Another anniversary approaches without Brady.

Patti was a petite, 60ish woman from Texas, who was clearly enjoying chatting with others in the crowd around her as she and her daughter waited near the Olympic Marathon Trials start line in Orlando. Her son was running to qualify for Team USA and the chance to compete in the 2024 summer Olympics in Paris. Here’s a story about the healing power of tattoos.

As a Florida legislative political candidate, Allie Braswell’s focus was on bringing people with different perspectives together to find common ground. Braswell, 62, and an expert in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and building relationships, had no illusions that bringing people together would be easy. And it wasn’t. But it was a former state legislator from the other side of the aisle, who surprised Braswell after his cherished wife, Shellie-Ann, died unexpectedly in 2021.

“I really had to take a deep breath and sit with the uncomfortable.” That’s how Lori Bogan recalls the moments after the two-year rollercoaster ride that was her husband Matt’s pancreatic cancer diagnosis, his passing and the days and the myriad of unexpected experiences that followed.

College sweethearts Jeff and Tammy Roberts had planned to hit the road and travel across the country in their RV before Jeff’s life was taken in a workplace shooting in Orlando. She has since pursued a new chapter by relocating to her home state of Missouri to be with her children and precious grandson.

After 37 years together, Barry and Sara Brady’s life together ended with the fall that should never have happened. “I look back and now have a clearer understanding of just how overwhelmed I was about everything.” First there’s grief, sorrow, regrets and then realizing you have to start a new chapter.

As a glass-ceiling cracking journalist, Betty Rollin knew quite a lot about life and death. She was a hard-working, female broadcast reporter with NBC News who typified the now outdated descriptor “career girl,” a term that at age 87, she found amusing.

Grief is an initiation into the dark side of being human and it requires courage. So says licensed mental health therapist Emily Green who describes grief as an ongoing negotiation with oneself about how to feel, what to think and how to act.