I Met God At The Sunrise With Miami Knight

I am so glad to have you here,

Miami,

As a referral from one of our previous Coming Back podcast guests,

Kathy Cheshire,

As a person who does a lot of umbrella things with grief,

Both from grief coaching,

Grief reiki,

Involvement with projects related to gun violence,

And I'm just so happy to be able to have you on and share your story.

So without further ado,

Let's just jump in.

Okay,

Thank you.

In a matter of eight years,

I've had three profound losses in my family structure.

I lost my father due to a congenital heart defect he had from when he was born,

And I lost my sister who had a hematoma,

Brain hematoma,

And I also lost my son who had suffered from a traumatic brain injury,

Which later he suicided.

So after that eight years of suffering through dramatic grief and loss,

That caused me significant,

I'm so serious,

Significant emotional scarring,

And I was desperate to find ways to heal from all of my profound losses.

With the assistance of prayer and therapy,

My guides,

My coaches,

My friends,

I transitioned through my recovery by processing and understanding the uniqueness of the five stages of grief and all of the emotional sensitivities that was associated to my loss.

After I went through the whole loss of losing my son,

Which I must also add that five years prior,

He had been shot in the head.

We had a lot of recovery from the initial shooting back in 2011,

And also that night he lost his best friend.

It was due to a robbery,

And he had so much recovery,

Which consisted of cognitive speech therapy.

He had to learn how to walk all over again,

You know,

Just own a lot of medications,

Seeing so many different doctors and therapists.

But going through that process,

It only took him about six months to heal.

His neurologist was just so amazed at how fast his brain started repairing itself,

And he started walking again.

One of his biggest things that he wanted to do was vote and get a driver's license,

So he did do those things.

But then we came upon the trial,

Which he had to sit across from his frenemies because he did know these young men that did shoot him and his friend.

But God gave us the opportunity to be able to go to court and for him to be able to be the key witness in the trial,

And both boys did get life sentences.

But four families lost their children that day,

And it was just a sad situation,

But we grew through it,

And I thought he was doing a lot better.

So I ended up moving back.

Well,

I moved him here to Georgia so he could go to some of the best facilities,

Which was the Shepherd Center,

And he was doing very well.

Then he started feeling like he wanted to go back because he didn't want to feel like they ran him out of his city and all of this kind of stuff.

He ended up leaving to go back,

And he lived there for the four years.

He started working again.

He was doing very well,

And he just ended up taking his own life.

I had to learn how to move forward after that,

And I remember trying to figure out what am I going to do because I was so angry as a mother.

I was really angry at the fact that I felt like I had gone through this again.

I didn't believe in God anymore.

I was really upset with God because I was like,

Why did I have to go through this twice?

Just having to re-experience that and burying my son and trying to figure life out again.

When I just thought everything was okay,

I was already experiencing an eight-year loss of losing my father and my sister,

But to lose him in that manner was really hard for me.

The only way that I was able to move forward was by just deciding.

I just had to decide that I wasn't going to do that anymore.

I just woke up.

It was kind of like after his death anniversary.

I had to take off work.

I just knew that whole week was going to be kind of sad for me,

And I didn't do well with it.

But I just decided.

I cried up until the last date that I talked to him,

Not when he died,

But the last date that I spoke to him.

I just let everything out that I could.

I didn't even have any more tears on the actual date,

Which was two days later.

But I just decided.

I said,

February 1st,

I'm not doing this anymore.

I called a girlfriend of mine and I told her the same thing.

The next three days later,

She had a vision board party.

I just started working on myself and started figuring out what I needed to do to move forward.

After that,

That was some of the things that kind of moved me through the process of trying to understand where I was with my grief.

There's absolutely so much to look at and unpack here,

And I've got three totally different questions for you.

I'm not sure which one to start with,

So I'm kind of just going to see which one is resonating.

I think it's most related to your recent statement of going to this friend's house who had a vision board party.

I literally wrote down what can we say or what can you say personally about the power of being able to visualize someplace different than where you are right now.

I think this is a tool that so many grievers don't know that they have.

