309: What if you gave everything to The Job?
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. I texted him and said, where are you? And he didn't answer, so I thought I would give him another half an hour and then I would find out where he was. I regret that half hour. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You're listening to This Is Actually Happening.

Episode 309 What if you gave everything to the job?

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love, work, parent, and educate through the power of vulnerability. New members can try Audible free for 30 days. Visit audible.com slash happening or text happening to 500-500. That's audible.com slash happening or text happening to 500-500.

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Quote today at Progressive.com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Comparison rates not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy. My mom came from a family of seven kids. They lived in British Columbia. She had a very strict upbringing. Her family was quite poor. They moved around a lot.

She was also diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis very young, so she had medical issues to deal with. And in a family that's already struggling, having a child that has elevated medical needs was a challenge. It also made her feel quite unloved. She left home when she was very young, about 15 years old, and got on a Greyhound bus and came to live with her grandfather and then her grandmother.

She got herself to high school without much parenting, ended up in a small town in Alberta where my father was in high school. They met when they were about 17 or 18. My dad will tell the story of he saw this girl on crutches come into the local cafe and he instantly fell in love because she was so beautiful. He didn't look at her disability at all.

She fell in love quickly with my father. She felt quite unloved in her family life and really needed somebody who just adored her, which is how it turned out for them. When she met my father, they were both in high school. My father was sort of the local James Dean of town.

He had a similar upbringing to my mom in that the family was quite poor, also from a large family. He was the second youngest child. He shared a bedroom with three or four siblings. His older brothers were sometimes bullying. That made him feel a bit insecure.

He grew up feeling he needed to prove himself. And that really did set the foundation for their lives. My parents got married quite young, had a baby early.

I have an older sister than I was born, and then I have a sister who's 18 months younger than me. So I had very young parents who were barely finished growing up themselves and were very bonded in that they needed to become better than the lives that they were raised in. Now, when my parents first married, they were poor.

My mom kept all of the home fires burning while my father was away driving heavy equipment, building roads or working in the oil patch. What I remember early on was my father being quite absent and my mother being quite present because my father was away working and he was driven so much to succeed.

Early on, he worked for his brother driving heavy equipment. Within a couple of years, he already wanted to start his own company. And he did that. And that meant he worked away from home five and a half days a week. And he would come home by noon or so on Saturday and then leave again before we were out of bed on Monday morning. Before he was 35, he had become a millionaire.

I know that my parents were workaholics in a way that is different from office work.

Work was part of every single day. And I grew up believing that you must be driven, you must have goals, you must strive to better your life, to the point that by the time I was a teenager, I thought other people who didn't have that work ethic were somehow living a wrong life.

I don't remember my father being a real fixture in my life until I was maybe 12 or 13 years old. And yes, providing a good life for us and a better life than what he'd had, but still absent from his five children.

Our house was the party house, and there was drinking and music and dancing and people. And some of those memories are very positive because we were surrounded by all this happiness. But he came to a breaking point with my mom. I was maybe 14 or 15 where she said the alcohol has to go or I'm going with the kids. I can't take the drinking anymore. It's the alcohol or it's the family.

And he, cold turkey, stopped drinking. He never drank again. It didn't change how much of a workaholic he was or my mom. It just meant he was there. We started going to church and church became a part of our life.

It actually created some things in me that I'm glad I have, such as a belief in something bigger than myself, which I think is a critical thing to give to children. There has to be something larger than themselves, and they can lean on that in hard times. And I know I have.

When our Heavenly Father became central to our life, it meant that there was something grander than my earthly parents that made my life more valuable. Knowing that I felt loved by my earthly parents and loved by a Heavenly Father made me think of myself as worthy of a good life and worthy of good things happening to me.

From adolescence, I thought of myself as being smart and I thought of myself as being funny and fun. I thought of myself as being hardworking. I left home when I was 17 and went to college quite early. I graduated high school a year early, so I pursued journalism.

entered my college years and the things I brought from my upbringing were that sense of being a workaholic and I never relented on that and that caused me some issues early on

I played hard, but I worked very hard. And so I got into a very bad habit of taking caffeine pills to help me stay awake so I could be up around the clock. And I would live on two or three hours of sleep during exams. It was affecting me mentally. And at one point, I know I had a breakdown and had some hallucinations. I was having nightmares about somebody who was going to harm me.

