Freedom Is Saying "I Don't Understand" With Kim Peacock

Kim,

Thank you so much for joining us on coming back today to talk about your victorious heart,

Which is both a nickname for your daughter that you lost,

But also the title of your book,

Which we'll talk about on the show later today.

And I'll start you off where we start off all of our interviews here on coming back.

If you could please share your lost story with us.

I will.

And thank you so much for having me.

Our daughter Nicole passed away.

It's 20 years.

Well,

It's getting close to 21 years ago,

And we were on a family vacation in California,

And we were enjoying time on the beach there in Pismo Beach,

California,

And we were writing ATVs and she got disoriented and went off a cliff and we watched her fall to her death.

And our lives changed obviously that day.

My husband gave her CPR on the way to the hospital,

But the doctor did pronounce her dead and we had to bury part of our hearts during that time.

And we had to grow and learn the learn grief the hard way.

In such a short amount of sentences,

I got this visual of just being there at the moment it happened like that just came so strikingly forward to my mind.

And of course,

I can't put myself physically into your experience,

But I think there's a different shock that comes from being present as death is happening or as the moment is happening versus being far away and there's this element to God,

I mean,

It's kind of it's kind of gruesome.

I'm getting this word for your husband of hands on.

I was hands on with her before she died.

And I wonder how,

As a mother,

That closeness at the time of her death has affected you.

It's affected me profoundly.

And that day was so you go from this joyful time,

Enjoying the time together,

Laughing,

Even driving on the trip up there are plans to this instantaneous change and ripping.

And it did feel like part of my heart was just ripped out.

And in and still part of my heart is missing even today because she's part of me.

And so that time was to even to have to walk through those days after that to go home.

You know,

We had to go through the process at the hospital,

We had to go home and tell loved ones that Nicole was no longer with us.

And those kind of things left impressions.

Now,

I don't remember a lot about the accident in a consecutive manner.

Most of it is snapshots,

Which I know is a protective part of me.

My poor husband,

He has so many things in his mind that he can't,

You know,

He can never get those images of his last few moments with Nicole out of his mind.

But we have both kind of come to a point where we really focus on thinking about the good,

The happy memories,

The even the memories of that day,

Those precious little last conversations we had with Nicole.

So just the striking contrast between just just seconds how your life can change and you you can't be prepared for that.

I think a lot of grieving parents face this unwelcome reality of the empty room of walking by their child's bedroom and they're no longer there.

And your family essentially had to come home to that.

And I think the place I want to go next is how did you break the news to others upon your return home?

I mean,

Is that something that maybe that's a snapshot as well?

And there's not a real tangible grip on that.

But also,

And this gives me chills to say,

But how did you break that news to yourself?

I think,

First,

Breaking the news to myself came very gradually,

Because it is not something that our minds our minds are not created to absorb the reality of loss,

Especially that and I don't and I don't like to compare grief and loss.

But for me losing my child,

My firstborn child was the reality my mind was not capable of absorbing it all at once.

And so for me,

Bringing that news to myself was a gradual thing.

And a gradual process and journey.

We everyone in our family,

Our immediate family was with us except for our daughter,

Lisa,

She had stayed home because she had a basketball tournament.

And she actually was staying my parents live next door to us and she was staying with them.

And one of the most agonizing things we had to do was break the news to her because they were only a year apart.

And her and Nicole were the very best of friends.

They were inseparable.

So we knew we didn't call because we knew we needed to be there with her.

And and we had a five hour drive home from the hospital.

So there was so much agony on that way home and we would stop and pray every once in a while because we just were so devastated and we had to okay,

Get a grip.

We need to be able to make it home and take care of the things we had.

We had two other kids with us and they were our son Alex was only five and then our daughter Megan was 11 and they were with us and they both saw the accident.

So we had we had so many different aspects that we had to take care of.

But when we pulled up at my parents house where Lisa was staying,

I just had to force myself to get out of the truck because what we were about to do was to change Lisa's life forever and to have to look at her and do that.

It was just a very heartbreaking thing and it was a snapshot just being able to have to go and face her and break that news to her.

And again before each conversation we had we would pray we'd say oh God please just help us help us do this help us do this in a way that would honor Nicole but also help these people because Nicole had so many people who loved her.

And so just going through that process it was probably one of the most difficult parts of those first few hours and first few days.

