Choose To Heal With Barbara J. Hopkinson

A suicide attempt was Barbara J. Hopkinson's wake-up call. In a brief moment, she realized she had a choice to make: live and dwell in her losses or choose the long, hard, road of resilience. This week, we're talking about Barbara's wide array of losses including her 21-year-old son, Brent, her 30-year marriage, and her right eye. We're covering how a lifetime of losses can all feel and look different, how debilitating grief can be, and how coming back is ultimately a choice.

Transcript

Thank you so much for joining us today on Coming Back and I'm so excited to have you here not only to talk about how loss has impacted your life but the art and the creativity that has come out of it.

So if you could please start us off with your loss story.

Oh,

Thanks.

Anyway,

Thanks for having me,

Shelby.

I'm delighted to be here.

And yeah,

I've had quite a few losses.

My – I guess a lot of it started with my 21-year-old died in a motorcycle accident,

Brent,

And he was going to have a great future but that kind of shook my world.

I also had my third son.

I've got a remaining son,

Brad,

And then my third son,

Robbie,

Was stillborn and I also had a miscarriage.

So I've lost three children and Brent was the last of the three that I lost but it really rocked my world because a year later my 30-year marriage fell apart and my husband left me for a younger woman.

So that was pretty earth-shattering.

I actually attempted suicide over that but luckily had the time to think about it and realized I couldn't do that to my remaining son who is now a successful chef and has given me a grandson,

Which I'm thrilled with.

But the other kind of non-personal or non-death type losses is I have been laid off of 10-year jobs twice.

I actually fell in a gym and lost a sight in my right eye and then a few years later had to have the eye taken out,

Have it eviscerated.

So I have a prosthetic for a right eye and yeah,

This seems like there's been a lot of things but it's made me very strong and very resilient.

I know we were speaking before we got on the call today about how these losses have made you resilient but I'm curious to know how all of these have shown up differently in terms of grief for you or if they're all kind of showing up the same in terms of how you grieve,

How you respond to them in your life in terms of how your behavior changes in the aftermath of them?

Yeah,

No,

I think they're all very different.

It's really difficult and not,

I don't think,

Terribly useful to compare losses or people that compare pain because it's such an individual thing.

But probably the most,

The one that shook my world the most was the loss of my 21-year-old son.

Brent was on his way to being an Army pilot.

He was out at Arizona State University and was getting engaged and you have a whole future in your head.

We were married 30 years,

His father and I,

And I was looking forward to retirement and grandchildren and then everything fell apart because first Brent died and that changed so much.

It's like you're being gutted like a fish when a child dies because your primary role in life as a parent is to protect your children.

So when you can't anymore,

It's unbelievably devastating.

And then on top of that,

My husband left,

Our marriage fell apart.

And so it was like a one-two punch and then Brent died the week his brother graduated high school.

So Brad went to college and ended up flunking out that first year because he couldn't deal with the studies and the grief.

He did get back in and finish and now he's a very talented chef that owns his own restaurant.

But at the time,

It just shakes your whole world and of course I was worried about him.

So that compared to the other losses.

My third son,

Robbie,

We didn't know until the end what was going to happen.

And so when he was stillborn,

Having to come home from the hospital and tell his brothers who was six and four and waiting for their little brother to come home from the hospital that he wasn't coming home was very difficult but in a very different way.

And I hadn't gotten to know him or his personality yet the way I did Brent.

And so it was also devastating but just in quite a different way.

And the miscarriage as well.

As soon as you're expecting,

You've got all these hopes and dreams and it's very,

Very difficult but it's different because you don't know the personality yet.

You haven't had all those interactions with them.

So it feels very different.

And then when my husband left,

Yeah,

That was like,

You go through this,

Oh my God,

Am I going to be able to make it and live alone for the first time?

And then you go through phases of anger and you go through,

Eventually work your way to forgiveness because it's much better for you to forgive other people.

And of course it was not,

The divorce was not all his fault.

Everything like that is always two-sided.

We both contributed to it but my son's death was a catalyst.

