Discovering Who You Are Becoming: Michele Neff Hernandez on Identity and Life After Loss

Join me, Daniel Kopp, in this rich episode of the Widow Life and Money Podcast as I welcome Michele Neff Hernandez, founder of Soaring Spirits International. Michele’s story begins with love, a blended family of six children, and a life full of motion. It changed in an instant when her husband Philip was killed while out for an evening bike ride. Widowed at 35, and knowing no one else who had walked this road, she set out on what she calls an “Are You My Mother?” search for other widowed people, traveling the country over the course of a year to ask fifty questions of thirty strangers who quickly became friends.

Michele shares how that search revealed the true gap facing widowed people, not a lack of answers but a lack of community, and how it grew into Soaring Spirits and the Camp Widow program that has now supported thousands. We talk honestly about solo parenting grieving children, whose understanding of loss shifts with every new age and stage, and about the freedom that comes from being honest with our kids that grief is hard. Michele also unpacks the organization’s research on the widowed experience, including why years three, five, and ten so often bring a fresh spike in grief, and why there is nothing wrong with you if they do.

Together we explore where grief and money meet. So many of the widows we serve suddenly become the solo financial decision-maker for their household, carrying a quiet drumbeat of “I can’t mess this up” while their brains are still foggy with loss. Michele names the weight of decision fatigue, the painful ways relationships can fracture over money and inheritance, and the reason a trusted, grief-literate professional in your corner can be a genuine gift you give yourself. It is a conversation about building confidence one small win at a time, and letting those wins strengthen the muscle of resilience.

Finally, Michele talks about her book, Different After You, and its central invitation: your task is not to return to your old self, but to discover who you are becoming. Loss changes us, and rather than seeing that new self as less than, she encourages every reader to meet themselves with curiosity and even wonder. Her closing reminder will stay with you. Grief is hard work, and if you find yourself tired or discouraged, there is nothing wrong with you. You simply need to give yourself something small today, knowing there are people willing to walk beside you.

Affiliated Links Mentioned During the Podcast:

Organizations/Programs

• Soaring Spirits International
• Camp Widow

Books

• Different After You: Rediscovering Yourself and Healing After Grief and Trauma by Michele Neff Hernandez

Connect with Michele

• Michele’s personal website and social channels

Thank you for listening to this episode. We hope Michele’s story brings you comfort, encouragement, and the reminder that you don’t have to walk this road alone. As always, please leave a review and connect with us on LinkedIn with your questions or feedback. We value hearing from our community.

 

Show Transcript

Daniel: Welcome, Michele, to the podcast. I’m so glad you’re here to share your story, your personal journey, your advocacy, your organization, and the impact you’ve made on me personally and on so many of the people I’ve had a chance to talk with. Thank you for being willing to come and share your story.

Michele: Well, I’m humbled to be asked and happy to have a chance to chat.

Daniel: When we were originally recording season two, we weren’t able to get you on, so we’re so glad to have you here for season three. Tell me how you ultimately came to this space. This story starts with grief and sorrow and loss. What do you want listeners to know about that part of your story?

Michele: I like to frame it as a story that starts with love, a blended family of six kids, and a bike ride one late August evening. My husband, Phil Hernandez, and I had been married five years. He went out for his evening bike ride and was killed by a driver. So I went from managing a blended family and enjoying a very active, fun life with my husband to being launched into widowhood.
I was thirty-five, and at the time I didn’t know anybody who was widowed. The only widowed people I even knew of were my grandmother and my great-aunts, and they had both already died by then. I felt very much like I was in the middle of a land I didn’t know how to navigate, and there weren’t any road signs. I found myself asking questions like, “Am I supposed to still wear my wedding ring? I feel married, but I’m technically not married.” And, “What do I do with all his shoes?” This guy had so many shoes, and every time I was going to move a shoe, I would be sad and crying.

I had an amazing family and friend network. As support networks go, I was very well supported, and yet none of those people were widowed. Because they weren’t widowed, we were all looking at each other asking, “Is that normal? I don’t know. Do you know if it’s normal?” That was a common refrain. What was the right thing to do? Was there a right thing to do? And how could they support me when none of us had any information about widowhood, what it meant to be widowed, or what next steps might be best, both for healing and for understanding the life experience I was living?

