-This program was made possible with philanthropic support from the New York Life Foundation.

♪♪ -Kai had felt sad before, but this was different, something more.

Mom didn't show it, but she was sad, too.

Without Kai's dad, their whole world was turned blue.

But this didn't mean they'd be frightened forever.

Brave sometimes hides in the strangest of places.

For Kai, that place was a sweater.

♪♪ ♪♪ -There's something we don't talk about, even though it affects each of us, all of us.

It's something we carry wherever we go, the inevitable result of losing the people we love.

♪♪ That something is grief.

Even if we're not grieving now, we carry the knowledge that someday, death and grief will visit us and the people we care about.

♪♪ But we try so hard to avoid it.

♪♪ We try to shut it out.

♪♪ We mean well, but we don't know the right words to bring comfort.

♪♪ Far too often, we simply say nothing.

♪♪ We need to get better at grief.

♪♪ [ Birds singing ] -I would have expected that by the second year, it would have been better, but I think it's the opposite.

The first year was a period of numbness.

True emotions don't hit.

The more time passes, the more you realize how permanent it is and that you have to go through each milestone without them.

-You're dealing with your own emotions and thoughts, but you're also looking at the destruction that death wreaks on people that are closest to you, and that's even harder in some cases.

I tend to think of myself as somebody who fixes problems, But when you run into a scenario or a situation that you can't do anything to fix, it's just a feeling of helplessness.

[ Saw whirring ] And I might not have outwardly displayed my own grief.

I think that led to a bit of stress between the two of us.

-Everyone handles grief in a completely different way.

For my husband, it was this feeling of wanting to fix it.

For me, there were some periods of isolation.

Because my brother died through suicide, I felt almost ashamed and very alone.

♪♪ And sometimes, I just wanted to cry, and I wanted to get the emotions out.

And it's very difficult to do that when you have small children.

I had to explain to them that there are some days where I remember my brother, and it hurts, and I cry.

And I cry because I love him.

♪♪ -I think we have this idea that when something hurts, it means there's something wrong with you.

That grief feels bad a lot of the time doesn't mean that it is bad.

Grief is the experience that we all have anytime we lose something that we love.

♪♪ And it's part of being alive.

It's part of being human.

♪♪ ♪♪ -T.J. was a ball of energy from the beginning to the end.

♪♪ He was always on the go.

And as he got older, he just got into more and more things.

If he could reach it, he was doing it.

♪♪ My grandmother, she raised me, and she's been my mom.

She would be that person that on many days when I just fell, like, rock-bottom, she would have been there to, like, pick me up.

And I was there, too.

I still feel like it's a dream.

I want to wake up.

♪♪ -I miss the names that he would call me.

♪♪ When I found out, I was very emotional.

I went down to my knees, started crying.

I loved him so dearly.

♪♪ Mostly, people that don't know me but knows the death that I went through, they just be like, "Don't cry.

Be a man."

But it doesn't really matter about being male or female.

It's just how the person grieves.

♪♪ -Grief is a universal response to change.

♪♪ All of us do it, but we do it differently.

It's unique.

The phases that grief has been described to us as may or may not fit, and we have to give each other permission around that so that we can really present ourselves as supportive and safe, because we can make it unsafe for each other with having an expectation around what someone else's grief journey is.

[ People speaking indistinctly ] -Dad, look at how many spiders are these -- one, two, three, four, five, six.

-It's strange to think back on it and remember the shock.

-Um, yeah.

I already finished that one.

-8, 9, 10!

♪♪ -I knew without a doubt that Dan was dying.

♪♪ But even when he did die, it's just so shocking that someone I had lived with for half my life was gone.

♪♪ It was so hard for the kids to lose Danny.

-Please?

Please!

I really wanted that one!

-Children's grief is not mini adult grief.

Kids grieve in spurts, and kids are very physical in their grief.

Oftentimes, right after they hear the news, you'll see them go and play.

And as adults, we tend to assume, "Oh, okay, they're okay because they're playing," but that's their language, right?

