By Rachel Lankester, Editor
Some conversations stay with you because they’re interesting. Others stay because they quietly rearrange how you see the world. This one did the latter.
When I sat down with Lisa Boehm on my Magnificent Midlife podcast, we were talking about parental grief – a subject most of us instinctively shy away from. Not because we don’t care, but because it frightens us. It exposes how fragile life really is. It asks us to sit with pain we cannot tidy up, fix or make better.
Lisa lost her daughter Katie in a sudden car accident when Katie was just seventeen. In the years since, Lisa has become a grief educator, author and founder of a community for bereaved parents. But those titles come second. First, she is a mother living in a world forever altered.
What struck me throughout our conversation was her refusal to make grief neat. She doesn’t offer platitudes or timelines. Instead, she speaks with honesty about what it means to build a life around loss – not beyond it.
How Unprepared We Are For Grief
Lisa has spent decades working in healthcare, including cancer care. She thought she understood grief – until she found herself inside it.
She spoke about how quickly she realised that, despite all our training and social scripts, we are profoundly unprepared for loss. Grief is treated as something that should follow a predictable arc, something we’re meant to “work through” efficiently.
As Lisa explained, the much-quoted five stages of grief were never intended for the bereaved at all. They were created to describe the emotional responses of people who were dying – yet they’ve been flattened and applied to everyone experiencing loss. The result is a widespread belief that grief has an endpoint and that reaching it is a kind of emotional achievement.
In reality, grief doesn’t resolve itself so much as it reshapes itself.
One of the most enduring images Lisa shared was this:
“I carry my grief like a suitcase. It’s with me all the time. Sometimes it’s really heavy and I literally have to drag it around. And sometimes it’s almost like a light backpack that is with me. But we have it with us all the time and it’s not a matter of getting over it or moving on. It’s really learning how to live with our grief..”
That metaphor alone dismantles the idea of “moving on.” Grief doesn’t disappear. It changes weight. It changes texture. It becomes something you learn how to carry.
Remembering Katie As A Life, Not A Loss
When someone dies young, there’s a danger that their story becomes defined by the moment it ended. Lisa is fiercely committed to resisting that.
Katie was vibrant and determined. She was bright, disciplined, funny and self-sufficient. She loved fashion and had strong opinions. She had plans. Just days before her death, she had earned a scholarship into a nursing programme.
Lisa spoke about Katie not with sentimentality, but with clarity. This was a full life – not an unfinished one. And honouring that life, rather than freezing it at the point of tragedy, became a central part of Lisa’s path forward.
Grief Is Bigger Than Death Alone
One of the most useful reframes Lisa offers is her definition of grief itself. Grief, she explained, isn’t limited to death. It is the loss of anything meaningful – health, identity, relationships, independence, youth, imagined futures.
For women in midlife, this can land particularly close to home. Many of us are navigating layered losses all at once: ageing parents, shifting bodies, children leaving, marriages changing or ending, roles dissolving.
Grief, in that sense, is not an interruption to life. It is woven into it.
The Pressure To “Move On”
One of the most painful experiences for grieving people is the expectation that they should eventually “move on.” That expectation rarely comes from malice. More often, it comes from discomfort.
Other people’s unease with grief can quietly become more important than the griever’s reality. We want pain to resolve because we don’t know how to sit with it.
Lisa acknowledged that most people genuinely want to help – but the things they say can unintentionally cause harm. Phrases like “you can have more children” or “everything happens for a reason” attempt to tidy what cannot be tidied.
What helps far more is honesty and presence.
One of the most powerful moments Lisa shared was about a friend who admitted she didn’t know what to say:
“She said, ‘I don’t know what to say. I’m so scared of saying the wrong thing.’ And because she said that, I don’t think she could ever say the wrong thing to me.”
It’s a reminder that sincerity matters more than eloquence.
How Grief Reshapes Identity
Loss doesn’t just hurt – it alters who you are.
Lisa spoke about how even everyday questions can suddenly feel loaded. How many children do you have? is no longer small talk. Her answer hasn’t changed. She will always be a mother of two.
Grief narrowed her circle but deepened her relationships. It stripped away the superficial. It intensified love and sharpened perspective.
She spoke about cherishing life more fiercely – not because loss is a gift (it isn’t), but because once you’ve seen how quickly everything can change, you stop taking so much for granted.
Healing As Something You Do
Lisa’s book uses the word healing, a term she knows can be uncomfortable for grieving parents. There is no finish line. No moment where grief is declared complete.
What she values about the word is that it suggests action. Healing, as she describes it, is not about being “fixed.” It’s about movement – however small.
Getting out of bed. Taking a walk. Asking for help. Caring for your body. Seeking support. Honouring your loved one in ways that feel meaningful, whether through service, ritual or quiet acts of kindness.
Healing isn’t the absence of grief. It’s learning how to live alongside it.
Grief Inside Families
Lisa spoke candidly about how grief moves differently through families. Fathers are often expected to be strong and silent. Siblings can become invisible. Marriages are tested not because grief destroys them, but because communication becomes harder under unbearable strain.
Her son was fifteen when Katie died and Lisa noticed how easily his pain went unseen. Everyone asked how she was doing. Very few asked him.
What helped, she said, was love, patience and creating space – even when she herself felt broken. There were no perfect answers. Just persistence.
Guilt, Reminders And Learning To Live With Both
Guilt is almost universal in parental grief. The last argument. The errand that shouldn’t have happened. The moment you wish you could replay.
Lisa was clear about this: parents are not omniscient. We do the best we can with the information we have.
She spoke, too, about triggers – school photos, graduations, weddings – and how they evolve over time. The pain doesn’t vanish, but it can soften and change shape.
One of the most important truths she shared is that contradictory emotions can coexist. You can be genuinely happy for someone else and deeply sad for yourself at the same time. Both feelings are real. Neither cancels the other out.
Carrying Grief – And Joy
Toward the end of our conversation, Lisa returned to the idea of honouring life rather than being consumed by loss.
“We can honor them. We can make them smile. We can make them proud. We can give them something amazing to watch.”
Lisa doesn’t present herself as healed or resolved. She presents herself as living – carrying grief and joy together, refusing to erase either.
She gives us all permission to stop trying to make loss behave. Permission to live fully with it.
Disclosure: I had some help from AI with this post. It’s completely based on the podcast interview I did with Lisa, but AI helped me pull the written post together, much faster than I could have alone.
Lisa’s website: www.griefsupportformoms.com
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Book: Journey to HEALING: A Mother’s Guide to Navigating Child Loss
Rachel Lankester helps women reclaim health, agency, purpose and power. She’s the host of the Magnificent Midlife Podcast and author of Magnificent Midlife: Transform Your Middle Years, Menopause and Beyond which was recommended in the New York Times. She’s the founder of MenoClarity, an online hub providing evidence-based information about menopause without hype or scaremongering. After an initially devastating early menopause diagnosis at 41, she helps women vibrantly transition through the sometimes messy middle of life, helping them cope better with menopause and ageing in general, and create magnificent next chapters. She’s been featured in/on BBC Woman’s Hour, iNews, The Sunday Times, Woman’s Weekly, Prima Magazine, Tatler HK and Woman’s Own amongst others. Get her newsletter.
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Last Updated on August 6, 2026 by Editorial Staff