So I like to say I went on an Are You My Mother spree. Think of the children’s book Are You My Mother?, where the little bird keeps asking every other kind of animal, “Excuse me, are you my mother?” I just kept looking for other widowed people. “Do you know anyone who’s widowed? Excuse me, do you know anyone who’s widowed?” My intention was to sit down with them and ask my questions.

I ended up putting together 50 questions. They ranged from practical things like shoes to more emotional things like wedding rings, and also what people had done and were doing to move through their grief. I was fortunate enough to have 30 people agree to speak with me, and I took a year and traveled the country. By the way, at this point I’m solo parenting kids, so this was on weekends. My family would come over, I’d leave on Friday and get home on Sunday. My intention was always to meet people in their own space and ask my 50 questions.
What I learned was that community was what I was seeking. It wasn’t so much that I needed a specific answer on how to do the thing. I needed to gather other people’s answers so I could frame my own. This beautiful group of 30 people from all over the United States welcomed me into their homes, and every single time they felt like a friend within two seconds, because we shared this big life experience.

That formed what I understood to be a gap for widowed people: how do I find other widowed people if there’s nobody in my local area who’s widowed, or nobody in my local bereavement group with a similar life experience or age? How do I expand my network of widowed people? We incorporated in 2008. At that time, social media was still mostly a college thing, so we were right on the cusp of when online community started to open up and become a possibility. We rode that wave into creating an organization whose purpose is to build community for widowed people. We’ve helped millions of widowed people over the last 18 years. We just turned 18, and people have been congratulating us on becoming an adult.

Soaring Spirits International is our organization, and it was born from that desire I had in the very early stages of my own grief to ask, “Where are the people who are walking through this, and what are they doing? Because I’m trying to figure out if what I’m doing is normal.”

Daniel: There’s so much there that resonates with what I went through personally when my wife Sarah died, when I was 32. Most of the younger widows we work with are looking for that same community. There might be a local GriefShare group or another organization, but you’ve got people widowed at different ages and stages of life, and they’re often asking the same questions you were. So in 2008, were there truly no resources out there, nothing for you to find, and that’s why you decided to go seek it?

Michele: The longer I do this, the more I realize there probably were resources I just hadn’t found yet. After 9/11 especially, a whole class of people became widowed, and that led to a resurgence of resources born from that experience. Some of them were very focused specifically on 9/11. What I did realize was that resources were hard to find. Widowed people’s capacity is typically so low. You’re managing all these other things, and doing something hard for yourself often falls to the bottom of the list. So you keep doing the things at the top of the list, which is more of the business end of death, the immediate changes in your life that absolutely must be addressed. Building community and finding resources for your grief often falls to a lower priority. And if those resources are hard to find on top of that, you tell yourself, “Okay, I’ll get to that at some point.”

One of the things I’m most proud of is that 18 years later, I feel we’ve impacted the type and number of resources available. We were on the front wave of that, and people since have said, “This is what we need.” I love that there are so many options now that weren’t possible when I was widowed, and that they’re popping up everywhere. Here’s the thing: if 2,800 people are widowed in the US every single day, there is no shortage of widowed people in need of support. When you have multiple avenues for finding support, the likelihood of finding one that’s a good fit for you is greatly increased.

Daniel: I love that, because it helps paint the landscape. It shows what people are looking for and the gaps that exist. We’re going to talk much more about Soaring Spirits International and everything that’s happened over those 18 amazing years. But I want to go back to the theme of parenting, because you weren’t just alone in your grief; you were also a grieving mother. Most of our listeners are in a similar stage. How do you honor the memory of your late spouse? How do you parent as a suddenly solo parent? Looking back, what would you share about that and the culture of single parenthood?

Michele: First, I want to say I see you and I honor you, because solo parenting is hard work. My experience is a little unique. I was divorced, so the father of my three kids is still alive, and my three stepkids’ dad is the one who died. They spanned a huge age range: the oldest was in his early twenties and the youngest was 11.

