When Grief Changes Everything, How Do You Find Your Way Forward?

Willow Weston sits down with longtime friend and mentor Heidi Price for an honest conversation about grief, loss, faith, anger, anxiety, and finding hope again. Heidi shares how losing her mother at 23 first shook her trust in God, and how the sudden death of her husband years later forced her to decide whether she would run from God or keep talking to Him—even when she was angry.

Together, Willow and Heidi explore why grief rarely looks neat or predictable, why Christians can unintentionally make loss harder by trying to explain it away, and why one of the greatest gifts we can give a grieving person is simply our presence.

This conversation gives you permission to let grief be messy while continuing to take small steps toward life, community, healing, and hope.

Meet Heidi Price

Heidi Price is a longtime mentor, teacher, woman of faith, and friend of Collide founder Willow Weston. Born in the jungles of Indonesia to pioneer missionary parents, Heidi’s childhood shaped her faith, love of teaching, global perspective, and desire to make a difference in the world.

Key Takeaways

• What do you do when grief makes you angry with God? Heidi explains why keeping the conversation with God open—even when it is messy, questioning, or angry—became essential to her healing.
• Why does grief make everything feel unsafe? Sudden loss can create anxiety and fear that something terrible will happen again, and Heidi shares honestly about the lasting effects of that fear.
• How can you support someone who is grieving without saying the wrong thing? Stop trying to fix or explain their pain. Show up, listen, remember what they lost, and make room for whatever emotions are present.

How This Episode Will Encourage You

If grief has stripped the color from your life, you do not have to rush yourself into feeling better. You can tell the truth about what hurts, invite people into it, keep talking to God, and trust that color can slowly return.

If you’re walking through grief and don’t know where to begin, Collide would love to help connect you with support and resources. And if this conversation reminds you of someone who needs permission to grieve honestly, share this episode with her.

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Welcome to the Collide Podcast. We're a growing community of everyday chicks colliding with Jesus in our mess, our pain, our joy, and our stories.

We value showing up as we truly are.

So that's what you'll find here, walls and masks being torn down so that we can allow Jesus to meet us where we truly are and hear about other women doing the same. We can't wait to collide with.

Let grief be messy. Let grief be messy. And don't package it well. You don't have to defend God. God's big enough to defend himself with the person that is grieving.

He is big enough, wise enough, lovely enough, beautiful enough to step into everybody's mess.

Welcome to the Collide Podcast.

I'm Willow Weston, the founder and director of Collide, and today I'm so thrilled to be hanging out with a long friend and mentor and an amazing woman of God, Heidi Price. And Heidi and I met about 20 years ago at a time where she was, quite frankly, walking through the valley of the shadow of death.

And she made time in the midst of that season to invite me into her space and walk alongside me in mine. And Heidi is a child of pioneer missionaries.

She was born in the jungles of Indonesia, and everything about that experience has influenced the trajectory of her life.

The foundations of why she follows Christ, desire to make a difference in the world, the love she has for teaching, the ability to see the world through a different cultural lens. And it has given her gratitude for how, in the middle of chaos, God has and can walk beside us.

Heidi's life has been stripped of color by deep and profound grief. But in her words, artist, God has colored in the places where grief has bleached. So today we get to have a profound conversation around grief.

And though it doesn't sound like the most fun topic, I'm assured it will be deeply impacting for all of us. So, Heidi, thanks for hanging out with me.

Thank you for asking.

I'm so happy to be in a very small room with you having a conversation.

It is really fun.

I asked you to be a guest on the podcast because I've watched you live out your faith for nearly two decades, and I admire you, I admire your wisdom, and I've watched you face your grief with tremendous authenticity and courage.

And I'm wondering if you can share some of the life experiences that stripped your life of color, as you say, and invited you into such profound grief.

It's the weird thing about grief is that everybody knows you're going to feel it, but when it comes, it is so profound in its impact. I think the first time I felt grief, felt grief to my very soul was when my mother died. I was just 23 and she died really quickly.

And the mooring that a mother is in your life and it being taken away. I just could not get over the fact. Several things, One that God would take away. My mother was very angry with him and that I had to figure it out.

I had to figure out how to do grief. And I didn't do well. I didn't do it well. I didn't do it well. It took me 10 years of messing around with, how do I get back into the graces of God?

