Nathalie Himmelrich

Inspiring Hope | Finding healthy ways of Grieving | Writer

Shelby Forsythia on Mother-loss as a Young Adult | Episode 29

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Shelby Forsythia

HOW TO DEAL WITH GRIEF AND TRAUMA is completely self-funded, produced, and edited by me, Nathalie Himmelrich.
Consider making a small donation to support the Podcast here. Thank you! 

Today on the podcast I am speaking with Shelby Forsythia who lost her mother due to breast cancer following years of treatment. Shelby was just twenty-one and this traumatic experience influenced her life as a young adult. Dealing with her loss, she delved into understanding and learning about grief. 
 Later, she experienced loss again after separating from her fiancée on the same day as she lost her job. Even though Shelby was practiced at dealing with grief, it did not make the pain of grief become any easier when, on top of everything else, she then also lost her best friend, but there was more awareness of how to support herself through it.  

About Shelby, this week’s guest 

Shelby Forsythia (she/her) is a grief guide, author, and podcast host. In 2020, she founded Life After Loss Academy, an online course and community that has helped dozens of grievers grow and find their way after death, divorce, diagnosis, and other major life transitions. Following her mother’s death in 2013, Shelby began calling herself a “student of grief” and now devotes her days to reading, writing, and speaking about loss. Through a combination of mindfulness tools and intuitive, open-ended questions, she guides her clients to welcome grief as a teacher and create meaningful lives that honor and include the heartbreaks they’ve faced. Her work has been featured in Huffington Post, Bustle, and The Oprah Magazine.

Check out Shelby’s links here: Website | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube

Topics discussed in this episode

  • The death of her mother from breast cancer, following four years of treatment
  • Family health challenges and Dad’s personality changes due to two brain aneurysms
  • Loss of faith  
  • Various ways of coping with grief: an eating disorder, delving into working, setting healthy boundaries around her grief, accepting help when offered, using her voice
  • Being guided by: Where does my grief want me to go? 
  • The loss of her fiancée, her job, and her best friend

Links

–> For more information, please visit Nathalie’s website. 

–> Subscribe to the newsletter to receive updates on future episodes here.

–> Join the podcast’s Instagram page.

Thanks for listening to HOW TO DEAL WITH GRIEF AND TRAUMA. If you’d like to be updated on future episodes, please subscribe to my newsletter on Nathalie Himmelrich.com

If you need grief support, please contact me for a FREE 30 min discovery session.

HOW TO DEAL WITH GRIEF AND TRAUMA is produced and edited by me, Nathalie Himmelrich. 

Clover Stroud on the Ambiguous Loss of Her Mother and the Early Loss of Her Sister | Episode 28

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Clover Stroud
Clover Stroud

HOW TO DEAL WITH GRIEF AND TRAUMA is completely self, funded, produced, and edited by me, Nathalie Himmelrich. Consider making a small donation to support the Podcast here. Thank you! 

Today on the podcast I am speaking with Clover Stroud, a British journalist, and author, telling us about her beautifully rich and colorful life, which also included deep trauma within her family of origin.
 She shares about the ambiguous loss of her mother who suffered a horse-riding accident and because of it became brain-damaged when Clover was only sixteen years old. Her mother was alive but no longer capable to fulfil her role as a mother. She required full-time care following her accident and died 20 years later. 

During their teenage years, Clover and her two years older sister Nell formed a close bond, as they first cared for their mother in their home. This role reversal had a huge impact on Clover’s outlook on life. Not even 50, Nell was diagnosed with cancer and died within a couple of years of their mother’s death.

Clover believes that what saved her life was to be creating and really going after life. One of her quotes from the podcast that I will keep as a reminder of our conversation is that grief can be a creative act. 

About this week’s guest 

Clover Stroud is a writer and a journalist and has five children. She writes about the way life feels, mining her own experiences to draw universal truths about what it means to be human. She never shies away from the big topics and writes with startling honesty about life, death, sex, addiction, motherhood, nature, grief, ecstasy, and suffering.

She started her career as a journalist at 24, and since then has written regularly for all the major newspapers and publications, including The Sunday Times, The Guardian, The Daily Mail, The Telegraph, Vogue, Red, Harpers, Elle, and she frequently appears on radio or podcasts as a distinctive and singular voice. She has published three memoirs, all Sunday Times bestsellers, and is working on her next book. 

Clover hosts a weekly author interview on her popular Instagram page @clover.stroud. 

Check out her website here for details on her memoirs. 

Topics discussed in this episode

  • Grieving the relationship with her mother after her accident and brain damage, the first loss, and caring for her at home with her sister as two teenagers
  • Twenty years later her mother died, and a new kind of grief
  • Two years later her sister’s cancer diagnosis led to her death

Resources mentioned in this episode

Links

–> For more information, please visit Nathalie’s website. 

