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55. Pain And Joy Can Dwell Together- With Megan Hillukka
76 Plays4 years ago
Megan Hillukka is a bereaved mother, with 6 children, 5 who are still here. She was 36 weeks pregnant when her daughter Aria, who was 15 months old, died in her sleep. She also experienced PTSD from finding her daughter Aria when she died, and has done the work to find healing in her brain and her life. From this, Megan wants everyone to know that PTSD is not a life sentence, and that healing is possible. Megan encourages and supports grieving mothers that though the worst thing has happened to them, their life is not over
In our conversation we talk about how they explained to their children that their sister had passed away, and making sure they used the best words possible to share, so that the kids themselves would not have fear around falling asleep. We also talk about the mix of emotions as she was saying goodbye to one child and just a few weeks later welcoming their new baby.
Through her experience of the death of her daughter Megan has learned tools and ways of shifting grief so that it can become just a little bit lighter, and easier to live with. Because Megan has done the deep work of grief, made space for her grief and time for her grief, she now has room for joy, laughter, hope, and so much fun in her life. She will never forget her daughter Aria and they talk about her often as a family. She helps her clients carry their grief instead of suffering with grief, and to truly learn how to walk side by side with both grief and joy.
Contact Megan Hillukka: http://www.meganhillukka.com
Her Facebook group is Http://www.facebook.com/groups/cultivatedfamily
Contact Kendra to be a guest or for a coaching session: http://www.griefgratitudeandthegrayinbetween.com
Music: http://www.rinaldisound.com
Logo: http://www.pamelawinningham.com
Production: Carlos Andres Londono
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Grief, Gratitude, and the Gray in Between'
00:00:01
Speaker
I know a lot of people feel guilt when they feel any joy. But for me, I just really embraced any joy that came into my life because I knew that any moment would be really hard again. I felt like those moments of joy gave me the strengths to keep going when another wave came.
00:00:23
Speaker
in when another grief wave came when things got really hard again. So they were like almost like a moment of fresh air where I could just like enjoy the moment. But definitely even those moments of joy were different than the moments of joy before Aria died. Hello and welcome to Grief, Gratitude and the Gray in Between podcast.
Purpose of Sharing Grief Stories
00:00:52
Speaker
This podcast is about exploring the grief that occurs at different times in our lives in which we have had major changes and transitions that literally shake us to the core and make us experience grief.
00:01:08
Speaker
I created this podcast for people to feel a little less hopeless and alone in their own grief process as they hear the stories of others who have had similar journeys. I'm Kendra Rinaldi, your host. Now, let's dive right in to today's episode.
Guest Introduction: Megan Hilica
00:01:31
Speaker
Thank you so much for tuning in today. Today, I will be talking to Megan Hilica. Did I say it this time right? Now I want to say it. Okay. This has been my biggest challenge doing the podcast is pronouncing people's names correctly.
00:01:48
Speaker
One of my biggest challenges. I've had episodes in which I've completely, you know, said the last names come absolutely wrong. So I should just practice before I start recording. So welcome, Megan, to our podcast. I'm glad you're here. Thank you for having me,
Normalizing Grief Conversations
00:02:10
Speaker
Kendra. I'm really excited to start chatting about grief, which seems kind of funny, but I love talking about grief and
00:02:18
Speaker
It's so weird, right? It's so weird when you're in this arena that we actually look forward to bringing up this conversation of it. But I think it comes from trying to, when you've experienced it, you do want to be able to talk about it, to grieve through it as you're going through it and normalizing the conversation.
00:02:45
Speaker
is something important and I mean that's the whole point I created the podcast was exactly for that to be able to normalize this conversation about the topic of grief and the topic of death which we don't talk enough about and I think that that's why then grieving becomes so unknown when we experience death because
00:03:05
Speaker
We don't talk enough about death, right? To be able to know about it. So let's first do a few of just getting to know each other kind of things, which we are just the two of us just getting to know each other. It's our first conversation. So where do you live?
The Loss of Aria
00:03:24
Speaker
I am from Minnesota, like Twin Cities area, Minnesota. I don't hear the O. I don't hear the Oda. I don't hear it.
00:03:33
Speaker
I don't hear it. I'm good with accents, and I don't hear the soda ode oo. Don't this, don't, isn't Minnesota, is, no, is that more Dakota? That's more like Canada, I think. And Canada, and Dakota, and the Dakotas, the northern part. Okay, okay, then I'm totally right.
00:03:51
Speaker
So you're from Twin Cities, and then that's where you were born and raised, and that's where you live now? Yeah. Okay. And then tell us then a little bit about your family, and then that way we can navigate into your grief story there, so your mom's story. Yeah, I am married to my husband, Justin. We have been married for almost 10 years.
00:04:18
Speaker
six children, ages almost nine to 18 months or so. And within those six children, we do have a daughter who died almost in may be five years. She died in 2016. And so I guess we have a big hole in our family, big part of our family missing, even though we have a lot of kids compared to a lot of people in a lot of people's view.
00:04:45
Speaker
And it doesn't matter how many kids you have, you always have that hole. There's that big, huge gaping hole in our family.
00:04:53
Speaker
Yes, now how old was she? Aria, just from your website, is her name. How old was Aria when she passed away? She was 15 years old. And what word do you like to say, by the way? And what phrase would you like us to refer in terms of that? Is passing away okay for you? Yes, I'm good with that. So she was 15 months old.