-Get off of my land.

I'm up here.

-Oh, my gosh!

That was actually so high.

-Parents tend to assume that their child is grieving in the exact same way that they are.

-No, the biggest one -- -But oftentimes, children are grieving in a very different way, and that can look like temper tantrums for younger children.

It can look like anxiety or even ADHD.

[ Kids chattering indistinctly ] And even if the death occurred years ago, having events or situations that remind the child that the person that they loved is no longer with them can be very triggering and can often produce those kinds of behaviors.

-This is my sword.

-Watch where you put your feet.

-This is my sword, and this is my boomerang.

-Knowing that I had decades of raising kids by myself ahead of me was terrifying.

Absolutely, there were moments of despair where I just didn't know how I was going to get through this.

I think grief should be categorized as an emotion set, not just an emotion, 'cause so much comes along with it, and they're all jumbled together -- sadness, frustration, guilt that we didn't pay closer attention to his health, or there was anger every day.

♪♪ -I think anger is sort of the hidden emotion in grief.

A lot of grieving people are incredibly angry for a lot of different reasons.

You might be really sad.

We think that sort of as the gold standard of grief.

And that's definitely part of it, but you can also be bored.

You can also be confused.

♪♪ Sometimes, people feel numb inside grief.

And because we have that idea that grief is you being sad and weepy, if you don't feel anything at all, then obviously, there's something wrong with the way that you're grieving.

♪♪ I think the thing to remember here is that anything somebody feels inside their own personal grief is correct.

♪♪ -You almost expect the world's going to take a time-out for you.

Stepping outside that next morning, there was the mailbox.

There were bills in there, and the one thought that hit me was that things aren't going to stop because we had a big loss.

You realize that a death is an event.

You all of a sudden have all these things to plan.

Do you want him to be cremated, or do you want him to be buried?

Where are you going to have services?

Who's going to do the services?

You just want to collect your thoughts and deal with the fact that you just lost a son, but there are things to be done and decisions to be made.

-The night of Nate's memorial service, we had -- I think it was over 700 people there, and I think maybe two people asked how I was doing.

Everybody else asked how my parents are doing, and it was just like, "Guys, I'm having a hard time, too."

I think people don't understand the connection that you have with a sibling, and it's something that's a lot harder than people realize.

♪♪ -The sibling relationship is one of the longest that anyone has in their lifetime.

♪♪ A lot of people say that kids are resilient and that they can make it through anything.

But I think one of the places where society may need to reconsider their position is just how resilient children really are and that they can become invisible in all of this.

♪♪ -Oftentimes, we will tell the surviving sibling, "You now have to be strong for your parents."

You have essentially told them, "You cannot grieve, because your parents need you to be strong for them."

-It has been incredibly hard living in the house with my parents as the only kid now.

♪♪ Usually, your parents are the people that you can go to, but I feel like I can't because they're going through a tough time.

♪♪ I just kind of forget about it and pretend like nothing's wrong and nothing's happening.

♪♪ -He and I always had a very special bond.

You know, you hear about mama's boy.

He was mama's boy.

♪♪ It was actually Nathan's best friend that told me he died.

♪♪ It's amazing what your brain can really block out.

♪♪ I look back now, and -- I hear people tell me things that happened.

I don't remember.

You just really have a hard time functioning.

I don't even know how you explain what your brain does.

We would just be simply going somewhere, and you'd forget how to get there.

-There's so much that goes on inside grief aside from emotions, things like memory problems.

Short-term memory can be completely trashed.

Reading comprehension can go sort of sideways and wonky.

General forgetfulness, all of those things are really, really normal.

♪♪ But because we don't talk about this stuff, grieving people often think there's something massively, massively wrong with them.

♪♪ -You can almost liken grief to an amputation.

♪♪ When an important part of our self, like a close family member or friend, is dismembered from us, we re-member the presence of that person as a phantom presence, and we go through an involuntary process of trying to reattach with somebody that we've been amputated from.