I think the most challenging thing about parenting grieving children, especially over time, is that their understanding of grief changes with every age and stage. A grieving parent is typically walking a path that faces forward. That’s not to say you don’t turn around, sit down, or decide you’re not going anywhere today, but your trajectory is, “I’m moving through this grief.” Kids can only move through to the level of their understanding, so when they reach a new understanding, everything shifts. Say a child’s parent died when they were five. At 10, they have a very different understanding of what that means. Now you’re revisiting it at 10, while the grieving parent has five years of grief under their belt. It’s like they hook you on the back of the shirt and pull you back: “Hi, now I’m over here.” And you as the parent meet them where they are.

For me, that was the hardest part. You also can’t always parse out what’s regular kid behavior and what’s grieving kid behavior. How do I support them and me, while I’m living my grief experience and they’re living theirs, now and the next time and the next time?

The biggest help for me was the habit of being honest about how I was feeling and where I was, and allowing them the freedom to be honest too. When we pretend to our kids that it’s not hard, and it’s hard for them, they think, “Wait, it being hard is not okay.” So I’d have a bad day and say, “Look, I’m sorry. I’m missing Phil badly today. This has been rough, and I know it’s rough on you. I’m sorry I was short-tempered.” It normalizes that grief is work, and sometimes hard work. When it impacts how you parent, you can forgive yourself, ask your kids for forgiveness, and normalize that sometimes we won’t be our best selves, and that’s true for them too.

That’s another reason community makes so much of a difference. When you’re solo parenting, you don’t have someone taking the kids on the weekend. You don’t have someone ready to dive into whether this grief therapist or that one is right. Ironically, the person you want to talk to about whether this is the right grief therapist is dead, and is the reason you need the grief therapist.
I always tell widowed people I hope they have a great therapist, a support group they belong to, a wonderful family, and, if faith is part of their life, a wonderful faith community. Even if all that is true, think about the number of hours in a week. There are a lot of hours left over, and that’s what community does. It helps fill the gap in that long stretch of time. You know how they say the days are long but the years are short? These are long, long days. Knowing other parents who are also parenting grieving kids helps normalize it and adds to the tools in your tool belt. It isn’t a replacement for therapy, grief support, or your support network, but it’s an enhancement that made all the difference for me.

I could ask, “Is this grief, or is this teenager? I don’t know,” and talk it through. That wasn’t immediate; it was years later. My youngest was 11, so by the time he was 16 or 17, I was asking, “Is this grief?” You forget, but for kids it could very well be grief, because they’re understanding something at a new stage of life and wrestling with it differently than before.

Daniel: Thank you for sharing that. I love what you shared about the team of people, the community, and the resources, professional and otherwise, that can come alongside. And the evolution of grief, too. Grief in those early days is so sharp and so heavy, and the brain fog is particularly pronounced. But there’s an evolution, and we use analogies like the roller coaster of grief and figuring out what’s next. In our firm, we use a decision matrix called Now, Soon, and Later to help triage some of those decisions. It helps to have somebody a little further along, or a lot further along, come alongside so you can bounce those questions off them.

Michele: And what we’ve also experienced is that it helps to have somebody who’s in it exactly where you are. Then it’s, “Good, I’m normal. Okay, this is hard. It’s hard for you, it’s hard for me, and it might be hard in very different ways.” It normalizes it. You have people ahead of you and people behind you, and in a grief community in particular, what we model for each other is so important. You can say, “Wow, you’ve been doing this 10 years and I’ve only been doing it two. You’re still standing, so that’s helpful. And you still seem to need some support, so good.” That models for us that when we get to 10, there’s nothing wrong with us if we’re still looking for a specific type of support. Of course you are, because you’re understanding it in a different way.

Soaring Spirits has done a good amount of research on the widowed experience, and one of the interesting things we found is that years three, five, and ten typically have a spike in challenge. At three, it’s, “Wait, no one told me this was a marathon. I thought it was a sprint, and I’m still dealing with this.” At five, it’s often, “I thought I was going to be somewhere by now.” That’s always self-defined. If you had told me when I was first widowed where I’d be at five years, I don’t know if that’s what I would have expected. So we wrestle with our own expectations. At 10, we often find people wanting to say, “This still matters,” because so many times people say, “Yeah, that happened to you a long time ago.” While it did happen 10 years ago, that person is still so much a part of who you are and who you’ve become. The desire for recognition peaks very consistently at year 10.