00:05:21
Speaker
Yeah, she was 15 months old, 15 months, 11 days. She died in the night in her sleep. And I was due with her little sister in four weeks. So I was 36 weeks pregnant. Oh, wow. With my fourth child. And then she died in the night, like sudden unexplained death in childhood. It's similar to SIDS, but it's just once they turn a year old, like there's no cause of death. Just
00:05:50
Speaker
Sudden and unexpected. They don't call it SIDS anymore after the year. No, it's sudden, unexplained, death in childhood after a year. And then your other two children are the older two then, are they boys and how old were they when Aria passed away? Yep, there's two boys and they were four and two and a half.
00:06:16
Speaker
So four, two and a half, and then Aria was 15 months, you were about to deliver, then it was in another daughter. At that moment you were expecting, you said, okay, and here you are pregnant, and then experiencing this moment of grief very close to the time in which you were about to give birth. So a moment of joy was about to come just around the corner with this sudden grief experience.
00:06:43
Speaker
Take us a little bit into that moment you said you found her then at night and we don't have to go into the details, but part of the reason is that you did suffer PTSD from that is what you shared with me in the email. So let's talk a little bit about that and how you navigated that at the same time as about to give birth.
Coping with PTSD
00:07:10
Speaker
Yeah, it was a lot. Like many times I thought, how do you say goodbye to one child and hello to another in such a short period of time? Like it's like, how am I going to do this? How do you do this? Um, and I think like with anything in grief is you don't have a choice. You don't have an option. So that's what you're doing, right? None of us chose to say goodbye. And you know, people ask like, how are you doing it? And it's like, well, I don't really have another choice. It's just what is going on in my life right now.
00:07:41
Speaker
Um, and yes, I was diagnosed with PTSD. That's post-traumatic stress disorder after Aria died because I found her in the night and, or actually I found her in the morning, but yeah, I, it was horrific. It was horrific to live with the trauma. Um, I think grief and trauma have so many parallels, but there are so many different things about trauma that
00:08:11
Speaker
it's important to understand. I talk about grief and that we can learn to carry the grief. We can learn to live with the grief and hold space for the grief and it's part of us for the rest of our lives. Trauma is something that can be healed with something that you can finish the trauma cycle. I was terrified with my new baby girl of her dying in the night, of her sleep. I was scared of my other children.
00:08:39
Speaker
I lived in a state of absolute panic and terror and fear. Every single day I would have flashbacks and moments of like shaking my other kids thinking that they're dead and gone. And like it was so real to me over and over and over again. And it was really horrific to live that again and again and again. And so that's where the trauma came in and where like it lasted for a long time until I got that help for it.
00:09:09
Speaker
Anybody can have those flashbacks and those kind of things for a while, but as if it keeps happening for a long period of time for you know if I would have not gotten the help that I got with it.
00:09:21
Speaker
I would still be there. I have no doubt that it would still affect me too. Because it becomes paralyzing. It becomes paralyzing when it already gets to a point in which it paralyzes areas of your life and stops you from being able to live a life that's already when it's already like you really do need help at that, you know, even
00:09:41
Speaker
before that probably, that's so good that you seek help. What you were describing about the fear, I always say this to people, I can never say I understand their grief because I don't, even if it's that I've experienced a similar type, I know that I can't say I understand it. I can relate to that aspect of the fear.
00:10:03
Speaker
what you were talking about the fear of what would happen to your kids. My first pregnancy was a miscarriage and so that aspect of like the whole pregnancy that not knowing what was going to happen and when you know that that uncertainty component and like when you were explaining of how you would like
00:10:20
Speaker
not know, you know, be afraid of even probably even going to sleep yourself. Like I, I'm just like multiplying even just that glimpse of mine with a miscarriage of the fear of like my next pregnancy, whether it was going to be viable to what your experience was. I it's like,
00:10:39
Speaker
unimaginable. I mean, I'm imagining it, but not being able to really completely comprehend it. Oh, gosh. So then how long did that take for you? So when you had your daughter, how was that for you to be on that
00:11:01
Speaker
survival mode still here, you know, with your, you know, giving love. Were you able to nurse? Did you produce milk, by the way, too, at that moment? This is very TMI information.
00:11:15
Speaker
You were, you know, you know what I'm talking about. I was just wondering like what the body does in that aspect of still feeling this amount of sorrow. I wonder if it ends up something happening of it not even being able to fully. I don't know. Does that make sense? Is that a really weird question? No, it's not because there's a lot that I've learned about like trauma and pregnancy, even how it affected my daughter, even though she was in usual with the trauma that I experienced.
00:11:44
Speaker
She has had, now that she's four and a half, we have seen different things that have come out in her that I do believe are from that trauma that I experienced and how much she was affected by what I went through.
00:11:59
Speaker
Definitely. You know, I kept wondering like, is, is this baby going to come sooner because of all the stuff I'm experiencing? But I think, I dunno, I guess it was good the way that things happened. Cause I needed every second to be able to try to process before she was born.
00:12:17
Speaker
Now, what kind of language did you use for your sons then? Because there were four and two at that time. I asked this then to parents that have had, you know, either their spouse pass away explaining to their child or another sibling. What kind of words did you use to explain to them what had happened to Arya? I think at that time, they definitely got a lot of like,
00:12:45
Speaker
pamphlets and things that said like things not to say and whatever and it's kind of like I guess we just kind of said the truth and what we believe that she died and she went to heaven and she's not here anymore her body doesn't work um just all these things that as they've gotten older we've
00:13:07
Speaker
been able to talk more about kind of what happened. But at that stage, it was just like, what do you say, you know, she, she died. And that's, you know, they'd ask why and like, we don't know, we don't know why we don't understand why. And we believe that it was her time to go that that's our faith is that God took her home and that, you know, whatever, but
00:13:34
Speaker
Just the really trying to communicate that I think something that like she died in her sleep and so we didn't want to say that I was gonna ask you so I was actually gonna ask you that component right that was actually just taking notes here to ask you that next was that something that then it was their fear around falling asleep for your other two and
00:14:01
Speaker
Right away, they didn't fully understand that she got in her sleep. And it probably hasn't been until you know, my older son can read and we have a book. I made a book about her and it talks about that. And I think they can start to understand now as they're getting older. But at that point, I don't think they really knew that it was in her sleep. But I have seen
00:14:30
Speaker
Like even in my daughter who didn't even know anything about that and like different, my different children, I've seen it come up where they've had like tons and tons of nightmares at a certain age or whatever. And they have a hard time sleeping. And I do think that that's related to all of the sleep, the sleep issues that we've had kind of since she's died.