–> Subscribe to the newsletter to receive updates on future episodes here.

–> Join the podcast’s Instagram page 

Thanks for listening to HOW TO DEAL WITH GRIEF AND TRAUMA. If you’d like to be updated on future episodes, please subscribe to my newsletter on Nathalie Himmelrich.com

If you need grief support, please contact me for a FREE 30 min discovery session.

HOW TO DEAL WITH GRIEF AND TRAUMA is produced and edited by me, Nathalie Himmelrich.

Why Am I Still Talking About Her?

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Grief
Click here to watch
... my dead child...

Sometimes I fall into the trap of what I believe other people must be thinking when reading my posts and ask myself this Q.

Today I came across this song and something in me happened.
I remembered why.
And it touched me deeply.
I actually cried just now as I was watching the 'only few' pictures we have from A'Mya.And I realised:

Grief doesn't have to be 'fresh' to be felt
Remembering matters
because it is the only time we have with them
This is the time when I mother my daughter A'Mya
The only place she lives is in my heart
and in my memory.

By sharing her with you
I keep myself sane and authentic
And if this - by any chance - triggers you
It is not because of my sharing
or because of me 'still talking about her'
It is because something in you is touched
and this feels uncomfortable 

Because truly -
you can imagine losing a child
even if you say 'I can't imagine what you went through' 
you could - if you'd so choose to -
but you'd rather not
meet that pain and anguish 
that deep inside you, you know

Because let's face it:
Loss is inevitable
Grief is a given 
you are human and bound to experience this
On the other side of birth is death
On the other side of a hello is a goodbye 
Embrace it, lean into it

Grief is Love

Amber Jackson on Life as a Young Widow with Four Children | Episode 27

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Amber Jackson
Amber Jackson

Today on the podcast I am speaking with Amber, a young widow, and divorcee who now raises four children on her own. She lost her husband Tim just seven months ago after a 16-months battle with cancer. She now is the captain steering the ship of her family, running a household with four children under twelve, at the same time as tending to her grief and her own needs.

Amber is a guiding light as to the resilience she draws from, inspiring with her version of grieving seeing it as a sacred time while also growing and evolving as her own person and in her life after the loss of her soulmate. She believes that ‘laughing means singing Tim’s song’ and it is a way to show her love for him. 

About this week’s guest 

Amber Jackson is a mom of four (one with special needs) and a cancer widow but that hasn’t stopped her from living life to the fullest. She is a self-proclaimed life enthusiast and is determined to see everything that life has to offer, including the bad, as something she can learn from. She loves tulips, pizza Friday, and kitchen dance parties.

Visit Amber’s Instagram page here. 

Topics discussed in this episode

  • Divorced twice with two young children
  • Widowed by the age of 32 raising four children on her own
  • Support of family, friends, and church
  • Being faced with mortality and living with anticipatory grief 
  • The benefit of regular, ongoing therapy
  • Seeing grief as a sacred time

Links

–> For more information, please visit Nathalie’s website. 

–> Subscribe to the newsletter to receive updates on future episodes here.

–> Join the podcast’s Instagram page.

Thanks for listening to HOW TO DEAL WITH GRIEF AND TRAUMA. If you’d like to be updated on future episodes, please subscribe to my newsletter on Nathalie Himmelrich.com

If you need grief support, please contact me for a FREE 30 min discovery session.

HOW TO DEAL WITH GRIEF AND TRAUMA is produced and edited by me, Nathalie Himmelrich. 

Support this Podcast

To support this podcast, please rate, review, subscribe to, or follow the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you.

Remember to keep breathing, I promise, it will get easier.

Turiya Hanover on Grief in the First Year and Coming out of Trauma | Episode 26

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Turiya Hanover
Turiya Hanover

Today on the podcast I have the honor to be speaking with Turiya Hanover for the second time, revisiting her first year of grief over the loss of her partner Maia and the associated trauma. 

Turiya and I share a passion: befriending death. Not everyone’s cup of tea in terms of passions but you will enjoy listening to this episode if you are interested in looking behind the veils of life, birth, death, and everything in between. 

*Just a note on the sound quality of this episode: Given I recorded this during my sabbatical in South Africa with a different microphone than usual, the sound quality is slightly different.  

About this week’s guest 

Turiya is the co-founder of Path Retreats and the transformational process – Path of Love with Rafia Morgan. Together they also lead a one-year Holistic Counsellor training for therapists called Working with People – School of Counselling. 

She has been trained in many different modalities such as Gestalt, Bioenergetics, Psychodrama, Family Therapy (V. Satir), NLP, Hypnosis, Somatic Experiencing™ (Peter Levine), Ego Psychology, Family Constellation, Enneagram and Astrology, and Essence Work.

