In this episode, I’m sitting down with Erin Blechman—mom, certified grief educator, and suicide loss survivor—for a conversation that is raw, real, and so deeply needed. Erin shares the story of her son Max, a wildly creative, deeply sensitive, and brilliantly funny young man who lived with medication-resistant depression and epilepsy, and who she lost to suicide in June 2020, right in the thick of COVID.
Here’s what we dig into:
✨ The early grief fog: numbness, depression, yearning, and an anger that surprised even her
✨ How journaling became a lifeline and eventually evolved into a book
✨ The coping tools that helped her survive: creating a memorial garden and finding her people in a suicide loss support group
✨ Her path to becoming a certified grief educator who now leads online grief groups and speaks publicly about suicide loss
✨ The cultural problem of grief illiteracy
✨ Parental guilt, the brutal “what ifs,” and how Erin learned to reframe them into “even ifs”
✨ Why healing in community isn’t just helpful, it’s transformative
If you’ve ever lost someone to suicide, loved someone who struggled, or just needed a reminder that your grief doesn’t have to look a certain way to be valid, this one’s for you.
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