How can I trust him again with the people that I love? And I didn't do it well. So in that, in that. Still. In that, that. That conversation with God, which was always really defensive, like, why, why, why?

In that relationship, my husband died. And he died also very suddenly. He died. He fell off a roof, left me with my two little children. And I remember.

I remember going home from the hospital with my kids in the back of the car, driving home, having this prayer in my mind saying, God, I cannot do 10 years messing around again. I have to face this grief with you right now. I don't want to waste 10 years. And I'm not really cool with this. I'm not okay with this.

I don't think it was good timing. I don't think it was right. I don't think it was fair that you took my husband. But I don't want to.

I just don't want to sit mad because I know what mad does. And nothing lifted. Like I wasn't. Like. Suddenly peace came into my soul in remarkable ways.

But a determination came that whatever I was going to do forward from there, however messy it was going to be, I was going to maintain a relationship or right then, it was just a conversation. It was going to maintain a conversation with God. And that saved me, I think, the.

Courage to have that kind of commitment where you're saying, I'm. I'm gonna stay in your face.

I just. I just thought, if anything, if God needs to come through at any time, it's in the middle of where you lose everything.

And you think he was in control of that losing. I just thought, okay, you knew. You knew Curtis was going to go on this roof. You knew you could have taken care of him.

You knew all the things about the consequences of this death. So you also knew how I was going to figure it out. So the figuring out Business here, it's going to be messy. I hate it. I hate it.

There's nothing in grief that's lovely. Nothing. It's so profoundly isolating. It's so profoundly lonely. But I knew God was going to be there, and he had a lot to say. He had a lot to say.

He had to kind of defend himself, and I know that's a terrible way, but he kind of had to be there because that was. That was what faith was about. You said God, you would.

When you say, you know what mad does, what does mad do?

Being mad with God, stopping a conversation with God makes you the only person that has perspective. And when you're in grief, you don't have good perspective. So for 10 years, you don't do relationships well when you're mad. You don't do.

You don't have perspective when you're dealing in anger and loneliness and bitterness, and you have no outlet for that. You are constantly. You're the only person that matters. Your voice is the only one that counts, and your voice is the only one that's broken.

And I knew. I knew I don't. I knew I didn't do well. I didn't do well in that, and I didn't want to do it again.

Part of why I asked you to be on this podcast is exactly that. I think a lot of people don't know how to do grief well. I think they feel like they need to do it the way that other people expect them to do it.

I think as a church, capital C church, we often haven't invited people into grieving and healthy ways.

And so I want to ask you so many questions around grief, and one of them is, in the days to follow the loss of your husband, did you experience one emotion or many emotions? What was the beginning of grief like for you, and how did it catch you by surprise?

It was. It was as if I. In the metaphor of bleach, it was as if I didn't see colors anymore. And that's what surprised me. I just. The waves of profound loss.

It is waves. It comes and it hits you, but it hits you in the weirdest times. And so angry and so sad and so disappointed. So incredibly disappointed.

So incredibly disappointed with people in their inability to say the right things. So incredibly mad at people's inability to know what to do.

But from this side of it, most people don't know what to do because most people are so scared that it's going to happen to them that you become a person that has leprosy or you have become a person that has. Everybody wanted to help me, but nobody knew how and I didn't, I didn't know.

Nobody knows how to do it, nobody knows how to feel it, nobody knows what to do with the hole that grief digs around you. It so profoundly lonely.

I remember because at the same time, you know, I'm trying to make sure that the kid, my little, they were little, teeny little littles, littles, you know, having them to deal with their losses and I was so wanting to be so careful that they didn't, that they weren't lost in my grief. I wanted some routine for them and I wanted some.

I wanted to be able to laugh with them because they were still laughing, they were still looking at life with perspective. And I didn't want to rob them of them being 6 years old and 4 years old by the immensity of my own grief.

So I would give myself permission to fall apart when they were napping or when I was driving or when they were in their bed. Not that they didn't see me cry. I thought that was normal, they should see me cry.

But the anger of grief or the edges of grief is too scary for a little person to figure out. And I didn't want them on top of their own grief to deal with fear that I didn't know what I was doing.

So, you know, letting them go to bed and then just being in there and just entering into just that. It was the weirdest thing, is just feeling it and realizing it. It wasn't killing me.