If I could even picture what my life might even look like,

Maybe a year from now,

Two years from now,

Five years from now,

Maybe I could figure out how to take steps to get there,

But everything seems so close and so impossible and so dark.

How did you get to this place,

Or maybe even how did your friend walk you to this place of being able to visualize this could be your life?

You could make it something different.

Well,

I guess I have to go back a little.

Two days prior to my son committing suicide,

I just had a friend over that she was going to help me work out.

She was a life coach,

And she was going to help me work out the four corners of my life.

I was so excited.

We had the boards all over my wall.

We were going over each perfect step,

Which was my health,

My business,

My personal life,

My marriage,

Just all these different four corners of what I was to be an expectation of changing my life at the time.

We did a 90-day plan on what that vision looks like.

The thing that I always tell people is,

See,

For me,

God has always just been with me.

For me,

I already had a 90-day plan prepared for me,

And I didn't even know what was going to happen two days after this.

I was so pumped up,

So excited,

And of course,

After this happened to my son,

There was no way that I wanted to look at a piece of paper and go over my life.

But within those two to three to four weeks after his passing,

I did have something to refer to,

And I did have something to look back on,

Like eating or drinking more water or exercising more.

I had a list of some things that I had already had a plan for,

And I just think it was already set up.

God had already gave me a plan because He knew what was coming.

I didn't,

But I already had something to fall back on.

Just for a person that may not have that,

I would say,

Go back to the things that you love,

Or if you were a writer,

Find those old books,

Begin to journal,

And then you'll start finding those things that want to come out of you.

Do something that you've never done before.

Just be a different person.

Choose to be someone different,

Because a lot of times when we lose someone,

We want that same systematic thing.

It's not that anymore,

So we have to change.

In that change,

We have to create something new.

That's why I said journaling or doing something that you've never done before.

Not just if you hadn't lost anyone.

If you were to lose your job,

You have to start thinking differently.

Now,

What else can I do?

Wouldn't it be something that I always wanted to do that I never experienced?

It would have to be something in that realm or something like that that you would want to put that in.

That you would want to position yourself into.

That makes so much sense,

And I love that you keep using these words choose and decide over and over and over again,

Because we have to actively participate in the process.

It doesn't just happen.

I've admitted a few times on this show that the book that actually got me into doing grief work was called The Happiness Project.

It was not a book related to grief.

It was not a book related to healing.

It was this book that asked a lot of smart,

Introspective questions on what do you want to do with your life,

And what can you construct for yourself that makes you happier.

But here I was reading it,

I don't know,

Eight months after my mom died.

Somehow,

I was like,

This is apparently the thing I'm going to reach for.

That got me to remember that I used to love going to the library as a kid,

And then I started reading again.

Then slowly,

Somehow,

That daisy chain of weird things connecting all together got me into reading all these memoirs and grief books and how to and self-help about what coming back from grief even could possibly look like.

Then that whole vision was created,

But it wouldn't have started if I hadn't taken a second to think about,

Okay,

What's going to make my life happier?

Happiness is so far from grievers' radars.

It doesn't seem possible,

But when you break it down or even say,

I don't even have to be happy tomorrow if I can just figure out a way to be happy in the next 10 seconds in this moment today,

Or even as far as to the end of the week,

I don't have to be happy for the rest of my life because God knows I can't picture that right now.

But to build in those structures and this weird thing that happened in your life of,

I got this plan two days before my son took his own life,

So it's like I had something to refer back to,

Not on purpose,

Not even deliberately.

I can't imagine what it would be like if we were to constantly be doing this questioning of ourselves as what do I want,

What would I like my future to look like,

So that when our losses happen,

We do have things to refer back to.

I think that's just an incredible piece of advice.

Thank you,

Thank you so much.

Yeah,

Absolutely,

And that leads into something else too because you were talking about God knowing what was going to happen with your son before you did,

But before that when you were telling your story,

You were talking about being angry with God and upset with God,

And I think this reckoning of faith is also something that happens in law.

So can you lay out maybe the relationship that you have now,

Have then,

What happened in the aftermath with this eight years of hell that you lived?

A lot of times I would fast.

Fasting is such a big part of my life,

And I remember when my oldest daughter was sick and she was in California and I had to fly out there to go check on her.