♪♪ ♪♪ -For the first two, almost three years, nothing made me really happy.

♪♪ There were a lot of those articles on "30 Things You Should Do Before You Turn 30," but there's no articles on the Internet that say, "Okay, here's what you should be doing in your 30s when you spent your 20s caretaking for your mom and dealing with terminal illness."

♪♪ So it was a fairly lonely feeling.

♪♪ I took a lot of the emotional grief and transformed it into physical pain.

♪♪ -Grief is not pathological, but we know that grief can really take a toll physically on people.

Grief can make you feel exhausted.

Grief can change your appetite.

Grief can also cause inflammation in the body.

So you often hear of individuals having health issues after the death of a loved one, and there may actually be a biological cause to that.

-Eventually, the physical pain just got really bad.

I was getting migraines every day, shoulder pains.

I kind of knew that, "Okay, this is grief-related."

And my doctor said, "Well, if you increase your exercise, that could help."

What ended up happening is, I really enjoyed lifting weights.

This was probably the first time I was really excited about something again.

I think being physically healthier and having those feelings of excitement made me a little bit more mentally and emotionally capable of dealing with some of my issues with grief.

-When I graduated high school, she wasn't there.

That was painful, not seeing her in the crowd.

Just felt like, you know, someone will always be missing in an event.

♪♪ It's just crazy, 'cause the day before, like, it was just normal routine.

And the next day, it was just completely -- just never be the same.

♪♪ -An event like this will challenge you to your core.

♪♪ Asia would be upstairs, and I can hear her wailing, crying herself to sleep.

That hurt.

And even now, if I replay it in my mind, it pains me.

♪♪ I was looking for an explanation, you know, the why.

Why did this happen?

To lose a parent at the age of 14 is like, "What did she do to deserve that?"

♪♪ -Secondary loss refers to more tangible changes that people go through after a grief reaction.

These are real challenges.

Death forces people into roles that they're not used to and roles that they can't be as effective as they would hope to be.

♪♪ -I didn't know anything about being a mother... [Chuckles] ...you know, especially with a teenage girl.

I didn't have any sense of what was necessary.

-There were some growing pains, especially about my hair.

Like, he didn't even know where to start.

I had to teach him how to braid.

Or womanly things like my cycle.

He handled it well, but I could tell it made him a little out of his comfort zone.

♪♪ -We're taught that grief just involves a death, but grief actually encompasses a series of losses and a series of change.

Those secondary losses can be financial things, identity, community, relationships, your faith, so secondary losses are kind of the double whammy of grief.

♪♪ -There are so many implications, because it's not just sort of this one event that happened to you at this one point of time and stays isolated.

It causes shock waves throughout all facets of your life.

And it makes it incredibly difficult for families to function.

♪♪ -Wow.

The economics of grief, the economics of losing your husband -- It was complicated and difficult.

The first thing I had to do was refinance our house so that I could afford the mortgage payment.

Dan was essentially a stay-home dad, and childcare in the Bay Area is very expensive.

Thankfully, I had a lot of help at first from people in our community, which I so appreciate.

It got us through the initial difficulties of reorganizing everything.

But I was definitely in a negative economy every month.

-No, it's a beacon!

-After separation from financial resources, there's a secondary separation from friends, at least a different sort of relationship with them.

♪♪ -People didn't know how to deal with me.

They didn't know how to handle me anymore.

♪♪ Even friends or, I guess, you know, friends at the time, didn't know how to talk to me anymore.

And they didn't actively try to make my feel isolated.

They didn't try to make me feel left out, but I feel like people would change around you.

♪♪ -We expected the grief, and we could deal with the grief, but what we weren't counting on was the lack of support.

Even good friends and family just became absent.

♪♪ We actually had some funny times.

Megan and I would be in Walmart, and Megan would see someone three or four aisles from us, and she would say, "Mom, there's such-and-such.

Oh, look, they're running down the aisle."

And sure enough, we'd watch them, and they would just flee from us.