The intensity of the emotion wasn't killing me, it was stripping me. It was so lonely and so hard, but it wasn't killing me that time.

It may time heals in weird ways, but it removes you from the sharpness of the immediacy to the numbness of the normal. You're just not normal. People don't know what to tell you. They don't know what to say to you. You just feel like.

Especially because I think my husband died by an accident.

I felt like nothing was safe, that my kids were going to die any moment, that my father, my parents, something bad wrong was going to happen again because now I didn't have this protectiveness around my family because this weird absurd accident happened. So dealing with the anxiety of okay, something's, it's going to happen, it's going to happen again, it's going to happen again.

And even, even to this day, when I don't hear from, I got married again, when I don't hear from my husband, Or I don't hear from my children. My immediate reaction is it's bad. It's not. It's never just late. It's always extreme because I want to.

And so the repercussions of grief play itself out, and it will for the rest of my life. And that is just the reality of it. I am not the same. I am so I'm softer in places, which I'm very grateful for because I was very hard hearted.

It's a high price to pay for brokenness. Grief is. But.

It sounds like you. I mean, you're describing so many different emotions. You're talking about anger and blame and theological.

Just your.

Your idea of God being protector and then you would answer your prayers. I mean, like theological explosions.

You're talking about fear and anxiety and then the incredibly difficult posture to hold to have to protect your own kids from the ugly, ugly, ugly sides of grief while you're in the midst of needing to enter into that grief.

And the thing is with people in grief is that they also protect themselves. I also protected people around me from my own grief because I knew they couldn't handle it.

I used to say when people would see me at church, they would say, hey, Heidi, how are you doing? And I'd be like, in my mind, I'm like, I'm fine. That's why I'm here. But if I'm not fine, I'm not here.

But when I'm doing really, really badly is when I need people the most. But I would never go out in public when I'm at the worst places. So in church, people would assume I'm doing really well.

And my thing is, of course, on that day that somehow everything aligned well, that my emotion was at a healthy place and things were not as sharp. Okay, I can be with people, I can be around people, but they're looking at me like, wow, she's, you know, she's so strong.

Like, no, at that moment, yes. Yes. Because I'm in public and I will be. I will be protecting you from being. Dealing with all my grief.

But when I go home and when I'm on my own, that's where I'm battling it.

Yeah, let's talk about that. Let's talk about the church. Let's talk about Christian culture and how we unhealthily deal with grief. Our own and other people's.

What are some of the most unhealthy ways you see us handling grief?

Minimizing it. Minimizing grief. Making. Making grieves equal everybody. I think we can all understand grief because we all understand disappointment.

Disappointment is like the beginning of grief. You know, you're disappointed. You understand that pain. And then there's this just huge spectrum of grief, right? Everybody has.

Has felt it in some ways. And so. So everybody. It's like, well, I don't know what it means, like, to lose a husband. So I can't ever talk to anybody who's lost their husband.

Yeah, you do. You've lost something. You know what loss feels like.

You can walk into, enter into anybody's grief, but you can't make their grief better in any way by what you say. But you can make their grief better by entering in and being as normal as possible.

I remember people would say to me, well, you know, your husband's in a better place. Yeah, good for him. That's not the point. The grief part isn't that I think he's in a better place.

The grief part is that I don't know what I'm supposed to do here. I don't know how to find God in the middle of this. I don't know where he is. I don't know how he's going to make my heart feel better.

And as a church, we can't. We need to hold people's grief as if it's holy ground and allow the people to bounce within this beautiful structure of.

I don't know, this beautiful structure of. Of peace. Okay, bounce in here, Heidi. Be mad at God. Be not mad at God. Be really good. Be not good. Let me take your kids for a moment.

Let me wash your car. Let me watch a really dumb movie with you. Let me cry with you. Let me do normal things with you so that the sharpness of this grief is not ever.

You're never by yourself in it unless you want to be. And then I'll know that because you asked me say, hey, I need some moments by myself. We assume grief. Grief is very personal.

It's very private, but it's extremely lonely. Grief is so lonely. And so people in grief feel like that they have to put themselves together because they have to be with people. They know that.

We know that. But then we look okay, but we're not okay. So to say, hey, you know what? This is you. I'm sure you're not doing fine.

Like, hey, Heidi, how are you doing? I'm sure you're not doing fine. It's okay. Let's do something together. Let me be intentional about. Well, you're a single mom.

