Braving the Bridge

What happens when your mind is constantly preparing for the worst, and then some of the worst things actually happen? This week on Braving the Bridge, Heather sits down with her longtime best friend, Kristie, for an honest, heartfelt, and sometimes hilarious conversation about living with anxiety while navigating life's biggest transitions. For years, Kris has struggled with the endless cycle of what ifs. What if she gets sick? What if something goes wrong? What if she can't handle what's com...

What happens when two people lose the same person, but lose completely different relationships? This week, Heather sits down with her 22-year-old daughter, Olivia, for a conversation about grief, growing up, family, faith, mental health, boundaries, flying, and trying to build a future after losing someone who was always supposed to be part of it. Olivia grew up with two dads. Her biological father has been an important, and sometimes complicated, part of her life, while Ken came into her wor...

Sometimes the moment that changes your life isn’t a tragedy. Sometimes it arrives as an opportunity you never expected and asks you to completely rethink the life you thought you had planned. In this episode of Braving the Bridge, Heather sits down with her sister and best friend, Sarah, to talk about the unexpected journey that brought a newborn baby into her family. At 38, Sarah was already raising two children, including a daughter whose significant medical needs had shaped much of t...

What happens to you after the thing happens? When life changes in an instant, it doesn’t just change your circumstances. It changes you. In this episode of Braving the Bridge, Heather talks about the strange experience of getting to know yourself again after loss. The parts of the person you used to be that you desperately miss, the pieces that are still very much there, and the unexpected parts of yourself that begin to emerge. From struggling to read a book or remember whether she ate...

Grief is something almost all of us will experience, yet somehow, we still don't really know how to talk about it. In the first episode of Braving the Bridge, I share why I created this podcast and what life has looked like since the unexpected death of my husband, Ken. The unbearable first days, the physical side of grief nobody warned me about, the ridiculous things grief makes you do, and my late-night search for some kind of proof that people actually survive this. But Braving the B...