I remember just going on this fast,

And when I went on this fast and I came back,

That was December.

January is when I lost my son,

And it was like the floor just caved in up under me.

I was so angry because I felt like this was the second time he had done this to me,

Not just with the loss of my father and my sister,

But the second time with my son.

I was just so grateful.

I had so much joy behind him,

Keeping him here to go through this trial and seeing him finally move forward and finally making the right decisions because he was raised by his father.

So a lot of times,

I just had him for summers and vacation and birthdays,

And I knew,

And I guess a lot of that too was guilt too.

I had all of this guilt inside because I didn't raise him,

But I was so grateful.

The best thing that came out of it was when he was shot,

I got him back.

So that's where the mother relationship and the nurturing and all that came from when he was back to a vegetable,

Back in a baby state.

I finally got that opportunity to be his mom,

The mom he deserved,

And he got the opportunity to be the son that I deserved.

That exchange,

It meant so much more to me than the years that I thought that I lost,

Which I hadn't lost.

It was just that I wasn't there on a day-to-day basis.

That being taken away from me when I felt that I had just gotten it,

I was upset.

I just really,

Don't talk to me about the Lord,

Don't talk,

Don't say no,

Jesus,

It was not going to happen.

Not until I decided it,

I made a change,

I think because I had repressed all of the faith that I had because I was a strong believer.

Also,

At this time,

When I went to this vision board party,

A week later,

I started another fast.

I started the Daniel fast,

A 21-day fast,

And I never went back to eating meat.

Now I'm going on two years being a full vegan.

That mindset change actually ended up helping me by me changing my diet,

Going to a plant-based diet.

I was able to think clearer and hear better and just seem to be a better person and a healthier person inside.

I've always known the Word of God and it's always been within me,

But then I started really practicing my spiritual awareness and higher consciousness and meditation.

That meditation was a big deal for me.

Also,

I started learning about ancestral history.

I started working with spiritual healers to help me heal old childhood traumas and getting all of those things out of me that I didn't need.

That's what was holding me.

I was suppressing so many different things.

Once you have so many profound losses,

Or just a profound loss,

It brings up some stuff that you weren't even aware that you were suppressing.

So after I started releasing a lot of that stuff,

Started learning about Reiki and how to heal my own energies and my chakras and align them,

And learning to be one and connected with the divine and expressive and feeling safe again and feeling creative again.

I just started feeling better about myself because of all of the practices that I started doing.

I went on this women's retreat and I learned how to release old childhood traumas.

That was a big one for me because I had childhood trauma.

I had the loss of not having my son with me.

I didn't know I really suffered from that.

When I used to send him back home or he would come here,

There would be this whole two to three weeks that we both were being very dysfunctional in our emotions.

He would act out in school and I couldn't show up for work.

Then I'm in the bed all week and he's not participating in school.

There was this disconnect because we wasn't together like we really wanted to be.

I kind of shut it off and said,

Okay,

Well,

I'll be okay.

But for so many years of doing that,

I can only imagine how military moms feel when they have to come home for a while and then leave their children and military fathers as well.

But I just had that disconnection that bothered me a lot.

I didn't realize all of those things had a total big effect on me.

Then once I finally went back to his grave,

That was another relief because I didn't go the whole year.

I just couldn't go.

I wasn't ready.

Thank God I had so many great girlfriends and friends that lived back home where my son was that they were always telling me,

Not until you're ready.

When you're ready,

We'll go until you're ready.

Oh,

God,

That just gives me chills when they would tell me,

We'll go for you.

Not until you're ready.

Then after that year,

When I decided and when I made that change,

I said,

No,

I'm ready.

I need to go.

I need to go.

But it took me the summer of 2017 to go back.

My name is Miami.

My father named me that because of him watching the sun rise.

He had never been to Miami before.

But when he found out my mother was pregnant,

They decided,

He said,

Well,

If it's a girl,

I'm going to name her.

His clue was,

He would tell my mom because they were living in Miami at the time,

You see it every day.

She had no clue.

But he would just watch the sun rise.

That was something that I never had seen before,

Never experienced.