I bet you never, you know, you never get your Your car washed. Hey, let me go and whatever. Just little things. Let me invite you over for Sunday afternoon so that you can just crash at my house.

And then the kids, you don't have to take care of them. Single mother. Grieving is hard, but give me a space where it's normal. But I can be in my grief and it's okay. And that I'm not held accountable for.

I had friends who I could just crash at, and they were. They knew my husband so that we could talk about Curtis and it wasn't a taboo subject, and they could.

We could have memories about him and laugh because Curtis is still in my memory. It's not like you can say, well, I don't want to bring Curtis up. I haven't forgotten him.

It's not like, oh, my goodness, you know, I want to talk about him. I want to talk about what I miss about him. I want to tell you what I thought yesterday, whatever. But so that.

So that's what I want the churches to do. I want your. As friends we need to do is allow that. Tell me about him. What do you miss about him? How lonely it must be for you.

Oh, and as a husband, mother, father,.

Daughter, it's so interesting to hear you talk. And my mind is flooded with faces and stories. I mean, there was a man in the Clyde office today, his wife just died this last week I believe in.

And as he was talking, he was saying, you know, he was her caretaker for the last 18 months, that she fought cancer.

And.

And I just, I think, have learned the hard way that I haven't always known how to enter people's heart. Stories. Well, and with him just kind of gave him permission to be where he's at.

And the truth is, is I think in a lot of ways, where he's at is that he's feeling relief, but I don't know that he feels like he share that, but relief that she's no longer in pain. Relief that he can sleep at night. Relief that, like, the. The hard journey of watching her struggle and fight like that's over.

It doesn't mean he's feeling all better. But when you talk about letting people be where they're at emotionally, I think we have a really hard time doing that.

We have these expectations like, you are grieving. You shalt not laugh.

For 12 months, you shall wear black.

You shall, you know, look sad at all times. And there's a shame around people who are steeped in grief when they actually laugh or have joy. It's so strange.

And that's all our expectations that we're putting on someone else's grief process rather than engaging them with the emotion that they're currently feeling. On any given 30 seconds.

And on any given day, all the emotions are in play because you do have memories that are funny, and you remember them, and they are funny, and you're laughing, and then you do feel bad about laughing, but then you don't feel bad about. It's so confusing. I used to. I used to.

When Curtis died, I wanted so much our culture to have a way that I could express to everybody around me that something bad, wrong happened. Like, I wanted to shave my head. I wanted to wear black.

I wanted to do something so people could look at me and go, huh, I bet you something happened to her. And kind of like, give me, like, treat me a little bit respectfully so that they're, oh, something's going on.

And I understand why people wore black because it gave people space to be kind of weird for a while within the emotions that they were feeling. And everybody goes, oh, of course she's grieving. It makes sense. Of course she's laughing hysterically or crying in the second moment.

Grief is that it is that overwhelming. It influence influences all of you. But our culture doesn't give us that. We're not allowed to be. Nobody knows. We don't. We're not wearing it.

We're not wearing our grief visibly well.

And you bring up an interesting point about people who've lost people for talking about death, even divorce, miscarriage. We work a lot with women who've lost babies.

And a lot of people in their lives, they're so afraid to do the wrong thing that they actually don't engage that it's even happening, which that's a whole nother loss, because then the person's had an initial loss, but then they've lost their sense of feeling known, their sense of community. I mean, even with my daughter, where she has a friend who.

Whose parents are getting divorced and her dad's moving out, and she's losing her sense of family. And I've asked my daughter, have you. Have you checked in with her?

And, you know, when she was younger, one of her responses in an instance like this was like, why don't want to bring it up and make her feel bad?

I said, bella, she already feels.

She feels bad all the time. So you bringing it up isn't gonna make her feel worse. You bringing up is gonna be you.

Coming alongside the place those people in grief. And divorce isn't amazing. It's Just think about grief in the spectrum of disappointment and loss, right? It's just little kid loses their toy.

They're beginning to know what grief feels like. Nobody in grief forgets that they're grieving. We're not surprised when somebody says anything. It's like, oh, my goodness, I forgot I was grieving.

We're never forgetting. But it's our story now. It is our story. It's what's making me who I am. It is what's changing the way that I see things. It is profound.