We’re told overall that it takes about a year, maybe two, and then you’ll be fine. What we’re saying is that at 10 years, it’s normal if you have a spike. And if you don’t, there’s nothing wrong with you either. We have to normalize the way grief moves through, because then we can adjust people’s expectations as they enter the grief experience, so they’re not judging themselves, which they will. Otherwise we’re setting people up to compare themselves either to others or to a standard that doesn’t exist.

Daniel: I love so much of what you shared there. External expectations can be so heavy. Grief is as unique and personal as the love we shared before it, so it can’t be compared from one person to another, other than to say, “Here’s what it was like for me.” I think there’s also a difference between the lived-experience conversation and the academic research, what shows up in the data.
Michele: Yes, and in the best circumstances, the data drives what you’re creating. That’s what we work hard to do, because our data is about how widowed people build resilience. It’s not a question of if. I think one of the most challenging things is communicating to people who aren’t widowed why this type of programming, and investing in making it available, is important.

It’s because we keep showing up. We do life, because we get to a place where we think, “Well, what else am I going to do? I’ve got to figure this out.” Because we figure it out, and the cost of that often can’t be clearly seen by others, we keep reinforcing the sense that it’s going to be fine. With adult grief, people think we’ll just get over it, and from an outside perspective, it looks like we do. But nobody knows the cost. What we’re starting to do is tie it to outcomes: what health outcomes are impacted by not having grief support? How are family dynamics impacted? A lot of that happens behind the curtain where nobody sees it. What people see is the widowed person out front doing their thing, going to work, raising their kids if they have them, and engaging in community in whatever ways make sense. They don’t see them at night. They don’t see what’s going on in their head. They don’t understand the mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual toll this experience takes.

Because there’s an expectation that we’ll get over it at a certain point, if you’re past that point, talking about it confirms you’re not over it yet. So does that mean I’m not normal? This endless cycle of expectation is harmful to widowed people, and to grievers in general, I’d argue, though our specific focus is on widowed people. What it typically does is make them stop talking about it, keep bucking up in whatever ways that shows up in their lives, and pay whatever price that costs.

Daniel: I love that you tied in the theme of wellness, because this is where much of what we do shows up, in terms of financial anxiety and rebuilding identity. Many of the widowed clients we work with were the daily household financial manager, handling the proverbial checkbook, cash flow, and budgeting, but not always the long-term planning. Academic research shows that spouses typically divide roles, so more often than not one spouse is the household chief financial officer, managing the long-term planning and the investments. Suddenly you’re not just a solo parent; you’re also the solo CFO of the household, stepping into that role. How does the financial anxiety of something new or overwhelming interact with grief? From the conversations you’ve had and the data you’ve seen, when are financial missteps or decision-making anxiety coming from a lack of financial confidence, as opposed to grief wearing the costume of a financial decision? In other words, how do you tell what’s simply new from what’s grief masquerading that way?

Michele: Research shows that the widowed experience is the most stressful experience a person will have in their lifetime. I like to clarify that this doesn’t mean it’s the most impactful grief experience, because nobody can know that. The reason it rates so highly is the number of places where your widowhood intersects with your life: your finances, your home, your day-to-day responsibilities, and your social network, to name a few. It’s so stressful because of the increase in all the ways you’re taking on new, and pretty much always additional, responsibilities as you start to engage with life.

Coming back to your question, we see it as quickly as, “I don’t know where all the passwords are.” We start with passwords. Then it’s, “This wasn’t my responsibility,” for whoever it wasn’t. So now it’s new, but it’s also nuanced, because it’s just you. If you have kids, at whatever age, you’re thinking, “The financial health of my family now rests solely on my shoulders.” Even if that was a familiar place for you, being the only one, without a sounding board, is where stress keeps ratcheting up.