00:14:54
Speaker
Absolutely. Yeah, especially if in the first, you know, what would you say your most like PTSD occurred in the first year, two years? When was it that you felt that it was the strongest for you? Well, for sure in the first year, because that's when I did it. I spent my life going to therapy and doing the work and processing the grief and the trauma and getting help. So it was a first year. And by the end of the first year,
00:15:23
Speaker
I had done so much work on myself and really healing that trauma that it definitely wasn't as big of a thing. I would say it probably affected me greatly for the first year and then the second year was easier. And now I don't, I don't really live with the trauma. I would say, yes, trauma can be healed. It's still a part of you. It's still a part of your life. It's still part of your story. I still have moments where.
00:15:51
Speaker
Like I will check on my other children, my sleeping baby, maybe my baby's not getting up. And I kind of like, Ooh, they should be getting up. And I can get a little bit anxious. And I, but the thing is I'm not terrified to go check on them. Like for me at some point, I just wouldn't even go look at them or I had to go check on them right now in order to like stop this anxiety or fear inside of me. And now I don't get that bodily response.
00:16:19
Speaker
It's just a thought in my mind that's always there. It's still there every single day. Like, what if I find another dead child? But it's not a physical bodily response that keeps me in this place of terror every day. I think that's important that what you're just saying right there, because it's acknowledging that it's there, but not allowing it to control you, is what makes it be that the trauma is no longer there controlling you. Yeah. You have a thought.
00:16:49
Speaker
Yeah. The thing with trauma is like, no matter how much you try to, you know, talk your way out of it or reason your way out of it, there's just no way to do that. You can't reason your way out of trauma. You have to get the help. You have to really rebuild those pathways in your brain and connect the parts of your brain that aren't communicating anymore and turning the parts of your brain on that turned off in that trauma experience.
00:17:17
Speaker
It's so important to get the help for it because it doesn't just go away. And I have done the work. It is exhausting. It's a lot of work, but it has absolutely changed my life. And every single day I'm so grateful when I can feel this calm in my body versus that absolute horrible ball of stress that was in my chest that I told everybody was slowly killing me.
00:17:41
Speaker
Wow. Now what type of therapy? What did you feel helped the most to move through the trauma?
EMDR Therapy for Healing
00:17:51
Speaker
What type of method? Yeah, so I did EMDR. It's eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. And the thing I would say about that is it's really, really important to have a therapist who, number one, you connect with where you can feel safe.
00:18:10
Speaker
in their space. And number two, that something that I've learned from talking with other people is that sometimes you can have a therapist who pushes you when you're not ready. And I think it's very important that you are the leader in your healing in your, in your, you know, working through your stuff and your therapist is your guide. They're the person helping you shine a light into the darkness.
00:18:37
Speaker
But they're not forcing you to do anything because it is something that can be really scary because you could get re-traumatized. But if you go at a pace that's safe for you, if you listen to your body, if you listen to what's going on inside of you, it is absolutely life-changing. So EMDR is like, I had these buzzers in my hand that would go back and forth. And some people do like with their eyes following a laser,
00:19:06
Speaker
Some people tap on the right side of my side of your body, but it's really connecting your right side and my side turning on both sides of your brain going back and forth and.
00:19:18
Speaker
my neuro pathways kind of thing of how it affects you like how those memories affect you physically. Is that basically also what you do as they're like going through that you're kind of just changing the chemistry of your of your brain process? Yeah, so you like reprocess the memories.
00:19:37
Speaker
And so two different ways that I have thought about it, this is not actually like scientifically the way that it is, um, as I learned more about it, there's a lot more, this is the way you interpret. This is your interpretation of it as you, and it really helped me to understand. So I think of it as like your right side and your left side of your brain, right. Have all these pathways, neural connections that connect them.
00:20:05
Speaker
And when you have trauma, it just cuts those in half. Your right side and your left side of your brain cannot communicate. They can't communicate. And so with EMDR, you're rebuilding those pathways back and forth, back and forth onto your inferior right side and left side of your brain so that they can communicate. And so your brain isn't like, okay, this happened.
00:20:29
Speaker
And now I'm stuck here because this is happening again, and again, and again, and again, because your brain and your body believes that it's happening over and over. And no matter how much you talk about it, no matter how much you say, Oh, no, I'm going to be good. Your body doesn't believe it. Your body's still in that state of being stuck and terrified and fear and shock. And so.
00:20:52
Speaker
you need to rebuild those pathways in your brain. And another analogy you can quick get is like, to help understand is like, your brain is like a computer has as much as files, it files all the memories of the things that have happened in your life. And when you have a traumatic experience, that file is in the forefront ever present, you can't file it as a past experience. It's constantly pulled off, it's constantly there, it's happening again, and again, and again.
00:21:22
Speaker
And until you can learn to file that, if your brain can file that, file that memory as something that happened in the past, then you're going to keep living it again and again and again. Yeah.