We talk a lot on this show about what helps us come back from grief and loss and I got through reading your book Victorious Heart that God and prayer were very very like cornerstone foundational elements of your coming back.

And I wonder with all of these with all of these prayers which each each of these times that you pulled off to the side of the road to pray on the way home and just the content of these prayers help us help us help us help us.

I wonder when that help came because it sounds like for you that it did come what did it look like or how did it show up for you?

It showed up in different ways but I but it would show up in just strength and it's hard to it's not a tangible thing that I can you can reach out and touch but it was the courage to take one more step when we would have to you know break the news or if we had to even when we walked into the funeral home you know a couple days later and had to make preparations I stood out there and I'm like I cannot go in there this I cannot go in there and make these preparations to bury my child and we would just pray God just help us and just exactly like you said help us help us help us because we just needed courage to go through the next step and and I pictured myself often standing around a pit and I knew if I allowed myself to go in that pit that it would be very difficult to ever get out so we would pray God keep us from despair keep me and my husband is so such an amazing man and he said he would pray God keep him from going into despair keep us from going into despair because that that pit of despair would have destroyed me and so it would come in just little bits of courage he would come and give me the courage to walk in and do something I needed to do he would give me the courage to not even think about and the wisdom to not think about the accident as much and picture it over and over and over in protection of my mind but to think about Nicole Wilde and free and living and and enjoying life so it came as just like little bits of whatever I needed at the time I think that's really beautiful and a sentiment of how grief works regardless of faith is literally the process of coming back is being fed these little teeny tiny bits and pieces as you crawl your way out of the hole I was I completely agree and I think it's the moment by moment the minute by minute and breath by breath that we have to go and and really that it's just being able to move through our pain no matter what we believe or how I did draw a lot of my courage and my strength from my faith but all of us have to go through hard difficult devastating circumstances and the only way we do it is not through the big picture not tackling the whole thing but just breath by breath it's another way that we are turned on our heads by grief I know that we had Rebecca Sofer and Gabby Berkner on I believe in the summer of 2019 to talk about what they called going micro all of a sudden and grief you can no longer think about the big picture which is what most of us do kind of idly all the time we're always kind of thinking about you know where we're going a couple weeks from now or a couple years from now or a couple decades from now like what the future is and what we hope it to look like and grief forces us to think on this teeny tiny little minutia scale that feels so slow and so even powerless at times because really I suppose for me in my grief my thought was what good is the next moment gonna do me like really how powerful is that when in reality that's where so much of coming back is contained is in that next teeny little moment exactly because if you think about the big picture there is no hope there is no energy there is no strength in the big picture because really we're hurting so bad when we're in grief that we don't want to go the big picture and and it and that is I love that going micro because it just brings it down to the very basic element of of how we survive and how we walk through these painful things and that it is so tiny and it does sometimes feel like you're going through mud like I everything is trudgery everything is hard but then eventually you gain momentum and that's when you do come back and that's when you do start being able to that's when I believe the healing actually starts and I think to what your husband said too about despair it sounds like despair was very very heavy on his mind it's like just don't let me go there I think despair is what happens when we try to go too big in the aftermath of loss and we try to see big picture and we try and see out towards the future and all we can see is blackness and that's where despair comes from we've talked about it a few times on this show about the roots of despair I wonder I wrote down this question as you were first speaking about breaking the news to your daughter who was still at home and as well as the two other kids you had in the car on the way home with you and that is what did grief look like in your household because for as much as you all lost the same human your relationship to her was entirely different for all of you yes and and because everyone grieves in a different way um grief is such a personal journey that each one of them it looked different in each one of their lives for lisa the oldest under nicole she felt just lost and her and nicole shared a room you talked about a few minutes ago going back to the empty room well her and nicole shared that room that's the room that they and and this might be hard this might i might choke up on this part because this is hard because that's the room that they shared their secrets and that's the room that they giggled way into the night and i'd go in and have to tell them girls go to sleep girls go to sleep and they'd be in there giggling and talking and and um that's where their dreams for their futures were born in that room so for lisa she could not go into that room and stayed like it was so what we did for her but she didn't want to take anything down either it was just she was stuck so what we did is we put everything back in the room we cleaned the room up we put everything exactly the way it was and we cataloged everything by taking photos of every little thing every corner every memory and then we i let lisa um keep out of whatever she wanted and then we put everything away we didn't make decisions right away about