We also see it in decision fatigue, because now there are all these decisions to make, and you wish they were only financial. You’ve got the financial ones plus every other one. From the minute you wake up until you go to sleep, you’re making all the decisions. I think we can underestimate decision fatigue, and sometimes, especially in the financial sector, it’s seen as boredom, lack of interest, or even lack of intellect. The truth is, my brain is on overload because this huge experience has happened, and it’s still in that fog of trying to figure out how this could be real. Layer on top of that decision fatigue and the very real responsibility of being the solo whatever. Even if you have no kids and you’re only responsible for yourself, you’re fully responsible for yourself. It’s a heavy emotional burden in addition to a mental one.

That’s one reason why, in the financial space in particular, the weight of decision-making paired with knowing you’re fully in charge, “don’t mess this up,” is so heavy. In my experience and opinion, it shows up most in finances and in parenting: “Don’t mess this up. It’s all on you.” That’s the conversation widowed people are having with themselves while they’re sitting in your office and you’re trying to shepherd them through. In the back of most people’s minds is, “I can’t mess this up.” While they’re hearing that drumbeat of “you should be here” and “I can’t mess this up,” no wonder they’re a little foggy when making decisions.

Daniel: That’s why taking the time to slow down and work through it with a thinking partner helps. Something else I’ve noticed, especially in the academic research I did at Kansas State, is how the cultural taboos around money intersect with the taboos around talking about death. Then you’re in this third space where you have the community aspect we talked about, and now you may have lots of people asking things of you, especially if there’s some kind of wealth injection from life insurance or other support. It creates a very challenging mix.

Michele: It does, and I love that you brought that up. First, there’s this weird expectation that every widowed person has life insurance and is probably super rich. Then there’s the reality of how different financial circumstances can be. And then there are people who may never have had that level of wealth and are now trying to figure out their emotions around it, in addition to, like you said, who thinks they should have a part of it. I can’t count how many widowed people have told me that someone in their life said their spouse would have wanted that person to have a certain item or a certain dollar amount. Those can be terrible, painful conversations, and relationships can break over them, all layered on top of the fact that this person has died and everybody is grieving them in their own way. And now everyone is wrestling over what that looks like financially.

So having someone in your corner financially who can help you sort through that, alongside your support network for your emotional needs, is a gift you can give yourself. When you look at how widowed people build resilience, one of the ways is learning something you didn’t know before. When you learn it, you think, “Hey, I’m actually kind of good at this,” or “Hey, I get it.” Putting yourself in a position to have someone help you get there is critical to your success.

That’s true even if you were the person making all the decisions, because the landscape has shifted, and you have to be able to shift with it. Having someone by your side you trust, who can walk with you, is so important. One of the things we’re actively working on is grief literacy training for professionals. When your professional is grief literate and understands what’s required of you as a widowed person, not only financially but in every other area of your life, they can help you understand what you need to know and when, so you can start building confidence. Once your confidence is built, that’s what gets the resilience muscle working.

Daniel: You’re preaching to the choir. This is what we do with the idea of scaffolding, or the spiral method of education. We leverage small wins, those initial steps, with praise, encouragement, education, and empowerment that help you build confidence and go from there, one tiny baby step at a time, whether in the grief journey, the parenting journey, or the financial journey.

I want to pivot and talk about Soaring Spirits. We referenced it earlier, but 18 years is an incredible accomplishment. I’ve had the privilege of attending a Camp Widow, and I’ve referred hundreds of people to Soaring Spirits and everything you’ve done. I don’t imagine that when you first started, you had a vision for where you are today, or if you did, it has probably exceeded even your grandest vision. Tell us the briefest version of how it started and what it is today.

Michele: After I finished those interviews with the 30 people, I thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool if they could all be in a room together? Maybe I could do a dinner.” But they were literally from all over the country, so that seemed logistically challenging. That turned into, “What if any widowed person could come? It could be a blend of a conference, a high school reunion, and a retreat. What if we put all those elements together for a weekend? Would anybody come?” The first one was in 2009, and 79 brave people came. Since then, thousands of people have gone through the Camp Widow program.