I even remember her name was Ruby and in some way I had abandoned her when she needed me. I really believe that happened for a long time even after my roommate rescued me from my waking nightmare.

I really believed she was out there. It took me weeks or months for me to come to terms with she was not a real person. That hadn't really happened. That that wasn't real. That it was my lack of sleep that had caused me to have that hallucination. It felt as real as if a person could walk into the room and talk to me.

It made me think about how to protect myself mentally. I don't think I had all the tools to either articulate what had happened or what was broken. I had developed some bad habits around how much effort I needed put into to achieve my goals. I carried the workaholic work ethic that I learned from my parents into my adulthood.

I met my first husband when I was 22. I had been engaged to someone else. We had broken up, and so I was on a bit of a rebound. In the religious family I was grown up in, you don't have sex with somebody before you get married. So when I met my husband and we were having sex, that was the heaviest burden of guilt I could possibly carry.

And then I got pregnant, so immediately I knew I had to marry him. So I got married at 22. I didn't even tell my parents I was pregnant when we were married. That meant I entered my marriage with him with a burden of guilt, and it made our early years heavy.

I had my first child when I was almost 23 and my second child when I was 25, and they became everything to me. I was heaping on my son at a very early age the need to be smart and to learn quickly. So, you know, from birth, I read him books and we worked on his alphabet. He could print his alphabet at three years old

So I started to inflict my need for him to succeed very young. The way my parents wanted to do better than their parents and I wanted to do better than my parents. I do carry some guilt for the early years of his life.

My relationship with my husband, he was a good man, but he had a different perspective on his career. He felt like he should have a career that he loved and it wasn't going to be driven by how much money he could earn. I felt I had to have a pretty solid career because he was going to be in a career he loved but didn't earn much money.

I was working a full-time job running a children's magazine and for a while I think I lost my way in what was really a good priority and that would have been family first instead of anything else.

I justified it by saying I'm always there for my children. I drop them off at school. I pick them up. I take them to their sports. I do all of those things. I make their Halloween costumes. I was doing all those things. Yet, being goal-focused and work-driven, career-driven can take away from some of the other things that could bring you joy.

At one point, I was working on a project and I had felt a pain in my stomach and ignored it. And on about day three, this pain started to really escalate. And it was about 10 o'clock at night. I was still at the office. I collapsed and an ambulance was called.

And I was taken to hospital and had emergency surgery. I woke up in the hospital having had an ovarian cyst removed. Apparently it had burst several days earlier and I was bleeding internally quite severely. But I had ignored it because I had a deadline to meet. Our marriage was faltering five, six years in.

Finally, we separated when they were 14 and 17. And I had a much happier life after we were separated, despite the angst it caused our children. And I went on to marry somebody who truly was the love of my life.

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I had known my second husband for many years. I had met him earlier in my career. He was my boss, actually, as I worked as a technical writer in his company. But I had kept in touch with him over the years. His name is Jim, and Jim was a man of great honor. And even though I was separated, didn't want to date until I was actually available.

And then when we were ready to make a commitment to one another, we got engaged and got married.

I also was struggling with depression. And I was seeing a therapist and I was taking antidepressants. And I never got as far along in therapy. I couldn't say what things I could do better or take away or add to my life that would reduce my depression. I just could never quite get my arms around it. I think my depression had multiple components.

In the religious environment that I was raised in, we have a strong belief that marriage is for eternity. I fell short in my measurement. I don't believe that now, but at the time, I believed that. A large part of me felt and feels like I failed my son in not dealing with his anxiety and his mental illnesses.

And I don't think I got him the help he needed, and it has resulted in a very challenging life for him. I carry that with me. I think a mix of those things contributed to my depression. Individually, maybe not so, but as you go through adulthood and ignore them, they don't go away. They gain more weight, surprisingly. And I think that's what happened with me. I'm a person that believes in forgiveness.

I also believe we have a responsibility to ask for forgiveness when we have hurt other people. And there's always casualties in divorce, and I needed to seek forgiveness from the people I had hurt along the way. And it took me a while to come to that and to seek that forgiveness. Not even sure that I have done that all fully yet.

I want to take accountability for my contribution to the marriage not working and for the pain it caused my children. So seeking forgiveness for things that I could have done better and should have done better because I knew better, that still stays with me. In my big picture of repenting of the ills you've done is to forgive yourself for the things that you cannot fix.