00:21:35
Speaker
Yeah, you have to change. I remember when I was 19 or something, this therapist, I was in a dance group, and he was kind of giving us an example of how you could change fears into changing how they were stored in your brain into happy memories.
00:21:53
Speaker
something like that so he'd make us like think of okay like what color is it is it in black and white is it in color is it moving are you in the picture or are you outside of it you know like kind of thing and so if I switch and then think of a happy memory what color is that is it in color is that in black and white are you in it or are you at it now let's switch that other memory to make it look
00:22:15
Speaker
like this one, visually, so that it stores, I remember that when you said a file, back then it was filing cabinet, it was not like that.
00:22:30
Speaker
There were no virtual files then. But I think we had just started computers. So I think it was more like a filing cabinet and putting it in the filing cabinet of happy memories, even if it had been a hard one. But if it recognized it as this had the same color and so forth in the memory box, it wouldn't trigger the emotion.
00:22:55
Speaker
that it is. So I'm assuming it was kind of like a very glimpse kind of vision, you know, of what you are explaining now. And when you're saying that, I'm like, Oh,
00:23:05
Speaker
I kind of had that a while back. Now, how in this process then, you went through that for that year, you navigated your grief. How did you and your husband, was it Jason? Jason, is that you said? Justin. Justin, sorry. I was like, you said at the beginning, how did Justin and you then
00:23:27
Speaker
navigate this grief at the same time of balancing all these joyful moments with your kids, too. And how did you react when joy would come into your life? Yeah. For me, I know a lot of people feel guilt when they feel any joy.
00:23:55
Speaker
But for me, I just really embraced any joy that came into my life because I knew that any moment would be really hard again. I felt like those moments of joy gave me the strength to keep going when another wave came.
00:24:13
Speaker
And when another grief wave came when things got really hard again. So they were like, almost like a moment of fresh air where I could just like enjoy the moment. But definitely even those moments of joy were different than the moments of joy before Aria died. And now I would say they're even different than now because now my joy is way, way deeper and way more expansive than it was in that moment. It felt like even
00:24:41
Speaker
The joy that I had was always clouded by a heavy weight. Now I don't have that anymore, but my husband and I really had a hard first year. It was very difficult for us to communicate, especially with my trauma. When you're in a state of trauma and you don't feel safe in your body, everything, it's hard to connect. It's hard to feel love and connection. All those emotions that you really need to feel safe and grounded to be able to feel.
00:25:12
Speaker
I was very angry and snappy and I spent a lot of time at therapy and just trying to pull myself back together is what I felt like I was broken and shattered and I needed a lot of help. And my husband kind of became the rock and really just did what he felt like he needed to do.
00:25:36
Speaker
And it was just, it was really hard. It was hard on him. It was hard for him to feel like his wife changed so much and wondering many times, you know, he had wondered like, do I even love this lady anymore? Like, how do I, how do I connect with her? And then we're both grieving and we're both grieving in a different way.
00:25:56
Speaker
And that was hard to like I wanted him to grieve the way that I was grieving because I wanted to connect with him through that and he's great a different way. And it took me a long time, not super long time, but it took me a while to understand that he was grieving he missed her. And it didn't look the same as my grief, but it didn't mean that his grief was any less or that he was in any less pain. It just meant that.
00:26:22
Speaker
He showed it a different way. He processed it in a different way and that I had to be okay with that and I am okay with that. I feel like that was the hardest, absolute hardest year of our marriage. But now we have the most amazing marriage, but I don't believe we would have had those hard conversations.
00:26:44
Speaker
We had to have so many hard conversations, super painful, super hard conversations that I would have never had that I wouldn't even have considered sitting through until grief and Aria's death really forced us to sit down and have those kinds of conversations. And I begin to learn that that is where our marriage has deepened is when we communicate and we know that we can get through hard things together and we can have these hard conversations.
00:27:14
Speaker
And that has been it's been really amazing but it's been a really, really hard journey, I guess, to get to where we are.
00:27:23
Speaker
You touched on several things in this when you were sharing right now. One was that aspect of one how people do grief differently. Here it was you both had had your daughter both had experienced the same loss yet both of course experiencing it very differently and that disconnect could drive people apart.
00:27:46
Speaker
But the fact that during that time, like you said, having conversations and the fact that you were also getting help for your trauma component too, and then realizing that you were both grieving just differently, that was what was able to kind of mend that bridge that was
00:28:09
Speaker
there that you felt that was different, that disconnect, right? Kind of like we were talking about the left side of the brain and the right side. It's kind of that, like you guys just had to again build that neural pathway then again here to realize, oh wait, yeah, they're different, but it's still grief. We're just expressing it differently. So that is huge. And the aspect, because again, I don't know if those statistics are still
00:28:38
Speaker
true or not or things, you know, my parents experienced the loss of my my sister passed away. So I've seen that as a child viewing that in parents, and I know how different each of them grieve. But the how many marriages sometimes there's, I don't, I'm sure there's statistics, you may know this, I don't know this, you know, end up driving themselves apart because of how they grieve.
00:29:04
Speaker
is so differently and they can't find that connectiveness again. So you've already experienced the hardest part in your marriage ever, like you said. So you guys will be able to do anything else from there on. Yeah, that's what it feels like right now. And I think that that statistic is really thrown around a lot. And I think that it's not always true.
00:29:32
Speaker
I think it's what people believe. And I think for me, it's something like I was terrified, okay, is our marriage going to survive this because that's what a lot of people say. And I was told by my therapist that it's not that it's only marriages that were already rocky to begin with, like kind of on the edge before this happened, that that's very common with, but it doesn't
00:29:59
Speaker
Like just because your child dies doesn't mean your marriage has to end. And I think what I, what I see a lot is that we had the hardest year ever. And if we had been like, well, our marriage is ending, it could have been so easy to give up and be like, no, we're done.