Grief is profound. It can make things good. It can also make you really bitter and very hard to be around. And for a moment, and sometimes for years.

And sometimes grief gets stuck and you get stuck in this. I'm going to stay in this place, and I'm not going to move, and I'm just going to be in loss. And what happens is that you lose your own life.

This death has also been now a death of your life and the death of your experiences and a death of your joy. And you refuse to move on.

You begin to identify with death and.

Loss that becomes all you wear. And then when people are stuck in that, it is hard. It's hard to be around them. It's hard to. Because they have lost their identity in. In the grief.

And grief can do that. Grief's big enough to do that. And so it's a battle. It's a battle. And there's things you can do. There's physical things that I did to help me.

I broke things when I was angry. I broke things.

I took an afternoon and I broke all the dishes that I received for a wedding gift, and I wrote on it with a black felt pen all the things that are. I was angry about and all things that I was losing.

And I just flung those dishes against a wall and it cracked and it splattered, and it was cathartic, and it was wonderful. And I made a quilt. I made something by hand. And it took me nine months, but it was my. It was my wailing walls.

What I said is that I just really, intentionally, slowly made something and created something. Because I thought if I can create something that's beautiful and some color will be. Will come back.

There's things that you can do in grief, intentional things you can do in grief to push you forward into life again, into getting color again. But sometimes, unfortunately. But unfortunately, it's just grief. It's. It's. You have to do it.

You said grief's that big, and that's. I mean, that's Striking me like grief's that big. To identify and keep you stuck.

As one who grieves now will always grieve, will always be mad, will always be bitter, won't see color again, can't experience hope. And God is not good. And grief is that big.

It is that big. And it can rob you. It can rob you of everything and keep you in a place that is dark forever.

I love your. Your examples because in some way, you destroyed something. In another way, you built something.

And you're inviting us into actually not getting stuck in our grief. It doesn't mean you can't be sad or feel the feels. But not getting stuck there and getting.

Stuck, it's not like, okay, you better get over it in a year or you're going to be stuck in grief. No, grief is. I still grieve, but I still am rejoicing. So grief is part of my story. It's not. It's a color that I wear. It is a perspective that I have.

It is a missing I will always have, I will always miss. It's going to be part of my story, but it doesn't mean that I don't enjoy.

But if I get stuck in this and it becomes this, this wall that I continue to build, so you got to break this wall. Grief can build walls. Build walls for relationship, build walls for joy. So it can change me, but it also can change my life and my perspective.

And it's something you have to work against.

And sometimes in the beginning of grief, it is the victory of getting out of bed, taking a shower and drinking a cup of coffee and doing all those things. And maybe that's all you can do, but that's okay. At least you took a step forward. You didn't stay in your bed.

And if you are staying in your bed, not getting out, and you're dealing with depression because grief and depression are their cousins, you need to get help because you can. It can enclose you.

And getting help is find a grief group to talk with other people who are in grief so you realize you're not the only one who's feeling these things. You're not the only one. The nuance of your grief is different than everybody else's. But the story of grief is the same in humanity.

We all will deal with it. Every single person on this earth will deal with grief. We all will walk in those roads.

Let's talk about the dumbest things that people said to you or that you hear them say to others in grief,.

That this was God's Will that I don't. I love the Lord. I just don't think he really enjoys anybody grieving. I don't think he enjoys the consequences of our fall. I think death.

I like it in Psalms, he says, you know, precious in the eyes is the death of his godly ones. God grieves with us, and you'll understand that when you understand that.

But to tell somebody that it's God's will that their person has died or they've lost their job or that there's going to be something better coming along the road, something better is not necessarily coming down the road. Don't wrap it in a package. Don't wrap it up in a bow. Let it be messy. Don't let it be messy. Just let grief be messy.

Let grief be messy and don't package it well. You don't have to defend God. God's big enough to defend himself with the person that is grieving.

He is big enough, wise enough, lovely enough, beautiful enough to step into everybody's mess and make a difference. He doesn't really need you to that.

If the person wants to hear from you and says, could you please tell me what God looks like, then jump in and tell somebody. I want to tell you what God looks like. God loves you. God has a plan for you. God is going to walk with you. But other than that, sometimes be.

Be the voice of God, in a sense, just love on people who are grieving, love on them. Don't. You're not.