Sometimes you cause pain to others, and there is no way to atone for that. There is no way that you can go back and undo it. And so the most you can do is to do better and forgive yourself. For me, one of the most challenging pieces is that part. I was mostly free from raising children, and my workaholism really kicked into high gear.

And he was already entrenched in his bad habits. He was co-parenting with his ex, and that left him a lot of free time to spend at work. The negative side of being married to somebody who also worked the same way was it gave a lot of allowance for that bad behavior to continue.

Now I was off being a consultant in the oil and gas industry by this point, and he managed very large multi-million dollar projects, and very much his self-worth was tied to how well he did on these projects. There were times when he was near collapse mentally and physically.

And we would spend many hours at the end of a project talking about what went right, what went wrong, what things he could do better, talking through what he felt were failures or successes. And he offered me the same when I was going through really hard struggles in my own work. And in that way, we were a great support to one another.

He was exceptional in many ways as a human being. He was raised in a terrible family, was an extremely abusive father. At some points in his life, he slept with a knife under his pillow. He had physical and emotional and mental abuse through his whole childhood. By the time he was an adolescent, he was sleeping at his friends' houses to get through high school.

And he went on to become an engineer and supported himself through university. He emerged from that upbringing with some broken parts, I would say. One of the broken parts was his self-esteem. And it was highly tied to how successful he was with his work.

The thing that he came out of his childhood with, though, was this commitment to kindness. And he wanted to never appear to be the kind of person that his father was. He was naturally good and kind. He did that without any accolades. One story that would just give you a sense of him was...

We had a ski place in another province and we would drive to that ski place every single weekend to ski. And some of that drive was through one of the most dangerous mountain passes in Canada. One of those drives he was doing without me and there was a woman walking along the road and she was a native woman and she was walking along near dark and the snow was starting to fall.

And he's pulled over and asked her if she needed a ride. So he took her, drove the three or four more hours that he had to through the mountain paths to get to our house, fed her food, and put her to bed. In the morning, she got up and showered, and he fed her breakfast, and he drove her another three hours away to the home that she was trying to get to where her family was. And he gave her money, and we thought we would never hear from her again.

A few weeks later, there was an envelope in the mail that had an eagle feather in it and a note from her that said, "I have never been treated with such kindness in my life. I have no possessions, and the prized possession I have in my life is this eagle feather, which is important in her culture. And I want you to have this because it's the only way I can express my gratitude."

And that is one of many, many stories about Jim. And nobody would know that story if I didn't tell it, because he didn't tell people when he did good things.

I witnessed his goodness. I witnessed how good he was to the people who he managed. I witnessed how good he was to my children when we got married. And it made him do his job in a way that sort of transcended it just being a work.

He wanted his people to be happy. He wanted his leaders to love him and to be proud of his work. He wanted to have pride in his work. He felt it manifested who he was. While Jim was an exceptional human and kind, generally empathetic, he did not suffer failure very well.

If a team that he led failed, he would more often count that as his own failure. Jim wanted to know that if there was a project he touched, if it had failed, what could he have done better? What could he have done differently to achieve a different outcome? He worked in a multinational corporation in the defense sector.

The culture in that corporation was mission first, team second, and self last. And that directed how they did their work and how Jim saw his work. Because the mission was to build a more prosperous company, the team would be successful in their own lives. He would speak in terms of, I need to keep this project going.

going so that my friends and my colleagues can pay their mortgages and keep their families in the lifestyle that they would like. For him, it was real terms. It had real tangibility. And he felt the weight of that all the time.

The self portion of what he believed was the culture he worked in was that he would sacrifice himself for the benefit or the success of the mission and then the team. And he routinely did that.

He would sacrifice time with his children, vacation time that he really needed to recalibrate himself. He would sacrifice days off, time that he had allocated to spend with me and to build our relationship. Many of the projects he worked on were stressful.

He would bring some of that home with him and we would talk it out. We said in the family that Jim is off in Jim Land right now and Jim Land meant that he was decompressing from a big project coming to a close or he was deconstructing in his mind how things went and when he was in that place he

was completely cut off from everybody emotionally and mentally. He just needed time alone to think things through. And then we would come out of it and take some time away and he'd be re-energized and he would feel good about his work and he'd be strengthened to go back and do it again. And I saw that cycle many, many, many times. Part of what made Jim a very valuable employee was

was that he built relationships with people and he depended on those relationships to help him get through a bid cycle.