The purpose of Camp Widow is to provide community, along with education and resilience-building tools, so when you leave, you’ve added something unique to your tool belt. 99.9% of our presenters are widowed themselves. They bring their expertise, and they also have the lived experience. When they’re talking to people and making suggestions, they know what it’s like to get back into the bed you used to share with your person when that person isn’t there. Until you’ve done that, you can’t truly understand it. That’s not to say other people don’t have valuable input or training to share. It just adds a lens. If you’re widowed, someone who isn’t widowed can tell you something, and the same exact words can come out of the mouth of someone who is widowed, and you hear it differently. It’s, “Okay, you get me on this level,” and that reinforces the value.

So Camp Widow has been a place for people to make connections and normalize the grief experience. My hope for every widowed person who comes to Camp Widow is that they leave with a friend. Those friends become the three o’clock in the morning people. They’re the ones you can call and say, “Hey, I did this thing. What do you think?” They’re your cheerleaders, your supporters, and your sounding board, and they become an important part of your life. That has been consistently true over and over again.

When I started Soaring Spirits, it was to hold Camp Widow. I wanted to have this event, and I thought, “Well, I guess we have to have a nonprofit to do that.” I had no idea how. I always tell people I still have the book on my shelf, Nonprofits for Dummies, because the For Dummies series was very big at the time, and I thought, “I guess I’ll just figure this out.”

So here we are, 18 years later, and we now approach our work from what we call our four-pillar perspective. The first pillar is direct service to widowed people, which we’ve done the whole time and think of as our primary focus.

Our second pillar is support for widowed people’s immediate networks: their friends, family, and kids, the people who are in it with them day to day. We provide programming that supports them too and honors their space, because they’re also grieving the person. I can’t count how many times I’ve said to a grieving mom, sister, brother, aunt, or friend, “This must be hard. You must miss them too,” and they’re almost stunned to be acknowledged. They’re so focused on the widowed person and want so badly to be there for them, and they’re also grieving the person who died.
The third pillar is grief literacy training for professionals. We’re working hard to give professionals the tools and resources they need to show up the way we hope they want to, as their best possible selves. They want to keep their widowed clients through widowhood instead of losing them when the widowed person says, “I don’t know, you just don’t get me, so I’m out.”

The fourth is our public health initiative. We’re seeking to change the way we look at widowhood. Instead of seeing it as just something terrible that happened to one person or one family, we see it as a community health concern, because we need our widowed people. We need people to come back to themselves fully and be healthy. We need them to be able to parent their children, run their businesses, or participate in whatever their field is. We need them in our community.

The public health initiative does a few different things. One is compassionate death notification: training law enforcement to deliver that terrible news in the best and most compassionate way. Nobody can change the horrible thing that happened, but we can stop adding layers of trauma to learning about it. That’s good for the griever, and it’s also good for the first responder, because they don’t want to carry that either. We also provide grief literacy training for medical professionals, and we’ve trained HR departments and attorneys. We’re out there trying to help people better understand the widowed experience, to change misconceptions, to normalize grief taking more than a year, and to show how multifaceted widowhood is. We so often think of grief as just emotional, but it’s so much more. If it were only emotional, it might be easier to manage. We want to help communities understand that, so when they engage with their widowed people, they do so from a place of informed and compassionate support.

Daniel: Thank you so much for sharing all that. It’s so powerful to hear and to know there’s so much out there. Visit soaringspirits.org to learn about the virtual programs, in-person programs, and resources, whether you’re grieving yourself or helping someone else. I love what you’ve built there.

I also want to give you an opportunity, Michele, to talk about your book and everything you’ve distilled into it. I love what you wrote about rediscovering yourself, this idea of a new identity, because you don’t leave the old person behind. I hate the phrase “moving on” in grief, but there is an idea that eventually, at your own pace, you move forward, rebuilding and restoring, with grief always part of you. The loss doesn’t change, but you change around it. Talk about why you decided to write a book and what has come about as a result.