But there's so much complexity and then you really miss,

I've had dogs and cats for more than 10 years and they died and it's like losing a family member in a different way.

It's hard to describe the differences.

They're all various levels of pain and they hit you at different times in different ways.

But I think it's so unique depending on your individual relationship with them.

I know I'm a certified grief recovery specialist and I've done one-on-one and group classes but say in my one-on-one classes where I've done them with mothers that have lost a child at different,

Adult child and baby children.

And then I also had a pet loss class with a woman whose dog was like her baby because that was the main thing in her life.

And you can see how it can affect them in overlapping ways.

It's really interesting.

So it's hard to categorize.

It is and it's hard to compare,

It's hard to categorize.

I guess I just have this vision of you as this person who's been totally,

The word that's coming to mind is storm-tossed.

I'm just like thrown up on the boulders and in the waves and you know the lightning and the crashing and you roll up on shore and you're like,

Alright,

This is what I got left to work with after all of this.

And there's humor in it but at the same time I'm like,

Man,

You've had literal chunks taken out of your heart.

And just intuitively,

That's just the visual that's coming to me.

That's so funny because I live on the ocean and I've climbed the jetties and it has tossed me around.

I did not know that.

That's kind of cool that that clicks together that way.

The bigger question that's sitting in the back of my head is after all of this and or in the midst of all of this,

Where does hope come from for you?

Because you mentioned that you had a suicide attempt and in my mind that that is a place of hopelessness.

And so I'm wondering where hope comes from,

Not only to allow you the ability to carry on just day to day but to continue to work with grief and others' losses to take it that one step further.

Yeah,

And I think an awful lot of the bereaved parents that I've talked to,

They may not have taken any action but a lot of them have considered suicide because it's that bad.

But for me,

I think it was the combination of losing the 21-year-old son and the marriage,

My other son flunking out of college and was going to be living alone for the first time ever and I was 51.

Combination of all that,

But I think a lot of times it's a trigger,

Right?

It's a moment in time when you just feel overwhelmed and make a silly or stupid decision and if you choose a method that you can't get out of,

Then I think a lot of times it happens and it just happens and you can't get back from it.

I was literally doing the carbon monoxide thing but that gave me time to think and in that few minutes to think,

It allowed me to say,

Okay,

I can't do that to my remaining son.

I can't put him through that and it was a turning point for me.

It allowed me to say,

Okay,

Time for you to make a choice to heal,

To kick yourself in the butt and climb out of this hole one day at a time,

Knowing it's not going to be easy and it's not going to be fast but you can do it.

And I knew I could.

It really wasn't,

I don't think I was depressed at the level where it would have stayed with me.

I think it was just,

It was a trigger at a moment in time because I had gone to an event that we were,

I had a couple of friends who had lost children six months after mine did and I was looking to start a support group and we were supposed to have a meeting and they canceled the meeting and forgot to tell me and so I needed to be with them at that point and when I pulled back into my garage,

It felt,

Then it felt hopeless and it felt like I don't know if I can take all this on at once.

But you know,

Just a moment in time decision that thank God it turned into a turning point for me.

And after I survived my son's death,

I really felt,

Okay,

I am so strong,

I don't think anything could take me down.

So all the other stuff,

Including the loss of my eyesight,

Which was tough,

But I don't think I've released five books since then.

It's like,

You just,

It's really all in your belief system.

And I felt,

Man,

After losing children,

I really just can't think of anything else worse that could take me down.

Can you talk about how coming back from loss is a choice?

You phrased it as I gotta kick myself in the butt.

I came to this place as well where I'm like,

Am I going to keep doing this or am I going to choose to make my life look different than it does now?

Yeah,

I used to have kind of a tagline that said choose to heal and finding a new normal,

Things like that.

I do think you do have to make a choice to heal because I think it's very easy,

Especially in there's so much these days,

So many opioid deaths,

So many suicides,

So much that's really hard and the people it leaves behind,

They wrack themselves with why didn't I see that coming and all kinds of guilt and anger and different things.