♪♪ -Because we're so weird and so awkward about grief, I think one of the things that can really happen is, as a support person, we're like, "I don't want to say the wrong thing," so you say nothing.

♪♪ Saying nothing is a terrible, terrible thing to do to your grieving person.

For the grieving person, that feels like abandonment.

So not only have they lost their person, but they lost their people.

♪♪ Oftentimes, when a family does come into support services, they actually spend more time talking about those secondary losses than they do about the actual death event, because those become the emergent needs.

And we don't factor in the impact that those secondary losses can have on a person or on a family.

♪♪ ♪♪ -There's, like, certain key moments that I remember that I still feel that same pain I felt then... ...like when I left the hospital in a wheelchair without my baby.

♪♪ -You try to push away your grief, 'cause you're the strong person.

You're supposed to be there to support your child who's going through the most difficult time of her life.

♪♪ So you grieve in little snippets of time.

♪♪ -My son, Mason, is in fourth grade.

What I do with him is try to not forget that he also had a loss.

He thought he was going to have a sibling growing up with him, and now he doesn't.

♪♪ -I was excited about teaching her things.

I still feel sad when I think about her.

♪♪ -In the situation that we had, you don't get very many memories, so you have to make the most of the time that you have.

There's certain parts that I remember and stick out to me.

♪♪ Megan laying down one evening on this little cot that was on the floor and just watching her stomach just move all over the place and being able to feel that -- I think that's probably my favorite moment with her.

♪♪ -I thought grief was something that you go through, and you feel sad for a little while, and then you're okay again.

♪♪ As time went on, I'm like, "Okay, well, how long am I really going to feel this way?"

♪♪ -Because we don't talk about the lived reality of grief, even grieving people think, "It's been six months.

Why am I still so sad?

What's wrong with me?"

Nothing's wrong with you.

You're human.

For those whose intimate daily lives are affected by the death of somebody, you're not even out of the initial fog at six months.

You have to live without that person on a day-to-day basis for the rest of this life.

That's going to take more than six months.

♪♪ -Coming up on five years, and...

I cry every morning.

♪♪ But I have noticed that I don't cry all day anymore.

♪♪ I get my cry out in the morning, and then I'm usually able to continue on with my day, most days.

♪♪ -Oftentimes, in the more immediate aftermath of the death, people rally around the person who's grieving.

♪♪ But what typically happens is that over time, that support tends to wear off.

There's also the assumption that after about a year, the person should be over it.

And we know that that's not the case.

And that can contribute to some misunderstandings.

♪♪ -One of the things that I recalled was somebody saying to me, "You'll get over it eventually."

But there's no timeline with grief.

It's not that one day, you wake up, and you say, "Huh, guess what?

I'm done grieving now."

That's not the way it works.

You wake up, and if you make it through a day without crying, then you had a good day.

And I'm sure that they meant well, but it wasn't the right thing to say.

♪♪ -The vast majority of times when we're giving direct advice, we are way off the mark.

Effective support is the attitude of open listening and accepting whatever they're saying and not feeling pressure about somehow taking that feeling away from them.

♪♪ -Most people have really good intentions, and they really want to support their person.

But if what you're doing is actually causing harm or distress to the person receiving it, you need to be willing to hear that.

We want to match your good intentions with your outward behavior.

♪♪ -There is definitely a call for humility, because you will mess up grief work.

Let's put that out there.

I can't even begin to number the times that I've made mistakes.

I've made mistakes in this interview around what it is to grieve and what it is to offer support.

And so I think it's important to just, off the bat, know that you're going to mess it up and, if they're hurt by something that we say, pivot to the mistake.

Don't beat yourself up around it, but understand that it's not a griever's job to course-correct you.

Then actually engage in how you can reconnect beyond the mistake.

I think when you're authentic and say, "I didn't mean that.

I really mean to say, 'I see you're hurting.

I don't know what to say, but I'm here for you,'" those are powerful, powerful support foundations.

♪♪ -I understand that people don't want to say the wrong things, but one of the difficult parts for me is, people don't talk about Nate.