Often he could call and say, I need more help. And in the days when the company was very prosperous, they would give him the big teams he needed to push forward and to push through to the end of a project. And as times became leaner, the help became leaner and he would take on more of the roles himself.

And then when the pandemic came and he had to work remotely from his team, he didn't always have access to those people. And it became really apparent that he would have to carry a lot of burden for this last bid all on his own. Sometimes he would work for 20 hours before he had sleep.

He might get one or two hours of sleep in a row, and then he'd get up at three o'clock in the morning to have a meeting or to return email so that the people in Rome could get it in their time. He did that routinely for many, many, many weeks as the pandemic started. At home, I was seeing evidence of his exhaustion.

I started having him have regular coffee breaks with me so that I could see that he was eating or that he was taking a moment to just talk about something other than work. We started going for a walk at the end of the day and he even resented the hour it took out to do that walk because he was missing a time zone that he could be answering email.

I knew that things were piling up when he started to go into his quiet zone and not be available to deconstruct things with me. He had started to have high blood pressure.

And we had a blood pressure machine at home. He was such an engineer that he made sure that the machine was calibrated with the one at the emergency room at the hospital so he could trust the readings that he was taking.

He was getting readings of 220 over 120 and 180 over 120. And as he would finish his workday, his blood pressure would drop back to normal. So he could track that his blood pressure was at extreme highs during his workday. He reported this to his company nurse and to his immediate manager. And they told him to go to the hospital, which he did.

The hospital said, we'll do more tests, and in the meantime, you've got to take it easy. When his additional testing was done, they found he had an aortic aneurysm and that they would need to put in a heart valve at some point. He told this to his immediate manager and to his executive manager and to his company nurse.

all of whom acknowledged his medical condition, none of whom recommended he take any time off work. And they all continued to allow him to get more work to ensure that this project would be delivered on budget within the timeline. During that time period, I had to leave him for a few days to go to a funeral. When I came back, he was pale and shaking, not eating, not sleeping.

talking to everybody he knew about how he was going to go out to his retirement as a failure. Because I had retired just a month before, he had declared his retirement date to be the end of July. They had talked him into staying until the end of September, and now we were at the beginning of September, and he was trying to close off this project and have a success at the end of his career.

He had been with this company for nearly 30 years, and he was despondent about leaving his career on a failure. At that time, he did not know for sure if his project was failing, but he had heard that a couple of very important things had been missed, and those items would immediately disqualify them from the bidding process on a significant multi-million dollar project.

Anybody from the outside looking in would know that that was out of Jim's realm, but he didn't see it that way. And he continued to work and work and work every angle that he could find to see if they could overcome those issues. When he believed that they could not overcome those issues and that the bid would likely fail, he could not accept that that would be the outcome.

He called his manager. He called his executive manager. He was told in both instances to just hold on to those items and they would talk about them in a big meeting that was going to be booked for the following week. They called it the lessons learned meeting where they would talk about things they had failed at during the process and things they could do better. It was a normal part of their work to do a lessons learned and do a look back.

For Jim, though, this meant that they would look back at something he had failed at, and that would be the last thing they would see about his career before he retired.

After he was told to wait, we spent a day and a half making notes about all the things that had gone on in the project, all of the challenges, including working across time zones, the health concerns that were not addressed. And he said to me, it's a good thing I'm not a kind of guy who would consider suicide. It took me a couple of hours for that to hit. And I went back to him and I said, please tell me that you weren't serious about that comment.

And he said, of course I was not serious. I was just joking. I'm just really upset about the outcome of this bid. And I'm very worried about that lessons learned that I will be painted as the person who failed. So because he said he wasn't serious, I took his word for it. We went to bed that night. I had a migraine.

And I had some sleeping pills that were prescription. And I said, I'll sleep off this migraine. And then we can talk some more. I woke up three hours later and it was dark. And we live in the country where there are no streetlights and we didn't have a yard light. And I'm surrounded by the forest and the mountain. And I went outside to see if I could see where Jim was because he wasn't in bed next to me.

Our cars were still in the driveway, and it was COVID, so we couldn't go anywhere. But I thought he had taken a walk to work out some of his stress. He wasn't in his office, which was in the basement of our house. I texted him and said, where are you? And he didn't answer, so I thought I would give him another half an hour, and then I would find out where he was. I regret that half hour. I laid down.