And you can get,

You can drown in that anger and that regret.

But you know,

If you think about it,

That's not what our loved ones want.

They made a choice that wasn't a good one at the time,

But they don't want us to be drowning in it or to wallow in it or to be stuck in it like that.

They want us to be able to try to heal.

And it's not one thing.

I think you can try all different things.

I was in the corporate world for 30 years,

Including 10 years at IBM,

And we didn't talk about spirituality or any of that kind of stuff,

Right?

Everything was all business.

So when my son died,

I actually told my boss,

Who was kind of high pressure,

I wanted to change my job and he was trying to prevent it.

And I said,

Look,

You don't have any power over me anymore because the worst thing that happened to me has,

The worst thing could happen to me has.

So I don't care about this stuff anymore.

You need to give me some space or I'm out of here.

And you know,

And just,

It's just perspective.

And it's making a choice that,

Okay,

I can do this.

I know it's going to be tough.

I also have to keep an open mind.

I tried all kinds of things like energy healing and meditation and journaling.

I mean,

All that stuff,

It all worked in its own way.

It usually is,

You know,

I tell everybody,

Try at least a half a dozen things you've never tried before.

And then probably three of them might help a little bit and keep doing those and then just keep searching for things because you don't know.

You don't know if you haven't tried it because it's,

Grief is very unique and it's a new situation.

So why not keep an open mind,

You know?

What surprised you the most about grief?

How debilitating it was.

After my 21 year old died,

I don't think I could read or listen to music for three months.

And it was very difficult to get out of bed in the morning and do anything.

It's like you force yourself,

But you're in shock those first couple of weeks to get you through the waking funeral.

And you know,

Everybody's around and there's a lot of support,

But then it starts to wane,

You know,

After the funeral.

And then you have to get up and you have to really face it and it starts to sink in.

And in my case,

The first low point for me was about four months after my son died when it hit raw,

Raw reality.

I mean,

I just,

I didn't know what to do.

And it was,

You know,

I can remember just sitting and sobbing on the beach and I had a good friend with me who actually knew a medium and this medium had already retired,

But she called her and asked her if she'd talked to me.

And I had never done anything like that,

But it's like,

Okay.

Again,

I got to try it.

And that was probably one of the things that helped me the most.

She was very genuine and knew all kinds of stuff that she had no way of knowing.

And that gave me hope.

I was on a mission,

On a journey to find out if my son's spirit continued.

And I have since become absolutely convinced that all of our loved ones' spirits continue.

So I've gotten signs and actually that's one of my upcoming books is about really credible signs.

But it just,

It gives you hope.

Stuff like that,

That so you can eventually get to the point where if you think of your loved one's life as a gift to you and not just a loss,

And think really focus on the positive memories and all the good times you had,

It just gives you a much better way to remember them and look at them as an owl.

And I think of any of them,

But especially Brent or even my husband,

Jim,

Who really,

He just died almost nine months ago.

I really think about all the fun things we did together and I know that their spirit continues and they're still with me.

I just can't physically see them and touch them.

You know,

I have to kind of pretend that they're on the other side of the world or something.

Yeah,

Yeah.

Sometimes there's still,

I have this with my mom too.

I'm like,

Sometimes I still just think she's on a really long trip.

She's still just somewhere across the world and her cell phone's disconnected.

Right.

You know,

I can't think of it like that.

Yeah.

But you know that they would want you to feel better and to heal and to just work your way through it.

So do it for yourself,

Do it for them,

Do it for the rest of your family and friends,

You know,

Whatever.

But try not to,

Not try not to get stuck in it.

Yeah.

Yeah,

Absolutely.

And I always get this visual.

I put my mind's eye on the podcast all the time,

Which is so funny because you can just hear my voice.

Nobody can ever see what I'm thinking.

But I have this visual as well that I use a lot in the aftermath of loss where you're like sitting down alone in the dark and you have like 18 hands and they're all just grasping for something,

For hope,

For information,

For a connection like through a medium or try this on,

See if it works,

The experimentation of it all.