00:30:20
Speaker
But I think it's so important to know that there can be really hard seasons and you just have to give it time where you work through it and you continue to keep trying to communicate, continue to keep trying to learn to love each other because it's a lot to go through. And when you can give yourself both of you the grace and the space to walk through it in your own way, then things can happen and change and become so much more beautiful. And the God marriage is so much deeper than it has ever been. And
00:30:51
Speaker
We wouldn't experience this unless we had done this hard work of communicating and connecting and keep trying again and again and again. That is what you just said about the season, right? Even just the seasons and grief too. There's still going to be other seasons in our own grief that may be
00:31:10
Speaker
tough again, even though we might have had three seasons of good, there might come a really tough winter unexpectedly, right, as well. So how do you navigate your grief now and what tools do you use to navigate your grief? Yeah, the biggest thing I would say now for me is that I know that grief is with me for a lifetime and where before
00:31:40
Speaker
I would fight it and be like, Oh, I don't want this to be a part of my life. I don't, I don't want to feel it. I don't want to, like I'd get angry when my grief came again. And now I know that it's with me forever. And when my grief comes, I'm not saying it's a bad thing. I'm not trying to get rid of it. I just let it be there. I'm like, yes, this is grief. Here it comes. I can feel it coming.
00:32:05
Speaker
I hold space for it. I sit with it. I feel it. And for me, it's a reminder that Aria lived, that I love her. I loved her. I still do. That she is a part of my life and with me forever and I'm never going to forget her. And like, I welcome it. It's okay for it to be there. So that's a huge thing that I do, but I do a lot of different things that really help me. This is what I teach moms that I work with is
00:32:35
Speaker
I do a lot of meditations and connecting with the emotions in my body, I really learned this in my own therapy sessions is feeling the emotions experiencing on where are they in your body.
00:32:46
Speaker
What color are they? How do they feel? Because so often we're so disconnected. The pain is so great that we want to leave our bodies. We want to get out of them and like numb it rather than going into our bodies and feeling it. And so I do a lot of that in myself anytime I have any emotion, even if not related to grief, instead of stuffing it down, which would be my natural tendency to want to.
00:33:12
Speaker
is really sitting with it and processing it. I also do emotional freedom technique. It's a tapping that has been super helpful for me in so many aspects with grief and other emotions. And that's also something I teach moms to do. And really just noticing the thoughts that I have that keep me suffering. So for example,
00:33:37
Speaker
a lot of moms feel guilt. I think anybody who's had somebody they loved die, they feel guilt because what could have I done differently to save them? Was there a role that I played in this? Is there something I could have changed? I felt a lot of guilt. For me, I was on this loop where the thoughts kept going again and again and again, where I couldn't get out of the cycle. It was my fault. There was something I could have done.
00:34:04
Speaker
You know, what if I would have gone because she had cried in the night and what if I would have gone in there and held her or something? What if she wouldn't have died? And I just kept going over and over and over in that. And once I was able to, it took me a while and it took me a lot of processing and work to be able to change that to even if I would have gone in there and hugged her and told her I loved her.
00:34:35
Speaker
She still would have died in the morning. Like there was nothing I could have done. I couldn't have changed anything. Um, and it took me a long time to be able to let go of that guilt and that it wasn't my fault. And there was nothing I could have done, but noticing the thoughts that were in my mind to be able to work through it and being like, okay, this is what's making me feel guilty. And when I'm ready to let go of the guilt, I can change these thoughts to something else.
00:35:03
Speaker
that really brings me to a place of like it wasn't my fault. I loved her. I did everything I could. I cared for her the best way I could. And yeah, so doing that kind of thought work is super, super helpful. I always say it's like learning how to just live with the pain of grief because grief is really painful instead of suffering under the weight of all the stuff that we add on top of it.
00:35:29
Speaker
I think what you said about acknowledging the presence of it and I think it's it is so much easier to just.
00:35:39
Speaker
allow it to be than to push
Embracing Grief
00:35:42
Speaker
it away. It takes so much more energy to push those feelings away than just to feel them. Like when you're pushing them away, I feel like it's like a pressure cooker type of thing. You know, it's like you put this cover on it and they're just like boiling up there. And it's like so much force is needed and energy to just try to keep them in rather than just feeling them as they
00:36:07
Speaker
as they come and acknowledging that they're there. And like you said, switching a little bit of those emotions with the rationale that you use now in order to be like, well, yes, I have those feelings of guilt, but I would have not been able to change the outcome. So kind of giving your own pep talk, per se, to navigate through some of these
00:36:33
Speaker
I would say the negative self-talk, that would be in a self-help kind of aisle type of aspect. But in this case, it'd be that those aspects of guilt that come here, you just have to switch them out.
00:36:49
Speaker
And now how has that role and when did the role of you starting to help others begin and how has that been instrumental in your own grief journey of now being a support for others?
00:37:07
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's been about two years when I started exploring, you know, how can I help others? I do remember sitting in my own therapy sessions and like really wanting to help other people with this, but I was like, I don't have the energy. There's no way I can help others right now because I'm so broken myself. There's no way I have the energy or the capacity. My energy is beyond empty. Like I can't give to anybody else right now.