They'll ask about my girls, ask about my grandchildren, but they will not -- It is as if he never existed, and that's rough, because I like to talk about Nate.

He's my son.

I would say even if you asked me a question about Nate and it got me choked up, that's okay.

I don't mind.

To be able to share a little bit of his life is wonderful.

♪♪ -I've heard many people say, "I don't want to make them even more sad than they are by reminding them of the person's name or asking how they are."

I 100% can guarantee that person's going to be sad whether or not you say their person's name.

You're not -- People aren't going to make the bereaved sadder.

♪♪ On the contrary, there's the feeling of, "Wow, my person's being remembered by somebody else."

♪♪ -The problem is that we're culturally conditioned to instantly cheer somebody up.

When we do that, what we're doing is silencing the person we care about.

♪♪ Your job as a support person isn't to make somebody feel happy.

It's to make somebody feel heard.

Even though it seems weird to us, letting people tell the truth about their pain is the best way to support someone.

♪♪ -I miss the little things that you take for granted... ...watching him pull in the driveway in his rusty old truck.

While I fully look forward to and expect to see him on the other side someday, what I would do, what I would do now just to have 5 minutes with him.

♪♪ -I miss staying home with him and having picnics.

I miss playing with him.

♪♪ If I still had two dads, everyone would be happier.

I mean, everyone is happy but not super happy.

-After Dan died, Ella's emotions started to become more flat.

Jack also kind of started to shut down but at the same time acting out.

He started having problems in the daycare where he was at.

♪♪ Max was just a baby.

He knew this person he loved was no longer here, but he was just too young to have any concept of what was actually happening.

In the time since Dan died, Max started saying a lot, "I miss Daddy."

♪♪ It took me a while to realize that really what he was saying was, "I missed Daddy."

We all had Dan in our lives for a time, but he didn't.

And he hears us talk about him, and he sees his picture, and he's telling me, "I didn't get that piece of that person that you all did," and I think that that has been really hard for him.

♪♪ -Kids will grieve at different monumental moments of their life, so let's say the death occurred when the child was 8.

They'll grieve again when they're 12, again when they're 16, again when they're 18, then again at those big moments of their life, whether it's graduation, whether it's marriage.

And they grieve through a new lens because they are able to understand what death means now at a different level than when they were younger.

♪♪ -When I make some big accomplishment, I'm like, "Man, if only Mom could see me today, she'd be, like, pretty proud of me right now."

I'm sure she's proud of me.

But you still wish they were there to see those changes in you.

I always saw my mom as some strong, unbreakable force.

She carried herself with a lot of confidence, and I always just wanted to kind of get that myself.

Every time I got teased at school because of my eyebrows or something, she'd be like, "You can't be ugly.

You came from me."

I think she inspires me to move forward and not let things bother me for too long and try to persevere as a way to hold onto her memory.

♪♪ -We know that in general, people who experience the death of a loved one can still go on to lead very happy, healthy lives.

We also know that support plays a really important role in how that person will grieve over time.

And we know that grief ebbs and flows, so having that support there continuously is critically important.

-That initial period where people are around, they're sending flowers, cards, food, it almost needs to happen later, because in those first few weeks, there was so much going on that needed my attention that I didn't really focus on the grief and then went, "Okay, everything's taken care of.

Now there's not 100 things that need to happen right now this minute."

All of a sudden, now my mind can just focus on this one very painful thing, and oh, my God, I'm freaking out.

And I don't feel like it's appropriate for me to reach out, because after that initial few weeks, people stop acknowledging that the grief is still there.

♪♪ -Many people will say, "Let me know what you need."

That's not helpful.

♪♪ Expecting the person who's bereaved to be able to identify what they need from you is like giving a non-mathematician a very complex math problem and telling them, "Figure out the answer, and then let me know what it is."

What the bereaved need is that friend, that neighbor to say, "Hey, I'm going to pick up the kids today."

So being very concrete about the help that's being offered would truly help the bereaved, as opposed to just saying, "My deepest condolences.