And I really do think that's so important and it's something that's come through on multiple interviews here on coming back is like who cares if it sounds crazy,

Just try it on and see if it works,

If it doesn't,

Move on.

I mean like the craziest things already happened.

The worst has already happened so like how could this,

It could get weirder but it's not going to get any worse.

It's kind of the mentality.

It's funny because what I did is I wrote my first book was a memoir called The Butterfly's Journey Healing Grief After the Loss of a Child.

And the first part of it is just kind of that two-week experience from phone call to funeral.

But then the second part of it is a summary after 10 years of how I recovered in the spiritual journey I went on and all the different things I tried.

And the three most important points I felt at the end of that,

You know,

With a 10-year perspective was number one,

You have to keep an open mind and try new things but you have to trust your own intuition.

Everybody's got advice.

They know nothing about your grief and your loss because it's unique to your relationship and your personality and how you heal.

So don't take to heart everybody's advice.

Just trust your own gut and open it.

So that's really just all in one point because it's all about open in mind and keeping an open mind and stuff.

The second is it's all about the love.

And that,

I'm sorry,

Actually the second is no,

Helping others helps you heal.

So any kind of focus you can,

It doesn't have to be about your loved one or about grief.

It can be any cause or anything that you like.

But reaching out and helping somebody else or others in general is so healing it's unbelievable.

And then the third area is it's all about the love.

So if you can focus on the love you had with that loved one as opposed to the pain and the loss,

It'll save you.

And tell me which book is this from again for our grief growers that want to pick that up?

It's A Butterfly's Journey.

A Butterfly's Journey.

Right.

And it's got a subtitle of Healing Grief After the Loss of a Child.

Thank you.

I'm curious now to know how you went from this disastrous chunks coming out of your heart grief to I'm going to write a book about this and I'm going to have multiple businesses dedicated to helping others come out of similar griefs.

Yeah,

I think instinctually I knew that helping others would help me heal.

So the first thing I did was reach out and start a chapter of the Compassionate Friends,

Which is a support group for families that have lost a child,

Grandchild or sibling,

Any age,

Any cause.

So I've had that.

I started it in 2003.

I've had it for 15 years and that's a local support group in north of Boston,

Northeast Massachusetts.

But after a while,

And as I was healing,

I just wanted to do more.

So I started working on the book and that took quite a while and eventually I released that.

And a while later,

I retired from the corporate world and IBM and said,

Still yet.

I felt now that I have some more time,

I'm very action oriented.

Just I am,

I'm a doer as opposed to a kind of a watcher.

And so I went and started a butterfly's journey and went and got a 501c3 and I went and got certified in grief recovery method.

And I feel better when I'm taking action to do something,

It helps me as well as equips me to help others.

And then it was confusing,

But the nonprofit is called the butterfly's journey as well.

And then we do these grief recovery method classes over the phone or in person.

And we have an online resource center,

Which is free.

But the thing that I've been really dedicated to over the last couple of years is called portraits of loss.

And we actually go to events and take photos,

We set up a bring a photographer and set up a photo booth with professional lights and everything and encourage people to express themselves by writing on their skin with magic marker,

Washable magic marker.

And they get to express anything about their grief,

Their love,

Their loss,

Just to be able,

It's a very cathartic process.

And then we take the photos and edit them and send them to them so that then they're a catalyst for them to talk about their grief,

Which we don't do much in this country.

So I'm really trying to encourage open expression of grief,

Loss and love through these photo shoots.

So we've done them all over the country and I'm in the process of taking them international and multilingual.

I've seen these photo shoots and you know,

Not to play favorites,

But it's my favorite thing that you do is the portraits of loss.

And I think because it's so striking and you don't have to do,

I mean,

Granted,

As humans we're visual creatures and so we see first and we kind of absorb or we read second.

So the less words we have to read and the more pictures we can look at,

It just brings so much more impact to a work and to have these words physically written on bodies is like I am carrying this.

