There is a particular kind of grief that does not announce itself. It arrives in the middle of an ordinary drive, through a phone ringing on a Sunday afternoon, in the voice of a stranger delivering news your brain simply refuses to hold. If you have ever felt the world keep moving while you were standing completely still, this episode will find you.

Stephen Panus lost his 16-year-old son Jake in August 2020, on a weekend trip that started with a peace sign from the driveway and ended in a parking lot, screaming to the sky. What followed was not a clean journey through stages. It was survival. One hour, then one day. The weight of holding a family together when you could barely hold yourself. The rage that comes when someone else’s carelessness takes everything. And the strange, hard-won realization that forgiveness was not about letting anyone off the hook. It was about releasing himself.

In this conversation, Stephen talks about what grief actually does to a body, a marriage, a family. How his wife and son experienced the same loss and walked entirely different paths through it. How the Jake Panus Walk On Scholarship grew from a house full of flowers into something that keeps his son’s name alive in the world. And what it means to show up for someone in pain, when there are no right words and showing up is the only thing that matters.

What You’ll Hear:

• The moment Stephen received the phone call that changed everything, and what happened in the minutes after
• The complexity of grief when anger, self-blame, and love are all happening at the same time
• Why the second year of grief was harder than the first, and the role of therapy in keeping his family together
• How the Jake Panus Walk On Scholarship grew from an impulse to honor a son into a living legacy
• The difference between knowing you lost someone and actually accepting it
• What Stephen would say to anyone who doesn’t know what to do when someone they love is suffering

Guest Bio:

Stephen Panus spent his career as a sports marketing executive, building brands behind the scenes. In August 2020, his 16-year-old son Jake was killed in a car accident on Block Island, Rhode Island. In the years since, Stephen has become a speaker, an author, and the creator of the Jake Panus Walk On Scholarship, a series of three scholarships honoring Jake’s spirit of compassion and lifting others. His book, Walk On, is available now and all proceeds support the scholarships. Stephen lives in Connecticut with his wife Kelly and son Liam.

https://www.stephenpanus.com/

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Keywords: child loss grief, father losing a son, grief and forgiveness, sudden loss, grief guilt shame, surviving the loss of a child, grief therapy, learning to live after loss, grieving father, walk on scholarship

There's a moment in Nick Prefontaine's story where the doctors step outside the hospital room to deliver news they don't think he can hear. His mom stops them. She knows better. Even in a coma, she believes her son is taking things in. That one act of belief, quiet and firm and unwilling to accept the ceiling others had set, shaped everything that came after.

Nick was fourteen when a snowboarding accident put him in a coma for three weeks and rewrote the map his future was supposed to follow. The doctors said he might never walk, talk, or eat on his own again. What they didn't know was that Nick was already setting a different goal. Before he could even form words, he was mouthing them. He was going to run out of that hospital.

This episode is about what it looks like to recover not just a body, but a sense of self, a purpose, and a calling. Nick shares the four-part framework he unknowingly used at fourteen and has spent decades refining. It's not a system built for winners. It's built for people in the middle of the worst thing that's ever happened to them.

What You'll Hear:

• The snowboarding accident that changed everything and the series of unlikely moments that kept Nick alive
• What his mother did in the hospital room that set the tone for his entire recovery
• The internal voice Nick heard before he could speak, and how he's learned to trust it as an adult
• The STEP system: Support, Trust, Energy, Persistence, and how Nick applied it without knowing it
• The long quiet after the fanfare faded, and what it felt like when regular life resumed
• How Nick finally said yes to the calling he'd been putting off for years and what happened when he did

Guest Bio:

Nick Prefontaine is a speaker, coach, and founder of Common Goal. At fourteen, a snowboarding accident left him in a coma with injuries so severe that doctors doubted he'd walk again. He did. He ran. And eighteen months later he was door-knocking in neighborhoods, beginning a career in real estate that would eventually make room for the work he was always meant to do. Today, Nick works one-on-one with trauma survivors, accident victims, and people in the middle of life crises, sharing the STEP system he used to recover and helping others find their next step when they can't see it yet. You can find him and download the full STEP system at nickprefontaine.com/step.

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Maybe you've felt it too. That sense that if you just did everything right, the story would unfold the way it was supposed to. That the checklist would protect you. That the guardrails were there for a reason.

Evan Boyer followed the plan. He was competitive, driven, self-focused in all the ways that tend to work well in corporate America. And then Christmas morning 2021 arrived, and the plan was gone. His wife was rushed to the OR. His daughter was born eleven weeks early, two pounds and six ounces. And Evan sat alone in a hospital room for an hour, waiting for news about whether both of them were okay.

Seventy days in the NICU has a way of teaching you things no checklist ever could. For Evan, it planted a seed. And when a second pregnancy and a professional setback arrived at the same time, that seed broke open. He left his corporate job, launched his own PR firm, and started building something that felt like his, for the first time.

What You'll Hear:

• What it felt like to stand beside his daughter in a hazmat suit, not knowing if his wife was okay
• How seventy days in the NICU quietly rewired his relationship with control
• The moment two life events collided and made staying put feel riskier than leaving
• What the first slow days of entrepreneurship actually looked like (and why he doesn't pretend it was seamless)
• How he found community in the NICU parent world by simply reaching out when he was scared
• Why he thinks the version of him sitting in that waiting room needed to hear that change is okay

Guest Bio:

Evan Boyer is the founder and CEO of Leaders PR, a boutique public relations firm he launched after years in corporate communications. A husband, father of two, and former competitive golfer, Evan lives in North Carolina and brings a grounded, energy-forward approach to everything he does. He is active on LinkedIn and can be reached at evan@leaderspr.com or leaderspr.com.

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