Half an hour turned into an hour, and I woke up. I could see still that he wasn't anywhere in the house or his office or in the yard, and it was nearing midnight. It was pitch dark. I thought I would drive around to see where he had gone for a walk. I texted him again to ask him where he was. No answer. But I got in the car, and something told me I should check in the garage.

I believe that I'm a spiritual person and that sometimes you can have some help from a spirit who may not be with you. Before I opened that garage door, something said to me very distinctly that I would find him hanging in the garage. I knew what I was going to see, and that's what happened. As the door came up, I could see his feet. I had a very strange sense of calm.

And I can't attribute that to anything except I feel like I knew before I opened that door that I'd had a warning in my mind or my spirit or my heart or whatever source that that's what I was going to see. I just remember saying to him, Oh, my sweetheart, what have you done? I held on to him for a minute.

And then all the things that happened after that seemed to happen automatically. I mean, like I was on autopilot. It was almost like an out-of-body experience because I was just doing the things that needed to be done. I knew I needed to call 911. 911 operator asked me to the rope around his neck to see if I could save him.

I said to them, "His eyes are open and I know he's gone." And she said, "Go find something and cut him down." I left him and ran into the house and came back and that's what I did. The 911 operator asked me to do chest compressions until the ambulance could arrive. We lived out in the country and it was going to be a little while before they got there. So I did chest compressions. I knew he was gone.

I just remember that night was very dark. I felt so alone. After about 10 minutes, ambulance came. The police came. The local coroner came. They'd worked to try and revive him for a little while, but they were clear pretty soon after they arrived that he was gone. And I remember sitting on the front step as the paramedics were working on him.

And I could hear one of them say, I think I got a breath. But hearing the paramedic say that didn't even give me hope. Because I already knew there was a female police officer, an RCMP officer, that said, let's go into the house. While they put his body in the ambulance. As I opened the door, about a thousand moths flew into the house. And I had no idea what they were doing.

why that happened. We closed the door and the entire ceiling of the entrance was covered with these little moss. The RCMP officer looked up and she said, "I have never seen that happen before. I just had the feeling that was the moment that his spirit had left his body." Once they took Jim, the police took me to the hospital so that I could be watched while I waited for my family to drive five hours from Alberta.

They didn't trust me to be on my own, and I'm grateful that they didn't leave me on my own. This Is Actually Happening is sponsored by ADT. ADT knows a lot can happen in a second. One second, you're happily single. And the next second, you catch a glimpse of someone, and you don't want to be. Maybe one second, you have a business idea that seems like a pipe dream. And the next, you have an LLC and a dream come true. And when it comes to your home, one second, you feel safe,

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And he texted back and said, phone his direct manager, not me. So I texted his executive leader, and he replied by giving me Jim's supervisor's information. By this point, I was very distraught. And I said, you need to know that Jim killed himself tonight.

and I believe your company has culpability in the circumstances that led to this, and I would like you to phone me." And still he didn't phone me. He got Jim's supervisor to phone me, and the head of human resources to phone me. And that's the only contact I had after that, is with human resources to sort out life insurance and benefits.

It just came to me that he lived what he believed was the culture of his company, which was mission team self. He failed the mission, and that meant he would fail the team. And in order to live with himself, he took his own life. I had read earlier on about something that the Japanese call karoshi. It's a term that they coined to talk about people who die from overworked.

They also coined another phrase, death caused by work where the method of death is suicide. And that's what happened to Jim. So I thought it was relevant to take up a cause with his company and ask them to reconsider how they manage their employees.

I read an article in Forbes that said workplace stress is believed to be the leading factor on suicides when employees have little or no control over their high job demands. And that's exactly the circumstances which Jim was in. He had made them aware of the medical stresses he was going to related to his job. And yet the high demand did not stop him.

From what I learned in my career is that human resources are the least caring people in the company. They have policies to follow, and they follow them to the letter of the law. I wanted them to know the human impact of Jim's suicide, and I wanted them to hear from me the responsibility that I believed they had in that death.

So I wrote up his story and supplied all the evidence I had, including his notes and his email and his messages to all of his leaders about where he needed help and about his health conditions and about his fear of failure. And I gave it to a lawyer. She used my research and Jim's story, put together a brief which we submitted to the company.

First of all, I wanted to make sure they knew that I was not seeking revenge, that I was only seeking change and acknowledgement in how they contributed to his death. I asked for a written apology, a formal investigation into how their failure to accommodate Jim through his stressful times at the end

I wanted a review of their policies and practices as it related to workplace safety and specifically mental health safety. I wanted them to contribute to a fund which I started to create grants for adolescents to have mental health projects in their area. I wanted a meeting with the leadership team of their company.