This is a part of me as opposed to I'm putting this on a piece of paper,

Which is a separate entity from my body.

Good observation.

Yeah.

Which is so cool.

And I love it.

I'm kind of wondering if you have some cool like or remarkable like takeaway stories from how this has changed you both as the creator of Portraits of Loss and Butterfly's Journey and as a leader of Compassionate Friends,

But also as people have participated in these projects,

Like how it's impacted them and their loss as well.

Yeah,

It's really interesting.

I mean,

I love like,

You know,

I could do the photographs myself,

But I purposely don't because I love talking to the people and understanding about their loss and then helping them decide what are they going to say and how are they going to present it.

So the stories I hear,

You know,

They're unbelievable.

You know,

I've got one grandmother who was she came to my support group first as she lost her four year old grandson to cerebral palsy.

And then his mother had a really tough time and went through some overdoses that they brought her back from,

But then she committed suicide.

And so this poor woman lost her grandson and his mother,

Her daughter.

And you know,

Her message was grief is the price of love.

You know,

And then,

You know,

There's another mother who lost her son to overdose suddenly was just such a surprise to her.

And her message on her arms was no blame,

No shame,

Just love.

Oh,

There's so many things it's like there's another woman who is beautiful black woman and she had some striking colors on and she just had her hands.

It's okay.

It's like,

You know,

I'm okay.

It's okay.

You know,

There's such a wide variety.

Sometimes people just put their loved one's name in a heart or they might have a phrase.

I never ever tell them what to write.

It's I always just encourage them with questions.

And we always have a slideshow like on an iPad or something that flips through examples.

And we do it with singles or couples or groups.

You know,

Sometimes we have a whole family.

There was a whole family and their daughter,

Sabrina had died.

So they had a whole phrase and they had one word on each person's arm,

But there were maybe six people in the photo.

You know,

It's so interesting.

And then we had a woman that came in and she and her husband had lost their daughter.

And so but she had this beautiful Dalmatian service dog with her.

And I said,

Oh,

Can I,

You know,

We took the picture with her and her husband and then her.

And I said,

Can I take a picture with your dog?

And we did that.

And it was beautiful.

And I said,

Can I take a picture with just the dog and she put her daughter's photo hanging from the dog's collar.

And it's,

It's,

It's just you look at it and it just melts.

It's beautiful Dalmatian.

You know,

With this,

Yeah,

This beautiful young woman's picture on it.

So it just they tell such a story.

But God,

You know,

One woman,

We were at compassionate friends national conference where they do a lot of times these pictures on buttons.

And she had three buttons.

And I asked her,

My God,

Did you lose three?

And she said,

Yeah,

My husband shot my three children and then shot himself.

Oh,

You just Yeah,

I mean,

So you hear stuff like that.

You just kind of hug you.

You know,

So I,

I like the part of being able to interact with them,

You know,

And then,

And then,

You know,

I have all that we get a media release with their email,

So we can email them the,

The resulting photos and things.

But yeah,

Some of the stories are blowing your mind.

Absolutely,

Like,

No kidding.

I'm looking at some of them now as we're speaking.

And they're just so they're so different,

And yet they're all they're all grief.

They're all the same.

And this and yeah,

And for our grief growers that are joining us on the bereavement cruise,

This is the workshop that you'll be teaching or the event that you'll be hosting on the boat.

Yeah,

Yeah.

So this is two things on the boat.

I am going to do a photo shoot.

So we'll do a photo shoot on the boat.

My staff photographer,

Patty Ray Miliotis will join us,

And we'll have,

You know,

A whole setup with with a backdrop and lights and we'll do photos for anybody who would like them.

And separately,

I'm going to do a workshop on resilience.

Again,

Because I think I've survived a lot of stuff and I really feel whole and happy and healthy.

And I,

You know,

I just I focus on the love of all the people and have been able to get past other kinds of losses and,

You know,

It's okay,

Life goes on and life can be good again.

So I just,

I just want to illustrate that for people.