I don't want to get in trouble about not speaking God's voice, but I just think we assume so much of God's voice when God really is big enough to speak in dark places.

You know, I. And we've talked a bit about it on this podcast, but how we seem to enter each other's grief can actually bring about more grief and more harm.

How can we take cue from Jesus? How do you see him entering grief?

What I did to understand God and I've had a wrestling match with God for my whole life. I just wrestle with him. I've always had just. It's hard.

So when he took things away from me that I thought he didn't have the right to take, I just really enjoyed the fact that my anger wasn't offending God. And so. And I don't know if I'm answering your question right, but how.

So to invite Jesus into somebody's grief, to invite Jesus into my grief, or to invite God's story into my grief was a matter of trust. I read what Other people did in grief. I read books about what other people did in grief.

I read laments in the Psalms over and over again about how David dealt with grief. When I couldn't pray, I let other people pray for me.

I just thought, if I keep doing this, if I keep doing this, I will eventually believe that God will color my life in. And he did. I just knew it. I had seen him do it in other people's lives. I knew that he had done it in other people's stories.

I knew people had walked away from unbelievable grief whole. And I knew I wasn't that different than them in my faith. And it took. It would just take that time. I would have to take that time to wrestle, to talk.

I journaled, I journaled, I journaled, I wrote, I wrote, I wrote, I read, I read, I read, I prayed, I prayed, I prayed, and I waited and.

I waited and I waited,.

And people came with me. People talked with me. People reminded me how much I was loved. People reminded me that there I would see beautiful things again. And I did.

What does that look like? How did color start beginning to show up in your life again?

I remember that well prior to bad, wrong things happening. I just love beautiful things. I love color. I do love color. I love it when I'm quilting. I love it. I love how to match colors.

I used to take pictures of flowers all the time because I could not believe how beautiful the colors were. And I remember that after Curtis died, I just didn't see beautiful things anymore. I just didn't see it. I didn't.

Sunset just didn't phase me, and it used to phase me. Beautiful sunsets. And we live in the Pacific Northwest and we have some fantastic ones.

And I remember saying, driving, thinking, I wonder why I'm not noticing beautiful things anymore. And then I would just, I'm not. I'm just not.

And I just put my head down and do what I needed to do until I remember seeing a beautiful sunset and three months later going, oh, that's a beautiful sunset. Oh, I see it now. I see it now. Oh, my colors are being. They're being brought back. I can see. I can.

When I didn't make a quilt right away, I made a quilt that was, what, six months later? But I could then begin to put the colors back together. So that was a physical coloring. I could see it. I wanted to take pictures of flowers again.

That was the literal coloring. But the other things, the other ways is the bleaching is how to have relationships with people again, how to Trust again.

And what that looked like it was three years later when I started, when I was in a relationship with my present husband now, and how I could love again, that's just coloring in. Curtis and Scott. They're not alike at all. But to love again and to trust that. To trust again, those are colors.

Those are things being brought back after grief strips away.

I love that. I love that. I love that God has brought life and color back to you.

You know, you talked earlier about dismissing and how we can dismiss each other's grief. And I think in. In an effort to not dismiss grief goes beyond the experience of death.

And I think in my work with women in Kolide, I feel like I'm meeting woman after woman, and she can't even say she's steeped in grief. But really what I'm hearing is like, she's lost something.

And whether it's a dream or the idea that she would be something that she's not, or, you know, they went bankrupt and they've lost everything or lost the breakup of a friendship or a baby or the ability to have babies or her breasts, I mean, it just losses. It runs the gamut, doesn't it?

All of it. It's. It's all the flavors of grief, loss. It's just the flavors of grief. It's the. And the thing is, it's as intense.

Like, I can't say, well, I lost my husband. So that grief is much bigger than everybody else's grief. No, it isn't. Because the grief that you're experiencing is as big as you can experience it.

So it is just that big. If you are disappointed in. And you don't get your job or you don't get to get married or you don't get.

That is the experience of Greece, and it fills your life, and you don't know what to do with it, and it's profound loss, and you just feel like nobody takes it seriously because nobody died, you know, and it. And you're like, well, you know, I don't. Nobody's giving me meals. And I'm just sitting here all alone in. In my grief, and I can't even name it. And.

And what I want to say is that, no, your grief is just as big because it fills yourself and it. And it.