what to do with nicole's things but we just put it and then we we redecorated the room so lisa could live in that room and now that was a three or four month process for me to say it sounds like it happened immediately but it took a long time because it was part of her healing going through that where um our youngest alex we had adopted him from russia a year prior so he had only had a year to spend with nicole but for him everything was black and white it was very factual a matter of fact at the hospital um before we came home my husband larry took him into the restroom and he asked larry he said um papa where is nicole and larry said well she's in heaven buddy and she and alex said well is she happy and larry said yes she's very happy and for alex that's all he needed he said okay and he went skipping out because he could picture nicole happy and then megan who was 11 at the time nicole was her biggest advocate she spoiled her rotten so megan lost somebody who watched out for her at school who took care of her who gave her advice about how to navigate weird relationships or hard relationships so each one of them they handled it differently so we had to be very careful to honor nicole's memory in each one of their lives in the way that they needed it's a big task to undergo as a parent to help each of your children grieve and then also to be grieving yourself and then also to be maintaining a partnership with a husband in your case a husband um so i i just want to take like 10 seconds to acknowledge that because that's hard and that is the more and more i do this podcast the more and more i recognize the luxury of my being able to be really selfish when my mom died because rather like aside from the occasional check-in on my dad my sister i really didn't look out for anybody else's grief experience but my own and there's like a a dark indulgent luxury and being able to be really selfish about your grief and just have it for yourself and not really have to i get this image of looking looking out beyond the porch of your house not really having to do that so i i just want to appreciate you for that in this moment because it's not easy it's not and and thank you for acknowledging that um and it's not in but in some ways there's two sides to that in some ways it kept me going um but in some ways it slowed down my healing um because when you are able to embrace and i really believe in our culture we don't embrace we don't allow people to embrace grief um and i because we want to fix it we want to make it all better and we we don't like to look at grief and we don't like to look at sadness and i think my belief is that you to heal you do need to embrace that um you said that that luxury that luxury helped you to heal as you embraced that time in your life so but i had two other people but i had two sides of that i it did slow me down a little bit in the beginning but it also kept me going does that make sense because i had a reason i had those kids and i didn't do everything perfectly i wish i could say i had i handled every conversation in just a perfectly healing manner but i didn't and i wasn't always as um i wasn't always as intuitive as i needed to be because if they said they were fine i thought they were fine and they weren't and so we had to have those conversations i had to start being really intentional at looking at is she really doing okay what's really going on and start looking in those um in their lives a little deeper but i do agree with you i think that it's it's just a hard thing i wonder if you could give us an example of that because so many of us do what the grief recovery method would call academy award-winning recovery where we we say i'm fine we look pretty good we put some makeup on like all this all this other stuff to try and present to the world that we're doing well so people either won't bother us or they won't see our pain so i wonder how you learned to see past the facade of i'm fine in regards to the kids or just the others in the family or in regards to my yeah well i think both i i think um with regard to your kids intuiting it in other people but also how you kind of learn to dismantle it in yourself i it it's difficult because you don't really want to go there sometimes it's easy to stay on the level so just and when i say i should say on the surface where you you're just getting stuff done because eventually you have to go back to work and do all those things the kids have to go to school so sometimes it is easier to stay there but the problem is there's no healing in that so in regards to myself there were times that i had to just stop i had to stop whatever i was doing and i had to just make make myself think about not doing life with nicole or i had to make myself look at the things that i was missing in with her she with her horse she was really into her animals so i would go out to the horses and i would just allow myself to go there and that was dismantling for myself now with the kids again it was very different because they didn't want to go there either because it hurt but i with one of my daughters what we did was we came up with a um with us like a score i'd say okay are you a one which you're doing really poorly are you a five which you're just doing okay are you a five which you're just doing okay and she would be able because she didn't want to she didn't even know how to go through her emotions and verbalize them but that could give me okay so you're a one or a two today we need to you know we need to just talk about that and um go there in that way so you just have to stop though and you have to look at them and you have to know okay they are missing nicole in so many ways and even just picture how they are missing her you know they she would be nicole would be driving megan to get a slurpee at 7 11 right now you know what we're going to do that those are the kind of things that i would have to i'd have to break it down to the very basic things they were missing about her i think that's really wise to put grief on a scale like that from one to five i've never heard anything like that before i think that's really clever and also kind of echoes the medical field too of like on a scale of one to ten where is your pain because we can't we can't all verbalize pain but we can understand a sliding scale of awful and doing all right um