So the weekend that we went to go to my son's grave so that I could finally have this conversation.

Because at the funeral,

I remember we were the last car out and I just had this vivid picture in my head of the casket being rolled down.

That's all I could remember from that day.

It was so much,

You know,

During the funeral,

There's so much going on and so many people trying to speak to you.

But that was the last visual that I had.

I was so afraid,

I guess,

Of going back there.

So it took me that long to go back there.

After we left the grave site,

We drove to Miami and watched the sun rise.

That's where I had a spiritual awakening there.

I really met God there at the water,

At the sunrise.

All of that ended up just changing me.

There was a shift.

When this shift happened,

I tell you,

Everything in my life changed just within a blink of an eye.

My whole life just turned to this way that I knew that now I have a purpose.

There's something more that I'm going to be doing here.

God doesn't make any mistakes.

There is a reason behind what happened and I need to be able to figure that out.

So that's how I started with the grief coaching certification.

Because I wanted to understand what healing looked like in grief.

And I wanted to understand what the framework of grief was.

I believe in the stages.

There's so much going back and forth about if there are stages or not.

But for me,

It worked for me because I had a framework of something to state this is how I was feeling.

For me,

It worked for me.

That's why I really love talking about it,

Talking about the stages to people that don't understand or are just going through it.

They're going to find their own way in their journey.

But I try to give as much support as I had and to as many people that gave their all to me.

I just want to give that back to them.

That's such a magnificent story about the sunrise and that actually gave me chills of your dad giving this clue if you see it every day.

And your mom was like,

I have no idea what you're talking about.

And that's because the process of naming,

I get chills talking about this.

But what we call ourselves and what others call us is very significant.

And so to be in this space where you are literally sitting across from your namesake,

The sunrise in Miami,

Of course that would be the space where your spiritual awakening happens.

Of course,

Because it's there you are and you're mirrored back to yourself.

And so I just get chills thinking about that.

And what I love about it too is that I like two things.

The first thing is that when this spiritual awakening happened,

It wasn't something that somebody else gave you.

And I think a lot of times people try and push meaning or purpose onto grievers and you're like,

No,

That doesn't belong to me.

Like they're in a better place or everything happens to reason.

Like we have to get there ourselves.

If you tell us we're not going to believe you,

But if we get there ourselves and we feel it like in our bones and we have these moments where we're staring across from the sun,

Like,

Yes,

Of course that makes perfect sense to our beings and our hearts.

And the other thing that I love is something that you'd mentioned earlier about this idea of your faith being repressed.

And I think you said that in a really neat way.

I've never heard it phrased that way before because a lot of people say they had a crisis of faith or they lost faith as if it went away.

And when you say you repressed faith,

That feels like it's being held down.

So like it still exists at this level and the possibility for it to come back is very real.

Whereas when people say they lost faith,

I just think of it gone in the blink of an eye forever.

So I'm wondering if we can talk a little bit more about what represses faith in grief and maybe what brings it back.

Just simply falling out of love with God represses it.

Just not knowing how or what stage that you're in or what emotion that you're feeling or what sensitivity that you're having to an actual emotion helps,

I'm sure,

A lot with suppressing.

Just because you don't know where you are and you don't know how to feel and you don't understand how to process,

Not understanding how to process or heal from grief,

Your thoughts and emotions are all over the place.

So being not able to be in a space to be open to God and still loving on Him even though you just had this traumatic,

Extreme,

Life-altering change that has happened to you,

Or something that was being taken away.

And you know that most grief experts say that we are required to receive or get things or have things as opposed to losing them.

And since we don't understand the process of losing,

Because we wasn't taught that,

I remember as a little child my mother,

When her girlfriends was over,

And it could have been whatever,

This woman's husband or this lady having an issue with her children,

I don't know what their deals were,

But they just sent the kids to the room.

And I can understand that because you don't need to be in grown folks' business,

But we never understood what they were going through when they were just talking it out and learn how to talk it out with other women or your friends.

Or even when someone died,

They would say,

Oh,

He's just sleeping.

No,

He's not sleeping.

Children are afraid to go to sleep.

We were always not taught how to handle it.

So by suppressing it,

You just hold it in.