And it pushes you and nudges you away from things that are hopeful, and it takes you away from the trust that you had in God and also breaks your relationships with people because you just are losing your momentum, your mojo, whatever it makes. That makes you get up in the morning. And so for me. And I used to think, well, I have lost my husband. I did the.

You know, no, I was disappointed two weeks ago. Affects everything that I. It's hard for me to eat, blah, blah, blah. You know, you still taste the same thing. Because grief is.

Is the brokenness of Genesis 3. That's it. We deal. Everything that was broken in Genesis 3 is. Is exemplified in our grief. We lost relationship with God.

We lost relationship with each other. We lost everything.

And the longing for healing, the longing for relationship, the longing for fulfillment, the longing for significance, that's because we're longing for something that is not promised because we live in broken, and we don't know what to do with that. And so we need to lean into each other's company. And shared grief is halved. It's just halved.

You.

If I sit with you and I tell you about how much I'm losing or dealing with grief, and you listen and there's tears going down your cheeks, and you're like, I'm so sorry. I walk away feeling, oh, it's not as heavy because you're carrying it with me.

And the more that I can grieve with someone else, the more they enter into my grief, I am able to breathe more. And that's everybody's grief. That's how we walk into everybody's stories.

The older I get, I'm starting to realize the power of recognizing the loss. And I don't think I did a good job of giving myself permission, let alone other people, to recognize losses in their lives.

And that's a lot of work I'm doing with women, like, taking the time to actually say, what did you lose? But I think about even a few years ago, where I experienced a friendship breakup that just. I mean, the loss that I experienced was.

I mean, I was weeping for a period of time that was ridiculous. And I think I almost drove my husband over the edge of how much I needed to process it. And then finally I realized, like, I'm grieving a loss.

I have lost someone that I deeply love. And I had to actually take time to recognize, like, actually get out a journal and write, what have I lost?

And write down, I lost this, and I lost this.

And it's. And it's always multi. It's a multifaceted forever. You don't have any idea where the tentacles of grief reach, you know, that broken friendship.

But then it was disappointment of what you were expecting in the. In the way that you felt when you were with her or with him. And in that brokenness and that.

That insecurity that you feel about who you are as a person and you have no idea.

Well, and it triggers other grief because it was triggering the. The. This sense that I didn't experience being a daughter to a dad who was present all the time and that I didn't feel like he chose me.

And then I felt like this, in this friendship is triggering, like, deeper grief.

But until I could actually stop dismissing, like, oh, it's just a friend, when I was actually breaking down about it, until I could actually sit down and recognize, like, this is a loss and it's actually triggering so many other losses in my life. And if I don't deal with this,.

I'm going to collect them. You collect grief. It's unresolved grief. If you don't. If you don't deal with grief, your losses, you collect them.

And it comes out in the weirdest times.

You're crying in dumb commercials and you have no idea why you're crying and you're thinking, this is a dumb commercial, and I'm weeping like, I've lost my best friend.

Because you probably did three years ago and didn't deal with it and you didn't think it was serious enough or you didn't look at it straight in the eyes and say, I am incredibly broken that I have lost this. And just said it. Like you said where you say it out loud and you do. You collect things. You don't resolve, and then it's unresolved. And I used to.

I remember thinking I could never watch my daughter do theater because I would sit and watch her and I'd start weeping. And it's a really supposed to be fun thing. I mean, she's great acting. I'm weeping and weeping. But it was. Exactly.

It's because I never resolved the issue of knowing that my parents had never watched me do anything. And I thought, oh, well, well. But of course. So every time I watch my daughter act, I would be sobbing, and I was just.

I would look at myself like, what the heck am I sobbing for? It's unresolved grief. It was just. I had collected these broken things, these broken feelings for years and years and years.

And it will come up, and it comes up with all of us, where you're. You're crying like you're thinking, well, this is. This is a loss. But it's not that big of. And it. But it is. It's a collected loss. And your little.

Your heart and your brain is. Is trying to resolve issues you hadn't done before.

Well, and part of not resolving it was when you try to engage people in conversation about it, they're wanting to dismiss it, like, you'll be fine, like, it's her loss. Like, you know, but you still don't feel okay about the loss of someone you deeply loved.

And someone saying it's her loss doesn't make me feel better about mine. And I think people's dismissal of these smaller losses don't make it go away.