00:37:35
Speaker
And so once I was able to get into a much better place, feeling a lot more grounded in my own life and feeling like I can help others, I really dove into it. And what I learned, which is very interesting, is like experiencing grief and living with it is one thing. And then diving deeper in how can I help others move through it as well is like a whole other layer of like,
00:38:05
Speaker
How can I help people? How can I teach them? How can I guide them through this as well as like a whole nother layer of learning and the whole nother layer of diving into how the body works and how our emotions work and really talking with tons of moms about their grief journeys and their experiences and how
00:38:28
Speaker
it's so possible for every one of us to feel that hope and that joy again, but also that we are going to carry grief with us for the rest of our lives. So it's really been an evolution of me going from this isn't about my grief anymore, which it is, you know, I grieve still, I still have a lot of grief. But it's not that when I work with moms, it's not about my grief, but I have to be in a place where I can
00:38:58
Speaker
hold space for them in their grief and not make it about me. It's all about them.
00:39:04
Speaker
Yeah, you end up helping. We help ourselves by helping others so many times. I feel sometimes you get more like I feel I feel kind of like I'm cheating. Like I'm like, well, it really is helping me even more than that. Maybe even help the other person. There's this sense of fulfillment and ease. And as you're saying, like being able to give somebody else the tools that help you
00:39:33
Speaker
And yeah, that act of service is just so important. So would you say then that this aspect right now here of you giving to others has been one of the biggest learnings of your grief journey, or if you want to share what things you've learned or that you're grateful for of your growth in this process?
00:40:01
Speaker
Yeah, I would say first, yeah, helping others has been amazing and really like when I'm with somebody on a call and they can see the difference in their body and they can feel it and they feel like this is the first time I felt hope. This is the first time I've been able to see that. Like maybe I'm going to be okay. It's like the best thing that I can hear. Like I'm like, yes, it works. It helps. Like that's what I'm here for.
00:40:30
Speaker
But the things that have changed my life is I have learned that we can die at any moment, any of us, my husband, I could, my other children, people I love can die at any second. And I think we want to like ignore that fact and kind of pretend that it's like it doesn't happen. You know, like, especially child loss, we're like, this isn't supposed to happen. This doesn't happen. It's like, well, actually it did happen.
00:41:00
Speaker
It does happen every day to people happen to me. And I just really want to learn to be content in the moment that I have and live the life that I have right now. And really like we have so many things that we put off for another day or like later on or oh, when I'm retired or when I'm whatever and I'm like, no, how can we live our life now? How can we live the way that we want to live now?
00:41:29
Speaker
How can we connect as a family now? How can we spend time together? How can we make that our number one priority is connecting and being together? I really learned that my relationships and my faith are really the most important things to me in my life. And so really, I feel like it took me, Aria dying to really kind of understand that on a deep level, because I think I took everything for granted and I took everything
00:41:59
Speaker
like it's just gonna always be this way and I learned that it's not it might not be and I really want to it's almost like learning to live fully because not out of fear I don't feel like I'm in fear of like we might die tomorrow but because we could die tomorrow and I want to live our best life now and so that's a huge thing that we have learned and I feel like we
00:42:24
Speaker
spend a lot of time as a family together because of that and like spending quality time, really how do you connect with your children? How do you connect with your spouse? But that's something that we have learned. And then the other aspect for me is that I was terrified of feeling emotions. I was terrified of hard conversations before Aria died. I would rather, rather than have a hard conversation with somebody
00:42:53
Speaker
I would rather like end the friendship or just ignore it or shove it under the rug and pretend it wasn't there. And now I've learned that the hard conversations really bring out so much deeper meaning and feeling the heavier feelings really bring so much more joy. So I learned that processing these really deep emotions, my emotional spectrum, my color wheel of emotion,
00:43:23
Speaker
has expanded to way more that I didn't even know it was possible to feel such deep pain in my life. But on the other end of that, I didn't know it was possible to also feel so much joy because I've had that
00:43:41
Speaker
And all this you learned also just from those hard conversations that you and Justin had to have during that time too. That was one of those learnings was that hard conversations are needed in order to awaken all these other levels of emotions. It's like another language. You learn another language when you open that possibility of having tough conversations. Yes, for sure.
00:44:09
Speaker
because you said like that emotional wheel and stuff. So it's like, oh, wait, I can feel this, this, this, this. It's like it's expansive instead of constricted. There's so many emotions that you can feel in there. They're not all super pleasant, but there is some that are so pleasant because you felt the unpleasant ones.
00:44:31
Speaker
Now with that, with that vocabulary now that you have of that emotional vocabulary, how do you then now help your children through their own understanding of emotions when they're feeling something? Like when they're going through a tantrum, like does it change the way that you even communicate through them of what it is they're feeling in that moment?
00:44:52
Speaker
Yeah, this is something I'm definitely working on myself. I think the biggest thing for me is especially to have the time to actually think of it because it's like we all like had time to like if I would go back in time to when my kids were little the amount of things I change
00:45:08
Speaker
you know, like if I had slept enough, if I had eaten enough, like maybe my temperament and stuff would have been better that I wouldn't have had more teachable moments rather than reactive moments. So let's just talk in those moments that you've actually slept and that you have a clear mind, do you use those opportunities to expand on their emotional
00:45:32
Speaker
you know vocabulary and yeah yeah for sure i was gonna say that a lot of it is me being in control my own emotions is the first part is like me being like okay my kid is screaming that doesn't mean i have to start screaming i can calm down like i have to be in control myself before you know i can start working and helping them but i do do different things with my kids sometimes i just let them whatever they're
00:46:01
Speaker
crying about or whatever, I just, I don't try to change it or fix it. I just be with them. I double them. I hold them if they want to. Sometimes they just want to be left alone and just really help them. Like when they get to a place of calm down, then we work through it and like, yeah, you were really sad. You know what was happening in your body. What were you so sad about? Kind of working through it that way. But as like my kids have gotten older, but also
00:46:29
Speaker
When my child is super grumpy and they won't talk to me, I'll talk them through connecting with what's going on in their body. Be like, what do you feel? To me, it seems like you're really grumpy or you're really frustrated. Where do you feel that in your body? And I might say, when I get frustrated, my jaw starts to clench.