The ways to answer the second part of the question is getting back there,

Coming back,

Just like your show,

What does that look like?

Coming back,

And it looks like a new you,

Something different,

Something that you're not used to,

Getting that love back.

It's not like it went anywhere if you're suppressing it.

It's just you have to go after finding it.

God is always there.

He's not going to leave you.

He's greater than life.

He's bigger than you.

He knows what you're going through.

He knows what you're feeling,

But you have to have enough within you to say,

You know what,

God?

I know I'm going through this.

I need you.

I need my faith to be restored.

You have to want it,

For one thing.

You have to want the change.

You have to want to be able to – you want a new start.

You have to want to have a relationship with God.

I mean,

You can't have a relationship with anybody if you don't feed it.

Your plants aren't going to grow if you don't water it.

So it's just you have to make the decision and decide that I want something different for myself,

And I want my relationship back with God.

I want a better relationship with my family.

I want a better relationship with just myself.

I want to grow.

I need to move forward.

So I think that would be the answer to your question.

I wholeheartedly agree with that,

And that goes back to what you were speaking about much earlier in our conversation about choosing and about deciding.

Because so much of what happens in our life after loss is that we're no longer experiencing life happening to us.

We must decide to respond at some point.

We now choose the direction that we go because we're no longer just coasting.

Loss kind of puts a boulder in the road.

It's like,

All right,

That road's gone.

Which road are you going to carve out for yourself?

And you have to do the work of carving it.

And it sucks because it doesn't – at one of the most difficult points in our lives,

Here we are having to do some of the hardest work of our lives.

When it's like,

Couldn't you just hand me my new life,

Please?

Instead of me having to do this work and creating it because it's agonizing.

And then there's all these questions of,

Well,

Where do I go?

What is the right choice for me?

What am I supposed to pick up?

What are the tools that I want to use?

And that goes back to that concept of being able to visualize,

Whether it's through a vision board or reading a book or something else.

The possibility that your life could look different from where you're standing right now.

And it's such a wild thing to do in the aftermath of grief,

But super,

Super vitally important.

I want to shift gears really quick.

I've got two bigger questions for you,

And I'll do one later.

But the one I want to ask now is that within this eight-year span,

You lost your dad,

You lost your sister,

And then you lost your son.

And the thing I wrote down when you introduced these losses was age-generational.

And this is not a comparison of losses by any means,

But to lose people who are older than you,

Kind of close to your age and definitely younger than you in the span of eight years.

I'm like,

How does that make you feel about how old you are,

How old you live to be,

The concept of people dying at their quote-unquote time?

And all of these perceptions about the order of things or how things are supposed to go versus what you actually lived and experienced.

Well,

Through my transition of my grief process and my journey,

I learned that eight meant new beginning.

So in the year of the eight,

I was coming up on my father's eighth death year anniversary,

And the night that he passed,

When his dad had called me and said,

Tyke,

He's missing.

And I said,

Why do you say he's missing?

But because he had left his things in order by the table and all of these kinds of things,

And so he was kind of feeling like something was wrong.

While I was having this experience while I was sleeping,

And when I later went back to go see what to research what it was,

It was called quantum entanglement,

Because I was having this experience where life was seeming like it was coming out of my body and the DNA pattern was swirling around me.

And all I heard was new beginning.

I kept hearing spirits say new beginning.

And me learning all of that after the fact,

Because I really needed,

Especially when I started doing the research for my book,

I needed to know what that experience was.

And I really literally felt like his life leaving my body.

And with my father,

I didn't experience any of that.

With my sister,

She had been in a coma for a year,

So it was tragic that she had we just she just never woke up one morning.

But a year later,

She passed.

So my father,

He lived to be 78,

So he lived a good life.

We always know he had heart problems.

So it wasn't of course,

It was traumatic because I lost my dad and he had been dead really for seven days that we didn't know.

And my sister just never woke up.

But it was a whole different experience because of my son,

Just because I guess that was my child.

And I gave birth to him.

My sister being her age,

You know,

She said grandchildren.

I can't say that we didn't suffer.

I didn't do as much suffering as I'm sure her daughter did or grandchildren did.