What's the,

Looking for words on this one,

But I feel like resilience right now is a buzzword in the United States,

Kind of all over the world,

Actually,

Where we're looking a lot at resilience and how to make people but kids be able to bounce back to come back faster,

Better,

With more hope than they used to.

And I guess how in your work do you prevent it from being like,

We need to be strong?

Because I think there's this myth of,

You know,

We need to be strong immediately after loss happens.

But then a lot of people confuse that with,

You know,

What resilience looks like.

So I guess determining the difference between the two in your work.

It's interesting.

I hadn't really thought about this in this context before,

But my gut reaction is to say resilience is not being strong or avoidance of being strong.

Resilience is coming back from,

You know,

Whatever blow,

You know,

You suffered and whatever loss you suffered.

So it's not about how fast or even how much.

It's more about,

You know,

Can I take the hit and get knocked down?

And can I crawl my,

You know,

Can I get back up again and can I continue?

And even if it's only a little bit at a time or one step in a staircase at a time,

You know,

Am I at least looking to get some form of a new normal?

Some something.

I mean,

It's not like you're ever going to,

You know,

Your loss is not going to go away or grief totally.

But you certainly can be happy again and be resilient to say,

Okay,

That happened.

Like I lost my sight.

Yeah,

That was a blow for a while.

And then I learned to function without it.

You know,

It took a while.

But yeah,

I think it's more about just trying to almost like in your coming back and you're in the title of your work and your show,

It's more about taking the blow,

But not letting it keep you down.

Just being able to find some way to get back to the surface and get a breath of air.

And you may sink a few times again,

But eventually you come up and stay up.

That's such a great way to describe it.

And I have one more question before we let people know where we can find you.

And that is,

What is the butterfly's journey?

And where did that symbolism come from for you?

Well,

To me,

A butterfly is a symbol of transition.

I think it's an international symbol of transition.

Most grief organizations seem to have some kind of butterfly in their midst.

Because it's so illustrative,

Going from a caterpillar,

You know,

Into a pupa and going from this ugly little creature into this magnificent,

Beautiful,

Colorful creature is such a symbol of transition in any way.

And I think of it as indicative or representative of the transition that our children or our loved ones or our pets went from a physical life to a spiritual life.

And it's our transition from having a life with them to continuing without them,

Right?

There's a big transition on both sides and it represents that to me.

And so,

I was considering that,

I think,

In the title.

And I actually had gone to one of the mediums and I went to a medium and she kind of said,

�No,

I think a butterfly's journey!

� Because I was,

I don't know,

I had it slightly different.

I forget what it was.

But anyway,

And so,

I just,

Oh,

The other story,

I got to tell you one quick story about the actual monarch butterfly that's part of my logo.

This is,

So about a month after my son died,

My 21-year-old son Brent died,

My other son and a friend of his were at my house and a big,

Beautiful orange and black monarch butterfly showed up on the deck,

But it showed up and stayed there.

And my son's friend saw it and he went out and it allowed him to pick it up and bring it in the house and it allowed us to actually hand it between the three of us and take pictures and it never tried to get away.

It was for half an hour.

It never ever tried to get away.

And then finally,

It's like,

�What do we do with it?

� Well,

You got to put it back outside and sometimes it's got to take off.

So he eventually,

He put it back out on the deck and eventually it flew away.

But the whole thing,

It never,

And every time we just look at it and I'd blow lightly on its wings and it would open its wings and stay flat for a minute so I could take a picture.

The most photogenic butterfly.

Come back up.

Honest to God.

So that butterfly is the butterfly that's in,

When I have my logo,

You'll see it,

A Butterfly's Journey.

That's the butterfly.

It's the butterfly that showed up a month after my older son died.

Wow.

And you're not the first person to mention butterflies on this show,

But I always like to know where people's names and their roots of the stories come from.

Absolutely.

So I've been,

You know,

A couple of people said,

�Oh no,

You should change your logo� or this or that.

I said,

�Yeah,

No,

I'm not giving up that book�.

I feel like,

�No,

That is way too important,

Too much meaning behind that guy.