i i just think that's remarkably clever so grief growers if you have kids or if you are surrounded by people who are also grieving like you are that might be a good way to open up conversation especially i'm thinking for like long distance too like over text or over email maybe if somebody's far away and you can't always you know look into their eyeballs see their face judge their energy or perceive it standing next to you is use the sliding scale of where are you today and that eliminates that question of how are you and leaving it open-ended because you are you are so many different things in the aftermath of loss so i i just think that's really wise i wonder um whether or not we have these conversations on coming back every now and then about these religious ideas of grief and god not giving you more than you can handle or things being in a divine plan and i know because of reading your book that the church was heavily a part of your grief process so i wonder if you ever ran into any of these kind of religious grief cliches and if so what you did about them if anything oh grief cliches i and religious um briefly cliches uh it when you are a person of faith at whatever whatever your faith is when when something like this strikes you have to decide what you believed before is true in your pain and so just even about my relationship with god it it became different um but people when they would say things they would only say things because they wanted to help but they would say things uh like it is all in god's plan well i believe that god i don't understand god's plan god is way too big for me to understand him but if i could just anchor myself in him and in my faith then he picked me up and carried me through so those cliches of you know this isn't his plan or he nicole's an angel in heaven or any of those things sometimes those were actually hurtful because i would feel like no you don't understand right now god is just picking me up and carrying me i don't understand what's happening i don't understand why and in the big scheme of things it's it's way too much for my mind to grasp if that makes sense so i just it became very my faith became very elemental as far as he just anchored me and carried me and and i do believe that nicole is alive more actually more alive in heaven than i am here um and so that gave me a lot of hope during those times so i people only say things because they want to help but sometimes the things that they say are hurtful and i do believe even in religious circles they may say things because they don't some people don't think that grief if you if you're grieving then you have that you have faith they believe that that's a lack of faith if you're grieving and i don't believe that i believe that grief is a part of that loss part of experiencing life here is when you have separation from someone it you are going to grieve and the bible and the bible talks a lot about grief so that's not even a biblical standard if that makes sense who i just think you hit on a really big truth there is that there are people in religious communities that believe that if you're grieving you're no longer faithful or that you're no longer you know believing in god or that you've wandered from from the lord or whatever it is um right and that's very closely aligned with society's idea of if you're grieving you must not be doing well you must not also be happy you must not also you know have a joyful or a good life i'm like we can all be two things at the same time but that's exactly good from the literature exactly a 100 exactly grief and joy it can actually coexist and and that's something i had to learn because grief just becomes a part of you when you lose someone and and when somebody would judge me because i was hurting because i lost my daughter and and would insinuate that i wasn't having enough faith in god well you need to just put your trust well that is not of god god gives us these hearts he created us this way and he understands our grief and i really believe that he grieves with me you know we we're free we're free will we have free will on this earth and it's just part of our our lives of of being born and losing and changing but that's all part of the cycle that he he created us with but to deny that is to deny the very heart that we've been created with i've um i so resonate with that because so much of the work that i do revolves around this idea of to deny grief and grieving is to deny our own humanity and yes and i think much of the world both in religious spaces and non-religious spaces have this expectation of you know a hundred percent steadfast robot people that just that just do what they're told and they're obedient and everything always goes well and if you have the faith this is what that looks like and sometimes yeah sometimes god and grief and humanity just doesn't look like that so i i really appreciate you touching on that thank you and it's not it's just kind of a messy business because it's not in our society we like to have things in our nice little neat boxes and you can't put this in a neat little box because there's so much that we don't know and we don't understand but we want to explain it away and people will say oh are you over it yet have you healed and you just want to say no i'm not over it yet but that doesn't mean that i'm not doing well that i'm not growing and living it victoriously that's why you know i have this mantra of my life of living with a victorious heart because i can be missing nicole and i can still live with a victorious heart this question just popped into my brain but how have you become okay with not understanding well that was a that was quite a journey because i really felt like i needed to figure it out i figured i really felt like if i could just answer the reason to why that i would be okay and if i could answer okay this is the reason nicole went to heaven this is the reason you know these good things came out of her death and a lot of beautiful things have emerged in this in this part of our lives but it's just the word surrender just to surrender and let go of the expectation that i have to know why because that that was weighing me down and it's i just kind of picture letting this thing go that's around my neck and that's drowning me this this why question or this understanding and it's drowning me