But being the age that I am,

I guess I kind of understood it better because she was in her 50s at the time,

So she was a lot older than I am.

So I kind of felt that,

You know,

Even though she died in this manner,

She still had a viable life.

You know,

She was a good mother.

You know,

She took very good care of her grandchildren.

And I guess because I just started,

I began to look at their life and what they accomplished and what they did in their life,

As opposed to I felt that my son had so much life to give,

I mean,

Yes,

So much more life to live.

And also that I had plans for him,

You know,

As a parent,

You have plans for your children.

And because I just saw all the potential that he had.

And since when that didn't happen,

I just kind of lost my way.

That makes a whole lot of sense and really speaks to this concept of kind of what we expect to happen at different ages or different places in our lives.

And even more so,

It's like there's this ramped up or added level of intensity with you surviving these years after his brain injury,

And then him moving back to where he wanted to live and going through the court case and losing his best friend and all of these things that seemingly got in the way of like the life that you wanted to live for him.

And you're like,

Finally,

We're back on track.

And then he's gone.

And just this idea of like,

There was so much more,

The grief recovery method would call it the death of hope streams and expectations.

And it seems like we just carry so many like armfuls and armfuls for our babies.

And that's just so incredibly huge.

And I think that's the direction that I want to go next is this idea of,

I wrote it down in all capital letters,

Justice and gun violence,

And maybe how the two are or are not related,

Because I think that's a toxic narrative that goes around society is that if the people are put away for life,

If you find the people who committed the crime,

If you remember those who have died in some special way,

Then you've done enough.

But I don't think there's anything that can ever truly make the outcome of gun violence right other than it never having happened at all.

It's very similar to grief.

Like you can't correct death unless death didn't happen.

It's such a hard thing to speak about.

And I know this is something that's very close to your heart.

So I want to get into this idea of the system of gun violence that we have in our country,

How we're addressing it.

And then maybe how we,

I'm speaking for myself as someone who has not experienced gun violence and does not have it in my close circles that I can immediately recall,

How we as people who have not had to live this life can respond to people who are living lives that are impacted by gun violence.

For me,

It's not the matter of taking a person's right to bear arms away.

We've danced around that so long from the Constitution.

You know,

It's just that's not the issue.

The issue is having the access to guns in communities that are already suffering,

That already have oversaturation of alcoholism and mental health issues and lack of jobs and not so well education systems.

And because of that,

Adding on top of the drug issue and having the access to guns,

Those that are not,

For those that who have not gone and gone to the state and provided their information in order to be checked by the government or their state,

Excuse me,

To be checked by their state to go ahead and get the right to carry is what I'm trying to say,

Excuse me.

And how do we get so many of the guns,

The buyback guns,

And how do we get the guns that are stolen into the communities?

That's more of the issue for me is having the access to guns just so readily.

And I remember my son,

Because he used to be in the streets just hanging out.

They would hop cars,

Train cars,

And there would be carts full of guns,

He told me.

He was like,

Yeah,

They were so easy for us to get them if we needed them.

You know,

And in Miami,

There was a story just recently where there was a tractor trailer left with cases of guns just there.

Just everybody was just taking them.

So how are we tracking the access to the guns that are in the street?

And I have now,

I'm now the chief ambassador for Bullets for Life for Atlanta.

And our mission is to bring more awareness about senseless gun violence and the effects that it has on communities one bullet at a time.

And what we do,

We actually make bracelets out of bullets that are donated to us.

We ask to that everyone that has bullets just one.

We feel like if you donate one bullet or donate bullet,

That'll save a life.

That'll save a bereaved mother or a mother to not be a become a bereaved mother.

That'll save someone's uncle,

Friend,

Cousin,

Whoever.

One less life will be taken if we,

You know,

As far as our initiative,

We feel as though this anti-gun violence initiative should help others understand why we are so pumped up and readily excited to talk about it.

Because we've gone through the suffering.

It's now time to do something about it so everyone,

Someone else doesn't have to be affected by it.

And our founder who is in Florida,

Susan Kennedy,

She wasn't personally affected.

She just got tired of hearing the stories of children being killed.