Turiya’s personal journey into human development started when she did her first 2-year Jungian Psychotherapy course aged 22, followed by an encounter workshop in 1970 in Germany. The revelation and exploration of this Humanistic Psychology approach took Turiya by surprise. The internal shift that she experienced was so profound, that she and her husband, set on a new course of human discovery, which led them to India. Through learning meditation, living, and working in a community under the guidance of a master, she developed a unique approach in working with people that is a synthesis of eastern insights, living awareness and western approach to humanistic psychology.

The sudden, unexpected death of her husband marked a turning point in Turiya’s life. This profound experience deeply influenced her own personal search and how she works with people today.

Today Turiya has the joy of being a grandmother and spends her free time painting and is writing a book about the rising of the feminine and about Death as a friend and the realisation of Impermanence.

Topics discussed in this episode

  • Reviewing the first year of grief and trauma
  • The ongoing connection felt with Maia
  • The fear of abandonment
  • Loneliness, aloneness, being alone and feeling alone
  • Preparing for death in the later stages of life
  • Death-defying culture versus befriending death

Resources mentioned in this episode

  • Stephen Jenkinson

Links

–> For more information, please visit Nathalie’s website. 

–> Subscribe to the newsletter to receive updates on future episodes here.

–> Join the podcast’s Instagram page.

Thanks for listening to HOW TO DEAL WITH GRIEF AND TRAUMA. If you’d like to be updated on future episodes, please subscribe to my newsletter on Nathalie Himmelrich.com

If you need grief support, please contact me for a FREE 30 min discovery session.

HOW TO DEAL WITH GRIEF AND TRAUMA is produced and edited by me, Nathalie Himmelrich. 

Support this Podcast

To support this podcast, please rate, review, subscribe to, or follow the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you.

Remember to keep breathing, I promise, it will get easier.

Keem Fares on How Grief Evolves From Survival | Episode 25

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Keem Fares

Today on the podcast I’m speaking with Keem Fares, the mother of Karina, a spirited intelligent young gymnast, who died in a freak accident when she was 12 years old.

In our conversation, we draw the connection from early grief to when we worked on the book Surviving My First Year of Child Loss in 2017 to now, 8 years after Karina’s death.

I can highly recommend listening to this episode with Keem because she so beautifully describes how grief has affected her life, her relationship, and her faith and how it has evolved from pure survival to how she experiences it now, after 8 years.

This was without a doubt the most interesting conversation I had on the topic of how faith and grief interact, especially given the fact that I would call myself a strongly spiritual but non-religious person.

About this week’s guest

Keem Fares is a Non-Profit professional and holds a leadership position in Financial Operations. Originally from Mexico herself, she met her husband in Cairo, Egypt, where they lived for 15 years before moving to San Diego, California in 2011.

Keem struggles to rediscover herself after the accidental death of her 12-year-old daughter, Karina, in 2015. She finds joy in her son Mark, and together with her husband, they rely on their faith in hope. They established Karina’s Joy Foundation to perpetuate Karina’s joyful spirit and giving nature through youth scholarships and acts of kindness.

She says, “I don’t have answers. I simply intentionally survive one moment, one day, one week, one month, one year…and then I do it again. Maybe, someday I’ll have survived enough to live and perhaps even thrive. In the midst of my own darkness, I can trust and hope that a rainbow might appear. One stormy day at a time, I am expecting rainbows.”

Topics discussed in this episode

  • The impact of her teenage daughter’s death on her life
  • How grief evolved from surviving to becoming ‘comfortable’ with grief
  • Pre-grief in the times before death-anniversaries
  • Finding comfort in community online
  • Social media offering both comfort and triggers
  • What grief looks like 8 years later, effects on relationship and faith

Resources mentioned in this episode

Links

–> For more information, please visit Nathalie’s website.

–> Subscribe to the newsletter to receive updates on future episodes here.

–> Join the podcast’s Instagram page.

Thanks for listening to HOW TO DEAL WITH GRIEF AND TRAUMA. If you’d like to be updated on future episodes, please subscribe to my newsletter on Nathalie Himmelrich.com

If you need grief support, please contact me for a FREE 30 min discovery session.

HOW TO DEAL WITH GRIEF AND TRAUMA is produced and edited by me, Nathalie Himmelrich.

Support this Podcast

To support this podcast, please rate, review, subscribe to, or follow the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you.

Remember to keep breathing, I promise, it will get easier.

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    Nathalie Himmelrich

    I accompany people therapeutically as a holistic counsellor and coach.

    I walk alongside people dealing with the challenges presented by life and death.

    I’m also a writer and published author of multiple grief resource books and the founder of the Grieving Parents Support Network.

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