No, it doesn't. In fact, it makes you feel stupid. You feel like, oh, maybe I'm not. Well, maybe I'm too sensitive. Maybe I'm. And you're like, you're not too sensitive.

It's just that some people are not able to deal with losses because they haven't dealt with their own.

Most people who are dismissive of other losses are people that haven't dealt with their own losses or they have a charmed life and nothing bad wrong has happened to them. And, you know, those. I don't haven't met anybody like that, but there might be some out there.

You're like, I don't want to be friends with you.

There may be some people out there who are, you know, have a charmed life in the end, but everybody's charmed life. We're all going to grieve.

Yeah.

I don't wish. I don't wish it on anybody.

Yeah. You shared a little bit about how God's brought some color into your life. Can you share how God restored your sense of family?

The complicated story about Curtis prior to his death is that I dealt with him as an alcoholic. And so in the years prior to his death, he had been sober a year before he died. But in the.

And everybody knows if you're married to an addict, an addict breaks everything, breaks all relationships. It's just hard. And so prior to being. To Curtis dying, it was just like that was the final thing.

Everything had shattered in my ability to know if I could trust a guy again, if a guy would ever love me again, if I was even worth more than a bottle. Because I used to think, Curtis can't even stop drinking because drinking is more important to him than having a relationship with me.

So I didn't feel like I was worth very much. And then when he died, we had been building it again. We'd been building our relationship, and it just felt like everything was ripped away.

And so when I met Scott, and then Scott was interested in me, that was weird. And then we started dating, and we were both Old, and that's just weird.

But we were both, you know, and then we got married and we got married quickly just because we're old people and we knew what we wanted.

They weren't that old, by the way,.

But it was just. But if you're single for a long time, it's hard to be married. And marriage for us has been one of those.

We have to really just work this one out because we're both independent and strong willed people. But I love it so much that Scott entered into my life and was willing to take my kids as his. Willing to father my children.

He was willing to father my children even though I didn't want him to. Like, I didn't want him. Because what does he know about that, you know, what does he know about being a father, you know? Well, nothing.

But still, he was. He was willing to butt heads with me because he loved my kids enough to fight for them. And I just was.

I just could not imagine that somebody would want to do that. And he did. Over and over and over and over again. And I am a piece of work. I am a piece of work. And he didn't mind. I thought that was great.

I just thought that was great. And he still thinks I'm the. He just thinks I'm the best person. I mean, he was 39 and he had never been married prior to being married to me.

And he was like, people are like, well, why weren't you married? And he was like, well, because I hadn't met Heidi yet. You know, just wonderful answers.

But just building and bringing him, because he was lonely, into a family, giving him the opportunity to be a dad. For me, to be a wife in a normal, whatever normal is relationship, to establish, to restore, to make whole. It's not easy, but, man, it's worth it.

I love the story that God is writing in your life. It's so beautiful. Thank you. When you think about people listening and we can come to a close with this.

When you think about people who are steeped in loss right now, no matter what it is. What do you want to invite them?

I want to say I'm so sorry. One that you have to feel this and live this and breathe this. I am so sorry that the story of your life isn't the way you wanted it to be.

But I want you to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that there are steps you can take to walk not away, but in the middle of and all the way through. And that you can carry your grief. Not a burden, but it becomes something that you wear that changes you.

But you have to get to the place where you need to walk out and through and feel it and know it because you are still allowed to live and you are still here and you have something to give to the world. And we need you. We need you to grieve as long as you need. But we need you to be part of our family again, of community and come home.

Teach us how to help you and love you and carry you through this, through these unbelievably dark days.

If that's you right now and you're listening to this and you don't know how to get help, I want to encourage you to email [email protected] infoee collide.net and we want to help you get the help that you need. So we're fiercely committed to walk alongside people to get them the help they need.

We don't want you to listen to this and recognize that you're steeped in grief and you have no idea what to do. So please email us. Heidi, thank you for sharing your story.

Thank you so much. And in this also journey, I am available to email anybody. If you want to talk to me in the process, just start. Thank you so much for asking.

It's nice to remember. It's nice to remember.

And if people want to email you, I'm going to have them email info at We Collide and we'll pass it on to you. Thank you for being with us and you guys keep colliding, keep walking forward and we will catch you next week.

Thanks for tuning in to keep up with us.

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