00:46:54
Speaker
And I get my throat starts to get really tight. And it feels like I can't talk. Does that feel like that for you or like trying to help them start to notice what's going on inside of their bodies when they are feeling an emotion. And then another thing that I do is like behavior always comes from an emotion that they're feeling. And so if they're not behaving or being really mean to somebody,
00:47:20
Speaker
I'll ask them, like, what's going on with you? Like, what are you frustrated about? What are you angry about? Like, what emotion are you feeling? What's going on with you that you're hurting other people? And a lot of times, you're like, I didn't even know I was frustrated. I didn't know I was angry.
00:47:38
Speaker
Or I don't even know what's going on and it just really like give them the space that okay, maybe you can go sit and have some quiet time in your bedroom and just think about what's going on, you know, inside of you. So you can really get present with why you're hurting other people, because it's really important to process that emotion that you're feeling.
00:47:59
Speaker
And do you think four years ago, would this would have been how you would have talked about it? No, I have learned a ton about emotions and processing. Four and a half, five years ago, for me, it was like,
00:48:17
Speaker
Can you just listen to me? Hello, do this, do that. I wanted them to all be little ducks that followed me and listened to what I said and did and I learned a lot. Because I said so and trying to fix what it was they were feeling rather than just allowing them to feel. Not much different than with grief, just feel it and just like you said, they want to have a tantrum, just have it, get it out of your system.
00:48:41
Speaker
kind of, you know, get out and then navigate through it. I know there's so many things that now I'm like, man, could I go back and change that? Even still, I'm still with I'm with teenagers now very different, too, because then it's always the ego that comes into play. And as you know, it's the ego that's wanting to try to fix the situation and make it be my way. But that's not really.
00:49:03
Speaker
what it is. Yeah, that's not really what it's about. I wanted to ask you how do you honor as a family Arias memory in your life now?
00:49:16
Speaker
Yeah, before I say that quick, I hope you can't hear my kids crying in the background there with the babysitter, but I apologize. I know, which by the way, before we started recording, when she was saying, you know, she's got five kids right there at home. I'm like, from nine, you know, from 18 months to nine years old. And I'm like, wait, how did you find time to do this recording? So it's like, he was like, oh,
00:49:38
Speaker
scheduled a babysitter. So thank you for doing that. Is it okay? Do you need to tend to them? No, I don't. I have a babysitter, so they're fine with the babysitter. I just wanted to mention that in case you hear that. Oh, it's life, right? It's life. So they're not knocking outside your door like, mom, mom. No.
00:49:55
Speaker
I can pause and then record afterwards if you needed to tense. So not a problem. So yes, how do you honor her in your life? I saw something the other day of like a family picture of somebody and they hold, there's always a teddy bear in their family pictures kind of just to honor the presence of their sibling. For example, that was like one thing. So what are some of the things you do as a family to keep her memory and to talk about her?
00:50:25
Speaker
and especially to the ones that never met her in person, right? So how is her life and your life now? I feel like there's a lot of ways we do. We talk about her often. She's talked about every day, especially just by my kids during play, they'll be eating and they'll be like, oh, Aria is eating food too, or Aria is looking at us.
00:50:51
Speaker
The little ones, the youngest ones. Yeah, all of them. They all talk to her every day. Like even my daughter will be talking with something. She'll be like, yeah, do you know Aria? Do you remember Aria? Like she'll, I just love when it comes up, like in conversation amongst my kids, my kids will bring her up often. And we talk about her a lot too. And
00:51:17
Speaker
Something we've done, which has been really fun is we light a candle in our living room where we have four candles on our table. And so each of my kids are old enough, they we light the candle and then they can blow out. They say something that either they remember about her or that they would like to do with her if she was alive. And so they say that and then they blow out the candle.
00:51:41
Speaker
And we've also done this for my husband, his sister died 19 years before our headed. And so they'll say something about her too, which is really fun. Yeah. It's just a way that we talk about her and keep her alive in our house. We have many things that we do for her birthday. Normally we've done a meal, Ronald McDonald meal, because she was at the hospital and we use that Ronald McDonald house.
00:52:12
Speaker
on her first birthday and so that has been really helpful. I guess I don't know if we're going to be able to do that this year but we've done a lot of different things like just we have a lot of things in our house, we have pictures of her, we have angel statues, we talk about her a lot. I made a book, it's like a scrapbook with
00:52:34
Speaker
all the pictures that I have of her in her life. And I got a bunch of my friends and family to just give me any memories they have of her. So then they have all of everyone's memories of her throughout that book. And then all my memories and all my husband's memories too. And that book has just been really, really helpful for my husband and for my other kids to look at.
00:52:59
Speaker
so they feel like they know her it's as if they they end up borrowing those memories and making them as if they're their own oh remember when aria did i this it reminds like that's kind of my kids talk about sometimes when they've watched like videos of them when they were little but it's really that they're not that they remember it's just because either they've seen a video or because we've told them of a story or remember when i was like two and that i did this this this it's not that they it's more because they've heard it
00:53:24
Speaker
So for your kids, those memories of everybody else are becoming their own memories to carry of Aria. Yeah. That's beautiful. Beautiful. Did I interrupt? Was there something else you were saying regarding the book? No, it's fine. We just do a lot. We talk about her a lot, and then I guess the work that I do, I get to talk about her a lot too, and really my experience of her death and her life and
00:53:52
Speaker
everything what has taught me and given to me and like we've often talked about like what would our life be like you know without her dying what would our life be like and it feel like so much has changed that I wouldn't even have a clue where we would be in our lives.
