So somebody is listening to this and hopefully they’re a little bit sooner in their journey, they’re going to get language for that, which is gives them a leg up. And then it’s like, all right, there’s tools out there that I can learn that will help me. And if I find that it feels like not only was my heart broken, but as you said, it was filleted and like all of the stuff I didn’t even realize I’d been carrying around shows back up, like I do not have to settle for that and let that be the new normal.

Heather: What do your kids think of watching you and all of this?

Krista: That’s a good question. I mean, they don’t say a whole lot. I think in the beginning, they were a little overwhelmed by how overwhelmed I was. And I had to learn that we all grieve differently because I think that first, I almost expected that they’re the ones who knew their dad and loved him like I did. And so they were my safe place. They were the ones that we were going to do this together. We were going to draw closer to one another. And that’s not really the way it happened for different reasons.

My daughter had only been married for six months when my husband was diagnosed. So they were newlyweds and she was four months pregnant when he passed. And so my grandbaby was born within five months of him passing. And so she was a new mom. Her whole life had just been turned upside down. Not only had she lost her dad, and then my son moved, he moved back to Missouri. I live in North Carolina. So I truly felt like I was on my own, you know? And the silence in my home was deafening. It was so difficult. Nights were hard for me. Mornings, I did pretty good, but nights were difficult. And I would just use all these tools that I learned from you to get through the evening, get through the night and to get to a place where I could start to dream again and start to think about my future and start to see myself doing some things without him, you know, how was I going to do this? And I did a lot of that by talking to him, by staying in relationship with him. I would go on walks and talk to him and tell him everything. And I knew him so well, I could tell you what he would say. I knew what he would say. I knew how he would act. I knew how he would look at me. I knew how he would reach over and take my hand, you know? And so I just reenacted that. And that carried me through probably the first couple of years.

Heather: So valuable.

Krista: I mean, not everybody has that kind, you know, when they hear their person’s voice, it’s not that kind necessarily. It’s not that loving. And so I’m so glad that you had that as a something you could lean on and find as nourishing.

Heather: I did and it was, it was beautiful. And then there came a time where I saw myself as, okay, I’m doing this. It was after that vacation, after that trip to Norway, that I began to see myself as, wow, I can do this. I can stand on my own two feet. And I began to feel, I didn’t like the word single, but I began to feel solo, like I could do this, you know?

Krista: So everybody out there who when they get to the Audacious Adventure section of Mom Goes On and they don’t like it, we can say, see?

Heather: That’s right.

Krista: Challenge yourself. Let it, let it, yeah, let it show you that you’re more capable than your brain might have convinced you. Is there anything that you wished I had asked you or that you had really hoped to share with people?

Heather: No, I think we really covered everything. To me, I mean, I just think that the biggest part of my story that some people maybe will relate to is just how out of whack my nervous system was and how unaccustomed to regulating it myself that I was because I had never adulted, you know, alone. And then just everything from my, even from my childhood.

Krista: Yeah, I’m really glad you were, you said those things, Heather, because it’s not something I think we’ve spent a lot of time on the podcast talking about. And I do think that if you don’t have the language for it and you aren’t prepared for it, that it’s already really hard, but then it can feel hopeless if it’s not been normalized to you and if you don’t know that there are tools out there that you can use to help create a smoother internal experience.

So, yeah, I’m really glad that you brought all of that stuff up. And some of the most painful patterns that we carry around as adults can stay kind of hidden when we have a really healthy partnership. You know, he’s so busy telling you amazing things about yourself and you’re feeling good about yourself in that relationship. And then boom, he’s gone. And now we’re faced with all the thoughts we learn to think about ourselves growing up. There were great coping strategies at the time, but maybe don’t serve us well as adults and yet, boom, here they are. And that’s work that can be done too. So you’re living proof of that. Thank you so much for being willing to come and share your story, Heather.

Heather: Oh, thank you for allowing.

Krista: You’re such a, like, in my mind, there are some people that, I mean, I never really imagined that Mom Goes On would be something people did for a long time. I just thought people would come in and then do it and then be done with it. So it’s an absolute delight that there are the lifer community that just kind of keep growing, keep giving. And in my mind, there are just some, and you’re one of them where I expect to see you on calls. Like it would be weird. I don’t know. You’re just kind of like a staple in the way that you show up, sets a really good example for everyone else. I think it makes it easier for other people to get coached and receive support because you’re so willing to show up and be raw and honest and let yourself get supported. And that’s so helpful for everyone else who watches.

Heather: Well, thank you. Thank you. I love this community. And I love what you’ve built here and I’m so grateful for it. And all the tools that you’ve given us have truly helped me to love life again. And I appreciate that.

Krista: My, absolutely my pleasure. I think it’s so cool that I can get behind a microphone and say stuff into it and it can go out into the internet and people like you hear it and then we get to work together and it’s a miracle. Thank you so much. We’ll talk soon.

Heather: Thank you. Bye.

If you like what you’ve been hearing on this podcast and want to create a future you can truly get excited about even after the loss of your spouse, I invite you to join my Mom Goes On coaching program. It’s small group coaching just for widowed moms like you where I’ll help you figure out what’s holding you back and give you the tools and support you need so you can move forward with confidence.

Please don’t settle for a new normal that’s less than what you deserve. Go to coachingwithkrista.com and click Work With Me for details and next steps. I can’t wait to meet you.