Let me know if you need anything."

♪♪ -Especially in those early days, anything you can do as a support person that makes those mundane and ordinary things easier so that your grieving person or your grieving family can have the luxury of just being devastated.

♪♪ A great way to do that would be saying, "I'm going to offer some things, and you let me know if that's something that you would like.

I would love to come over on Tuesday and pick up the recycling.

Would that be okay with you?

I would love to come over and clean for your house for you.

Would that be okay?"

-One friend just called me up and said, "Hey, I've hired a laundry service.

They're coming to your house.

All you have to do is stick all the dirty laundry in a trash bag, hand it to the person.

They're going to wash it, dry it, fold it and bring it back to you tomorrow."

And it was like, "Oh.

That's great."

I would have never thought to ask.

Like, she just said, "It's already done.

Are you going to be home at 6:00?"

"Yeah," and, "Great, they'll be there at 6:00, and just have it in trash bags."

♪♪ -After we found out that my brother had passed away, my concern was who was going to take care of my children, because I didn't know how long I was going to be in Texas making arrangements.

And thankfully, my husband's family was able to step in and take that mental stress away from me.

-My friends have been really supportive in talking to me and also being people that I can go to and talk about my own challenges.

So I kind of vent with my close friends, and they were always there for me.

They're still there for me, and two years after, they continue every now and then saying, "How are you doing, man?

Are you okay?"

you know, and also showing concern for her.

♪♪ -Two of her friends still contact us.

They'll recall moments or maybe send us a picture they find, just little things, like put stuff on her obituary online.

♪♪ And we appreciate it.

-People annually put their thoughts up online about her, and we say, "Wow, they found the time years later to do that and wish us well," and we find that to be very comforting.

♪♪ -Grief rarely involves a clinical consultation.

The greatest source of support are family, close friends, and coworkers.

Another resource of support are support groups, and those can be very helpful at a certain point.

-[ Speaks indistinctly ] ♪♪ -There are grief support groups for suicide survivors, but it wasn't until I was introduced to TAPS that I was able to find a place where I belonged.

-This is a place where we remember the love and celebrate the life.

We only grieve because we love, and that love never dies.

And it was just such an amazing feeling to know that I wasn't alone, and I think TAPS really helped me to understand that it wasn't his fault and that he didn't mean to leave us behind.

♪♪ -Grief is a rite of passage where, to some extent, it changes us.

♪♪ And it's nothing we ever get over.

♪♪ It's something we carry forward forever.

♪♪ -My story is tragic but is not unique.

There are other stories just like mine.

Grief is a sense of brokenness.

You are going to be broken in ways that you've never been before.

♪♪ The process of living is losing.

It's just what it is.

I had to come to terms with it like, "Okay, that happens," and it does not have to be with you.

And you accept that, and you go along, but you live the moments that you have in the most powerful ways that you can.

♪♪ -Grief brings out the worst in people, but it also brings out the best in people.

You know, I've seen a lot of changes and personal growth in people who are grieving, and I think that's one of the ways that we're almost memorializing Oscar and paying tribute to his life is by trying to find positives in everything.

The growth that we've experienced, the things that we do for each other now, the way we communicate, are completely different than before this happened.

But even though there's a lot of positives that come out of it, we'd just as soon trade that all in for having Oscar back.

♪♪ -The one day, I was driving by where Nate wrecked.

And being a man of faith, and a feeling that hit me of, "Nate finished the course.

Nate's already at the end."

♪♪ And every day, I'm just a day closer to where he already is.

♪♪ -When you experience the death of someone who's close to you, that is an unequivocal change in your life.

♪♪ You're never going to go back to who you were.

It is only now who you've become and how your life is shaped in the future.

♪♪ -I think about her every day, and I didn't think that I would.

I thought because we had her in our life for so little of amount of time, I didn't think that she would creep into my mind every single day, but she does.

-Well, we got many here present who were anticipating the birth of a child, but the promise of new life ended too soon, so here they are with heartache and emptiness and silence.