because i got it and i'm fighting it fighting against it and i'm treading water and i but i'm literally drowning but all i have to do is let go and once i let go i can rise up and i can breathe and i can just say okay i don't understand and there's so much freedom in that and and that takes so much to understand to feel like we have to understand everything in life takes away so much beauty and mystery of life and um and i think that that's part of my healing just to even know that i don't know it all but i know that i got to be the mom of this beautiful amazing wild girl and i say wild in the most free free sense of the word and and that was a privilege and i don't understand that all of even why or how that all happened but i know that i was privileged to do that and so to embrace that and let go of the expectation of why and how and understanding everything that was amazing i wrote down um freedom is acknowledging that i don't understand and i think that's so fitting in grief because so many of your descriptions here today and then also in your book as well have this sense of i'm wading through mud i've got this thing around my neck i'm shackled down by this i'm weighed down by this and i think so much of what we crave in the aftermath of loss is a sense of freedom because grief is such a trapped experience to be in part of that relates to hopelessness and powerlessness and being out of control and at the root of all that is i just don't know why and i think that's just so incredibly insightful thank you uh the direction i want to go next is is your book how how this entire experience of the loss of your daughter turned into something that a got written down and then b got turned into a book that others can pick up and physically hold in their hands when nicole first passed away we were just kind of lost we didn't know how to do this grief thing and so i would take a lot of courage from other parents who had walked the journey of child loss in front of us and i would look at them and i would marvel okay they're doing it they can they survived they are still breathing they're walking around and so it put a little seed in my heart to be that for other people and i really just had this desire that i needed to let other people know that they would survive and they were not alone and they were not crazy and that and again that beauty could emerge and during the first few days first few weeks after nicole passed away a friend of ours gave us a a bookmark and it had her name nicole's name at the top and underneath it said victoria's heart which is the meaning of her name and so a little seed was planted in my mind like okay i want that that's a perfect word to just those are perfect words to describe nicole i want that to be the theme of my life to live with a victorious heart and part of living victoriously and living with a victorious heart is helping other people so i started just even talking to other moms and and spending time even mentoring other moms through their grief and i started writing things down but as i wrote things down at first i thought i had it figured out but the more i wrote things down the more i realized no there's so much that i don't know about even my own grief and so i just this process seriously started about seven years ago where i thought okay i need to put this in some cohesive material to be able to help people and to help people to know again that they're not crazy and they're gonna make it and just having to go through that journey it was a little bit like layers you know talking about the accident having to go back there was painful but it also added another layer to my healing and even now just these wonderful amazing people that i talked to and that i've met through this journey and even people i've met that have read the book they will just say oh i just felt like somebody got me i felt like somebody understood what i was going through and i'm thinking that is my goal right there if they can just feel like they're not alone and so that's just kind of the process and and how it happened it was very organic really because it was just part of my healing and then part of my passion of helping others through their healing i love this because going back to that concept of i don't have to understand like you don't have to understand to help other people walk the road of grief with you you can just both sit there and be like we both don't understand together yes and that that is so true i love that and that is so true just like just to hug somebody you don't have to say all these words of wisdom that you understand all of the mysteries of the universe and all of that because i don't believe we can because the universe is too big for our minds and and all of how everything works but just to know but the the most precious thing we need is connection and to know that we aren't alone and we're loved and it's going to be okay and we're going to i'm going to i don't understand and i don't even know exactly how you're feeling but i'm going to be walking every step with you so you're not going to be by yourself i wonder as we're getting closer to the end of our conversation how nicole and her legacy continue to show up in your life today oh it's a beautiful thing i have several people have named their children after nicole my oldest granddaughter is named after nicole and it's so fun to see just her growing and even having some of nicole's attributes people that i still get to hear stories about how she's been a part of the about how nicole touched people's lives nicole knew how to see the invisible people those people who were struggling and those people will contact me even still and say you know i just want you to see this story about nicole this this is what she did for me and those things are just such blessings to my heart we also have several scholarships some to college some to for different horsey events that because she was so highly involved with horse activities horse showing so there there's belt buckles and trophies that are memorable memorialize her and honor her name but in the the biggest sense of the uh honoring nicole is if i can live with that victorious heart if i can live and help other people to me that is me being able to carry on a legacy that she started when she was with us so that's very important is just to be able to live well now