Michele: I appreciate the opportunity. The book is called Different After You: Rediscovering Yourself and Healing After Grief and Trauma. Honestly, I thought I was going to write a book, not start an organization. I thought I’d write a book, let it sit out there in the world, ride off into the sunset, and go do something else. But widowed people called me into a different phase. I thought those first 30 interviews might form the foundation of a book, and that’s what I set out to do. Then the community called me, and I felt like this community was what I was supposed to build. I let go of the idea of writing a book. I didn’t have time, so I let it sit by the wayside. I was asked a few times and always said I didn’t have time.

Then I met another widowed person who has written multiple books, and she said, “Michele, you’re never going to have time, and you’re never going to be in a better place to reach the people you want to reach with your message. So what you need to figure out is what your message is.”

By this time I was 13 or 14 years into this, and the message I most want widowed people to hear is that your job is not to go back to your old self. We set ourselves up to say, “If I can just return to how I was before, then I’ll know I’ve made it. I survived because I used to like to read, and I still like to read. I survived because I was funny, and I’m funny again.” We set ourselves up to believe that being recovered enough to return to life fully means being exactly the same. The deepest truth is that you can never be the same, because what you’ve lived through is so significant that it’s life-changing.

Instead, your work is to learn about your new self. Sure, you may still like to read and you might still be funny, but you may also discover a depth of feeling about something that never occurred to you before, tied to how you made your way through your grief. I like to say, ask the question and don’t give yourself the immediate first answer. The biggest work for widowed people is to discover who they are in the aftermath and then become who they’re going to be next. Who you’ll be next is foundationally tied to the person you were, but with new elements and new experiences. You suddenly realize you’re good at finances. Who knew? That changes how you see yourself. If you’ve been telling yourself all this time, “I’m bad at that. My person did that, I don’t,” and then you discover you’re actually good at it, that shifts how you look at the life you’re building and how much you trust that life.

So I broke it down into seven specific ways of thinking. I try not to call them steps, and they’re definitely not stages. They’re ways of looking at where you are, whether you’re in the deep grief period, the questioning period, or the testing-things-out period: “Wait a minute, I used to love horseback riding, and then I stopped because my partner hated the smell of horses. Maybe I need to ride a horse again and see how I feel about it.” It’s that willingness to test things and not give yourself the first answer. What’s your favorite color? “Well, it used to be purple, but I’m not sure anymore.” Give yourself a break to ask, “Wait, what is my favorite color? Has my life changed?” Maybe the answer is no, and then you know that about yourself now.

While the book is fundamentally based on the widowed experience, I’ve been fortunate to have people tell me they’ve used the process in it for every kind of hard thing they’ve lived through, from the death of another primary person in their lives to an illness to all kinds of experiences that require us to acknowledge we’ve been changed. Then, instead of seeing our new selves as less than, we can look at our new selves and say, “Wow, you’re pretty amazing.” My hope for people reading my book is that they walk away thinking, “I’m great,” because they did the hard work.

That’s not to say life is perfect or that you won’t face another hard thing. But if we allow ourselves to change with the experiences that change us, we keep access to every tool we gained to get where we are. That means for the next hard thing, you’ve got new tools. Say you did all the work to become financially savvy, and then something else hard happens in your life. You don’t have to become financially savvy again, because you already did that, and it’s a tool you can use. My favorite thing about the book is that I hope people walk away thinking, “Wow, I’m pretty great.”

Daniel: Thank you for taking the time to share all that. We’ll have links in the show notes to learn more about the book, Soaring Spirits, your personal website, and everything else. As we come to the end, Michele, are there any last thoughts you’d leave with listeners, especially about where people can find and learn more?

Michele: We welcome you at the Soaring Spirits website. It’s the hub for all things, so please come visit us there. As a final takeaway, I love to remind people that grieving is hard work. If you find yourself tired or discouraged, there’s nothing wrong with you. You’re doing hard work. It probably means you need to find a way to give yourself a little something today, whether it’s a five-minute break or a quiet cup of coffee. Know that there are people willing to walk beside you, and Soaring Spirits is certainly a place that will walk beside widowed people through the whole arc of the widowed experience.

Daniel: What a perfect way to end. Thank you so much for taking the time today. And listeners, until next time.