00:54:07
Speaker
And that's interesting because sometimes like we wonder the what ifs and so forth and as much as we would have not necessarily, we don't want necessarily that experience to have happened yet at the same time it was meant to happen for the life to be what it is now. And so it's hard to sometimes turn back time and figure out even looking at it what would it look like
00:54:36
Speaker
now because it was just not part of the greater plan of God for that to be. And I know you're religious, so I can say that word. So yeah, it was not part of his plan for that to be. And I guess in your case, faith has been one of those aspects that has brought you that comfort in your journey. Yeah. Yeah, it has.
Honoring Aria's Memory
00:55:05
Speaker
The kids, when you were talking about them eating and stuff like that, have any of them ever mentioned, do they talk to her? Like, do they see her or things like that too? Do you have any anecdotes? No, but just more, like they talk about her and what she, you know, she's eating too, but not like she's there eating, but they're kind of joking.
00:55:31
Speaker
Oh, okay. That's cute. I'm glad that they keep her there in their daily memories in life. Is there something else you wanted to share that I did not ask any words of wisdom for the listeners, somebody that may be just starting their grief journey at this moment?
Advice for the Grieving
00:55:53
Speaker
What would you say to them right now?
00:55:55
Speaker
What would you say to yourself if, right? If you, you know what I mean? Like, what would you even like, if you had you just experienced this? Yeah, I would say just give yourself a lot of compassion in the grace and know that your tank is beyond the empty. Like you, everything that you could do before, everything that was possible for you before is going to take gigantic effort to do now. So just like cut out everything that you don't need to do.
00:56:23
Speaker
and really give yourself the grace and the space to grieve and give yourself that permission to grieve because processing the emotions and feeling the pain and working through it is really the only way through grief. We can't get through grief without going through it. I really wanted to just go to sleep and wake up on the other side of it.
00:56:44
Speaker
And it's just not possible. You have to go through it and just give yourself a lot of grace because you need it and you need that space and time, really the space to process and work through it. And I would just encourage you to get the support and help that you need either with me or with Kendra or with therapists or with whoever
00:57:09
Speaker
that you connect with and feel like it can help you because you do not need to do this alone. It is not something that you need to do alone. There's so much help. There's so many resources and I would just encourage you to seek that help and get the help because you can learn so many things and you really get yourself out of a stuck place in a lot faster way when you have that support and help and guidance.
00:57:34
Speaker
Thank you. And then sharing about that, share a little bit how people can find you and what would working with you look like for somebody that's wanting, do you only work with bereaved mothers? So I focus on bereaved moms, but I really believe that grief is universal. It's a universal experience. And so if somebody wanted to, I can definitely work with them one on one. But I do group coaching with moms.
00:58:02
Speaker
I have a group program and I have a grief program that moms can get as well but I have done one work but I'm more focusing on my group and then I also have a program that could be for anybody but it's really like the wording is for like moms who have lost a child but this program I like I have no doubts it can help anyone with grief but it's called stop talking start feeling
00:58:31
Speaker
And like we're talking about how you begin to, we don't feel the emotions as much. We fight them. We don't want to feel them and it can feel really scary to feel them. And instead we talk about it a lot. We try to talk our emotions out of our body. And sometimes we just stop talking and we go internal.
00:58:51
Speaker
and begin feeling that experience of the sensations inside of our body. And so it's a mini program, mini workshop that really just dives into that and how emotions work and really gives you a different perspective of emotions so they're not so scary and that you can embrace them. Because grief is not your enemy, it's really a place to hold space for and care for and remember
00:59:17
Speaker
the person who died who you lost so much. That's why you have grief. That's a beautiful description of it. That's a beautiful, can you say that again? Grief is really a place where, say that description again. It's just so beautiful. It's just really a place to care for and hold space for the grief that you have, because again, have the grief because of the love that you have for the person that you lost.
00:59:40
Speaker
Yes, beautiful, beautiful. See, I always learn even in these in these interviews myself, like we're constantly learning and seeing different perspectives and just even ways of wording what grief is. So thank you for sharing that and thank you for sharing Aria with us and your journey and for everything that now you're doing.
01:00:06
Speaker
for others as well. And I'll make sure to add your website and it's your name, your name, if you want to just say it just in case people don't know. Yeah, Megan, Helica, it's H-I-L-L-U-K-K-A, so there's two L's and two K's. That's my website. And Megan is with, it's M-E-G-A-N, because sometimes two of those have different, yeah, H-I-L-L-U, double L and double K.
01:00:31
Speaker
Yeah. And if you want to do that workshop, that mini workshop, it's just meganhelka.com slash workshop. And then I also host a podcast called Grieving Mom's Podcast. Oh, that you see I did. There's my dog now talking here in the, um, what is, what is your podcast called? It's called Grieving Mom's Podcast. Oh, okay.
01:00:53
Speaker
Perfect. You see, I didn't know that part. I didn't know that you were also a podcast host. Perfect. Well, thank you so much again. And thank you for the kids and for your babysitter too, for giving you this space. So thank you. I appreciate it.
01:01:17
Speaker
Thank you again so much for choosing to listen today. I hope that you can take away a few nuggets from today's episode that can bring you comfort in your times of grief. If so, it would mean so much to me if you would rate and comment on this episode. And if you feel inspired in some way to share it with someone who may need to hear this, please do so.
01:01:46
Speaker
Also, if you or someone you know has a story of grief and gratitude that should be shared so that others can be inspired as well, please reach out to me. And thanks once again for tuning into Grief Gratitude and the Gray in Between podcast. Have a beautiful day.