We come together this morning to remember that child.

-I know I'll grieve my whole life for this little girl.

I had plans.

I had hopes.

I had dreams.

For the most part, I think I'm in a good place.

I'm doing the best that I possibly can.

-Mother's Day will resonate with grief.

-In the beginning, it felt like I was never going to get through it.

♪♪ Now most of my days, I feel like I just go through normal emotions anyone would go through.

But there are still times where it feels like I'm back in the beginning of it.

♪♪ But I've learned to accept that and know that in a couple hours or maybe tomorrow, I'm going to feel better.

I'm going to get through it, and this is my life now.

♪♪ -I often get asked about, "What's the end game around grief and grief support?"

And the answer is, there is no end game other than to create a real safe environment for all of us to do the work of loving, to do the work of losing.

Grief work is about humanity.

It's about the work that we do on being more human, because everybody you meet is going through something.

♪♪ -Even in the short amount of time he was with these kids, I can't tell you the things I see in them that come from him.

The infamous pumpkin pie that Daddy makes you!

-I want pumpkin pie.

-He seemed like a good cook.

I want to be good at cooking, too.

-I know one way you're a lot like your other dad.

-How?

-Kindness.

-Hmm.

♪♪ -This experience of losing the most important person in our lives had the potential to ruin us individually, to ruin us as a family, but it won't.

♪♪ We're going to survive this and find a way to thrive because we have to.

♪♪ I'm never going to get over missing the only person I ever wanted to be married to and I believe the only person I will ever want to be married to.

That... is going to be hard for me for my whole life.

♪♪ But is it a measure of how much I loved him to let losing him destroy me?

It's not.

It's a measure of how much I loved him and how much we were committed to being a family to raise them the way we would have raised them together as much as I can, which is love and play and fun and giggles and candy.

♪♪ -If we want the kind of culture where we feel cared for inside our deepest pain and we feel capable and confident in caring for our people's pain, our friends', our family members' pain, then we need to open these conversations.

♪♪ It's hard, and it's awkward, and it's uncomfortable, but it is necessary, and it's not impossible.

You can open conversations about grief.

They're really conversations about love.

♪♪ -Grief never goes away.

It just stays.

For T.J.'s birthday, we have, like, a party.

♪♪ -Every year, on his birthday, I have cake and ice cream so that all his siblings are together remembering him, celebrating him.

His siblings blow out his birthday candle every year.

-♪ Happy birthday, dear T.J. ♪ ♪ Happy birthday to you ♪ ♪♪ -Crazy to think that my brother and my grandmom was just, poof, out of my life but still in my memory.

♪♪ -Everybody, listen up.

On the count of three, "Happy birthday, T.J." 1, 2, 3.

-Happy birthday, T.J.!

-Happy birthday, T.J.!

-Whoo!

♪♪ -There's one thing that we are promised the day that we're born, one thing that will absolutely 100% happen.

♪♪ That is that one day, we will die.

♪♪ Whether it's now or whether it's in 10, 15, 20, 30 years, someone around us will experience the death of someone significant in their life.

♪♪ If at the end of this, all we can do is simply normalize and validate their experience, we will be better humans.

♪♪ And the taboo-ness of grief will cease to exist.

♪♪ ♪♪ -What if things could be different, better?

♪♪ What would happen if we could speak the truth about our pain and hear the truth about other people's pain?

What if, instead of avoiding grief, we acknowledged it, validated it... ♪♪ ...if instead of shutting grief out, we made space for it?

♪♪ What would it look like if our actions matched our intentions, if we learned how to offer meaningful support?

♪♪ ♪♪ What if we got better at grief?

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -This program was made possible with philanthropic support from the New York Life Foundation.

-Just when he felt he might never be bold, Kai's world was changed by a sweater of gold.

What kind of sweater makes you brave when you're sad?

The kind that is stitched with the love of your dad.

Suddenly, he realized that right from the start, the same brave and its stitches was stitched in his heart.

♪♪