A year ago, I was asked to speak at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention’s Long-Term Survivors of Suicide Loss Summit. I had attended the previous summit two years earlier and even gave a short presentation, so I was honored and deeply grateful to be invited back.

What I didn’t know was that I needed this conference far more than anyone in the audience needed my presentation.

I chose to speak about wellness. It wasn’t a random topic. Wellness has been part of my professional life for years. I studied it during my doctoral program, and my dissertation chair was one of the leading experts on the Indivisible Self Model of Wellness. I thought I was simply combining my professional background with my personal experience as a suicide-loss survivor.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. Preparing for this presentation became an unexpected journey of my own.

I was asked to present both a plenary session and a breakout session, and I wanted the two to build on one another. As I developed the presentations, I realized I couldn’t simply teach a wellness model. If I was going to ask others to reflect on their lives, I had to be willing to do the same.

So I built the plenary around my own journey. I talked about surviving. Then living. Then thriving. But somewhere along the way, I realized something I had never fully acknowledged before. My journey didn’t begin on August 22, 1998, the day my mom died.It began months earlier. It began the summer I became her caregiver. It began with the uncertainty, the fear, the responsibility, and the anticipatory grief that I carried long before I ever became a suicide-loss survivor. That realization changed everything and how I viewed my journey.

I practiced for weeks.

I reviewed every slide.

I added speaker notes to every presentation slide and loaded them onto my Kindle. I wanted to be prepared if I lost my train of thought.

And then I walked onto the stage…and never looked at a single note.

Instead, I trusted that after weeks of reflection, I already knew what needed to be said. What surprised me most wasn’t that I remembered the presentation. It was that I said things I had never said before. At one point I found myself telling the audience,

“My mom would be sad if what she did stopped me from living my life fully.”

I hadn’t planned those words. They simply came. The room became very quiet. As I said them, I realized they weren’t just for the audience. I needed to hear them too. Because I know my mom. And I know she would never want the way she died to become the reason I stopped fully living. She would want exactly the opposite. She would want me to build the biggest, fullest, most meaningful life I could.

That single sentence changed something inside me.

For years, I believed honoring my mom meant carrying my grief. Today, I believe honoring my mom also means fully carrying my life.

One of the greatest gifts of the conference wasn’t giving the presentations. It was what happened afterward. People came up to tell me about the months before their own loss. About caregiving. About repeated suicide attempts. About years of uncertainty. Many of them told me they had never considered that their grief had begun before the day they lost their loved one. In telling my story, they recognized part of their own. I think we gave one another permission to acknowledge that our stories are bigger than a single day.

The next morning, my breakout session was completely full. People told me afterward that I “made them work.” I smiled every time someone said it. Because that was exactly what I hoped for. I didn’t want to give people five tips to find wellness. Honestly, I don’t think anyone can. There are enough books and presentations that promise five easy steps to healing. I don’t believe that’s how wellness works. Wellness isn’t a formula. It’s a personal journey. No one can walk that journey for us. But no one should have to walk it alone.

Instead of giving answers, I wanted to create space for people to ask themselves questions they may have been avoiding for years.

Who am I now?

Who walks beside me?

What gives me purpose?

Do I deserve to move forward?

Those aren’t questions I can answer for anyone else. They’re questions each of us has to wrestle with ourselves.

Perhaps the greatest surprise wasn’t something I said on stage. It was something I learned about myself. For years, I believed this was my mom’s story. I now realize it is also mine. My mom’s death will always be part of my story. But it is not the whole story. The whole story is about learning to build a meaningful life after unimaginable loss. It’s about discovering that grief and joy can coexist. It’s about choosing worthiness over obligation. It’s about believing that my life deserves to be lived as fully as the love I carry.

One of the conference evaluations brought me to tears. It read:

“Long term survivor, speaking of their journey, while remaining in touch with their humanity, their grief and the evolution.”

It wasn’t the compliment that moved me. It was the recognition. For much of my life, I struggled to find places where I felt I truly belonged. Sometimes I felt too human for academia. Other times I felt people saw only the “Ph.D.” and missed everything else. I spent years trying to find places where I could simply be all of me. This conference reminded me that those places do exist.

For years, I searched for places where I belonged. What I was really searching for were places where I didn’t have to become less of myself. Looking back, I realize that’s why moving from Texas to Maryland was so important. At the time, I thought we were simply moving across the country. Now I understand I was moving toward a life that reflected who I really am. It was the first major decision I made from a place of worthiness instead of obligation.

There is one more truth that emerged from this experience. For years, I thought my relationship with my mom was rooted in the day she died. Today, I feel closer to her than I have in years—not to her death, but to her spirit. I see reminders of her in cardinals, butterflies, and the smell of honeysuckle. Whether those moments are signs, memories, or simply the way love continues to show up in my life, they all remind me of the same thing.

She would want me to live.

She would want me to be free.

She would want me to experience the joy, peace, and purpose that she never had the chance to fully know.

Maybe that’s what wellness has been teaching me all along. Not that grief disappears. Not that life becomes easy. But that healing isn’t about leaving love behind. It’s about allowing that love to call us forward into a life that is fully lived. Because in the end, I believe this is true now more than ever:

My life deserves to be lived as fully as the love I carry.