And I talked to them about what they could do to change the practices in their own company. The majority of my career, I worked in a field called change management. And what we learned is big companies do not change through changing policy or process. They change by having a culture shift that is led by the leaders at the top of the organization.

Don't change a policy and expect that to change anything. Change your culture and you will change your organization. I spoke about that to this leadership team that had met with me. There were several leaders and after I had taken 30 minutes to speak to them, they wanted to have a roundtable speaking with the president.

He broke into tears and he said, I can barely understand how we let it get this far with Jim. And I had no idea that we put him under that kind of stress. Without fail, we went around that table and each person expressed their sorrow for the loss of Jim. They made verbal promises to try and change their own culture.

The outcome of that meeting was more conversation about how mental health safety is as important as physical safety in a workplace.

We have so much data at our disposal that we do need to find a way to have legitimate, honest conversations in big companies. And we need to take HR out of the equation so that we have humans talking to humans without a policy being a roadblock or a barrier.

so that we can actually feel safe in our workplace to talk to a leader about a medical condition and have that leader respond as a human and not as a person who needs to drive you toward a deadline. They think this is a human resources problem when it's actually a leadership problem.

What I've witnessed myself is when I had breast cancer and I needed time off work, everybody was so supportive. And the reason they did it is because that is a medical condition. It's tangible. When a person comes to you with a mental health issue, leaders don't know what to do with that. Leaders don't know how to actually say, it's okay if we don't meet a deadline because you need this week off.

Because nobody's given them the permission to do that. And that's what I mean by leadership is the only way we make culture shift.

With the donation that Jim's company gave and through donations of participants, I started a foundation called 500 Miles for Mental Health, whose objective is to get money to adolescents to have mental health projects in their peer community. So I target the money we raise through the foundation at mental health projects starting at junior high and high school age children.

I sincerely believe that if children have better tools to cope with mental health, they will grow up to be more resilient adults. If Jim had been raised in a mentally healthier family, he might have not believed that his career was solely the source of his self-esteem.

He may have had self-esteem that came from good grounding in loving yourself and knowing that you have worth beyond your career. My childhood was so different from Jim's. I learned early that I was worthy of love, of having big dreams and big goals. And I got that partly from a religious upbringing, but mostly from my parents making me believe that way.

It starts from childhood to believe that you're important and that you're worth love and worth being loved. And Jim didn't have that. So I go through depression and I come out thinking suicide is not actually an option because I have people who love me and people who need me.

In Jim's world, he has people who love him, but he has never felt worthy of that love, and his entire self-esteem rested on whether he was successful in his work. It's sad to think that no tools were given to him as a child or as an adolescent to make him feel better than that.

What if we could give tools to children who don't have those tools naturally? What if we could say, you are worth everything that every other child is worth?

Can't overemphasize that when you feel that love and that constant sense of safety around you, you do feel worthy of love. And not only that, you feel it's your right to have it, that it's your right to be loved and to have that extended to you in your relationships. I think that grief when somebody kills themselves is a different ballgame. You're constantly wondering why.

Why wasn't the love we had in our marriage enough to keep him? Why wasn't all of our plans for our future enough to make him stay? And how come I wasn't the person that could save him?

Everybody who wants to give me advice will say, well, you must know that he wasn't himself when he made that decision and that people who commit suicide are only thinking of relieving themselves from that pain. And intellectually, I know all of that's true. Emotionally, it's a different thing. I don't know that I've entirely forgiven myself for dropping the ball.

Part of me still believes I was selfish as I went to bed with my own migraine when I knew he was struggling. The only answer for me is to remind myself of the love we had, the love he shared not just with me but with strangers and with family and friends, and to try and emulate him in some ways and to be the better person. I definitely was a better person for having been married to him.

My recovery has to be that I live a good life and that if this foundation succeeds, that it makes a difference in the life of one or ten children who then have more mental health resilience than they would have otherwise. And that I live a life that's worthy of the love he gave me.

Today's episode featured Trina Kolpitz. If you'd like to reach out to her, you can email at 500milesformentalhealth at gmail.com. That's the number, 500milesformentalhealth at gmail.com. And you can learn more about her foundation at 500milesformentalhealth.com and join their 2024 challenge. From Wondery, you're listening to This Is Actually Happening.

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