Like there was King Carter who was killed,

This young boy who was on his way walking to the candy store and was shot.

And she was just so frustrated.

And a week later,

Another girl got killed and she was just frustrated.

And she started this amazing organization,

Bullets for Life.

And now we're in several cities,

Chicago,

Atlanta,

New Jersey,

Memphis,

Indiana.

And we're just trying to bring more awareness and team up with like moms to demand action and just whoever's that's listening about gun violence to help us heal and help get better laws put in place and set forward so that we can move forward.

We're tired of just talking about it.

We've been talking about it for so many years and we haven't gotten there yet.

And we're still fighting.

And as far as me,

I know that me being a big part of this initiative,

I'm going to continue to fight until the day that I die because I just don't want someone else's family to have to go through what I went through.

Not only did I suffer,

My mother,

My children,

Siblings suffer tremendously from loss.

Aunts and everybody,

Friends.

So I just don't want to see someone else have to go through what I did.

This always seems to remind me,

This conversation that the larger world is having about gun violence and laws always reminds me of cars where so much of it right now is we have to remind people of the power that they're holding in their hands.

People forget that they drive around two ton death machines that could run any of us over and we'd be dead at any time.

And I think so much of what's happening right now with gun violence is reminding people that the small piece of metal that you put into this device can literally take someone's life.

And to just,

Gosh,

To put that level of depth and understanding into someone's brain.

I wish sometimes we could just shake people so they'd get the point.

How asleep do you have to be to not recognize the immense amount of weight that you carry right now to take out another human life?

It blows my mind and it's a reason why I don't even have guns in my house because it's way too much power for me to even comprehend having.

It just absolutely drives me wild.

And so I'm so glad that there are additional organizations like yours that are raising awareness for things like that and even proactively saying,

Here,

We'll take your bullets.

We'll just take them off your hands.

Yeah,

We will.

And it's very therapeutic for moms because when we disassemble the bullets,

We feel as though that we're killing a bullet.

This is one less life being taken.

We can just kill it.

We're done with it.

We sit around a round table.

With the moms,

We have a program called Popping Heel where we pop the bullets and we wear our heels and we're healing at the same time.

We're having conversations about what happened and we have an open discussion in a safe place where we can share.

So a lot of good comes out of it.

We also do sell the braces.

They come in all colors,

All sizes for men and women.

But we always gift to the bereaved moms or the bereaved father just because we know what they have gone through,

What they're experiencing.

It also gives us an opportunity,

Especially for me being a Master Grief Coach myself,

It gives me the opportunity to be able to listen and hear.

I'm still healing within myself.

The stories that I hear,

With my story sometimes you just think that you've been through it all,

But I know mothers that have lost two children.

But me being able to understand grief now and understand how to process and with me understanding Reiki and chakras and all of that for me healing.

Because initially saying suicide for me was,

Oh my God,

It used to just tear me apart to talk about it,

To even keep reading about it.

But it was almost like I was forced into learning more about it.

And as I grew to understanding it,

Now I'm helping moms that are going through this and it's not a barrier,

It's not a weight for me.

I don't feel so heavy.

I know the things that I need to do to help bring my energy up and release my energy and move forward and meditate.

But every person is not there yet.

So I'm just grateful that God gave me the ability to learn all of the things that I did and with healing and knowing how to do it for myself so that I could be a bigger source reference and source to help moms.

I think so much of the time grief is heavy because it's unfamiliar and the more that it becomes familiar,

We learn how to wear it and we learn where it belongs in our body and we learn how to carry it.

Or sometimes we learn how to put it down too.

But with things like saying the word suicide,

It's so heavy at first because it's so foreign,

It's so unfamiliar.

And in many cases,

Especially with suicide,

With gun violence,

With other ways that people die or are injured,

They're often taboo.

There's not usually places for them carved out in quote-unquote polite conversation.

And so they're heavy and they're unfamiliar until they're not anymore.

And it's our repeated saying of it and our repeated processing of it and again going all the way back to the beginning of our conversation of this repeated envisioning something else,

Envisioning a future that looks different from this,

Where it's no longer heavy or maybe a little less heavy is really,

Really powerful.