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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Maybe you've built your whole life around being the one who shows up. The one who runs toward the hard thing when everyone else steps back. You know the feeling of being needed. What you might not know is how long you can keep that up before you lose track of who you actually are underneath it all.

Dr. Tony Dice spent years chasing the highest version of that identity, from a remote mountain town in Northern California to the Navy SEALs, from the brotherhood of elite service to the unraveling of a nine-year addiction. What looked like strength from the outside was quietly hollowing out everything beneath it. And the moment it all became undeniable wasn't some dramatic public collapse. It was a phone pushed under a bed. A call from a daycare. A son who needed him, and a room he couldn't leave.

This conversation is about what happens after that moment. Tony has been in recovery for fifteen years, earned his doctorate, returned to the very treatment center that saved his life, and built a career helping veterans, law enforcement, and high performers face the thing they've been outrunning. His story doesn't wrap up neatly, and he wouldn't want it to. It just points somewhere real.

What You'll Hear:

• The moment Tony's addiction became undeniable, and why he couldn't get out of that room
• How the identity of "the hero" became both a lifeline and a trap
• What the decision between the SEAL teams and his addiction actually felt like in the body
• The small, unlikely moment in a treatment center that redirected the rest of his life
• Why he believes addiction is far more universal than most people are willing to admit
• What it feels like to watch someone's guard finally come down, and why that's the work he was built for

Dr. Tony Dice is a Navy SEAL veteran, 15-year recovery advocate, professor of counseling at Old Dominion University, and founder of Bishop and Dice Defense, a veteran-owned business that pairs tactical training with mental health services. He is the author of After the Trident, a raw, memoir-style account of shame, addiction, and the recovery model he developed over more than a decade of working with high performers.

https://bishopdicedefense.com/

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Some shifts don't arrive all at once. They come slowly, over days and years, asking you to let go of things you weren't ready to release. If you've ever had to reimagine who you are after something took a version of you that you loved, this episode will feel like a hand on your shoulder.

Deb Meyerson was 53, healthy, and doing meaningful work as a Stanford professor when a stroke began on a drive to Lake Tahoe. What followed wasn't a quick recovery. It was a slow reckoning with the body, the voice, the professional identity, and the quiet realization that some parts of the old life weren't coming back. Her husband Steve walked every step alongside her, navigating his own grief as a care partner while trying to hold the family together. Together, they eventually found a way to transform the loss into something that now helps thousands of stroke survivors feel less alone.

This is a conversation about the kind of grief that doesn't announce itself. The kind that shows up on your happiest days and in your proudest moments, reminding you of the distance between who you were and who you are now. It's also a conversation about what it looks like to keep creating meaning when the old map no longer works.

What You'll Hear:

• How Deb's stroke unfolded slowly over a Labor Day weekend, and what the overnight "slow fall off a cliff" felt like for both of them
• The moment three years in when Deb had to leave Stanford, and how that second loss broke something open
• What it actually means to hold multiple identities at once after trauma, and how Deb navigated the "yes and" of still being herself
• The grief cycles that don't end, including the morning after their grandson was born
• How writing a book became the most affordable therapy Deb never expected, and what led them to start Stroke Onward
• What Steve learned about being a care partner, and why that role is so rarely seen or supported

Guest Bio:

Debra Meyerson is a stroke survivor, author, and co-founder of Stroke Onward, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting stroke survivors and care partners through the emotional journey of recovery. A former tenured professor at Stanford, she wrote Identity Theft with her son and husband Steve after her own experience of rebuilding identity in the wake of a stroke and aphasia. Steve Zuckerman brings decades of experience in business, economic justice, and nonprofit leadership to his role as co-founder and care partner. Together, they work to ensure that the emotional side of stroke recovery gets the attention it deserves.

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Some stories start with a loss so early that you don't even have the words for what happened. You just carry it. You carry it into every room, every relationship, every quiet moment where something feels off but you can't name why. That's where Wendy's story begins. She was seven years old when her father died, and nobody sat down to explain it. Nobody said you're allowed to be angry. Nobody said you can talk to him in the moon and the stars. The world just kept moving, and she learned to move with it.

What Wendy didn't know until she was 62 is that her instinct of not quite belonging had an answer she hadn't even thought to look for. A DNA test. A buried secret. A biological father who had come to her house while her dad was at work, and a mother who had spent a lifetime protecting everyone except the one person who most needed the truth.

This is a conversation about what it costs to grow up without language for your own grief. It's about the way a body holds on to what a family refuses to say out loud. And it's about what happens when the truth, as painful and as complicated as it is, finally lands. Wendy wrote her memoir, My Pretty Baby, as a call to action, not just a personal story. Because 64% of adults have experienced some form of adverse childhood experience, and most of them were never given permission to talk about it.

What You'll Hear:

• What it felt like to lose a parent at seven when no one gave grief a name
• The moment in an acting class in her 20s when 20 years of buried anger finally surfaced
• How growing up with an alcoholic stepfather shaped her sense of self and blame
• The DNA discovery at 62 that reframed her entire life and answered the question she didn't know she'd been asking
• What it means to feel validated by the truth, even when the truth comes too late for some conversations
• Why she wrote My Pretty Baby as a call to action and what she hopes readers carry with them

Guest Bio:

Wendy B. Correa is a writer, yogi, speaker, and advocate for honest conversations about adverse childhood experiences. Her memoir, My Pretty Baby, traces her journey through childhood loss, family dysfunction, and the identity-shifting discovery that her biological father was not who she believed him to be. She is committed to breaking the silence around ACEs and helping others find language for the things they were never allowed to say. You can find her at www.wendybcorrea.com and on Instagram at @WendyBCorrea.

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There are moments that don't give you any warning. You're living your life, things are working, and then something happens that makes you question every single thing you thought you knew. Including yourself.

That's where Chris Magleby found himself in 2017. A small piece of a pot brownie triggered a full psychotic episode, one that landed him zip-tied in his front yard, fighting cops he didn't recognize, hearing sounds that weren't there. It was terrifying. And it was, in a strange and quiet way, the beginning of something.

Chris spent the next two and a half years working through acute anxiety, a manic episode, and the slow, painful process of rebuilding a relationship with his own mind. What came out the other side was a man who understood the difference between controlling life and actually living it. Now he's channeling all of that into Mindless Labs, a mental health startup built for people who know what it feels like to be lost inside their own heads.

What You'll Hear:

1. How a childhood marked by his parents' divorce shaped his relationship with control and safety
2. The night a psychotic episode cracked everything open, and what those terrifying hours felt like from the inside
3. Why the two and a half years after were, in some ways, harder than the episode itself
4. How Chris found his way to mindfulness, meditation, and Eastern philosophy as tools for survival
5. The difference between pushing through and actually feeling your way through
6. What it means to turn your hardest experience into something that might help someone else find the light

Guest Bio:

Chris Magleby is the co-founder of Mindless Labs, a mental health startup with an apparel line that funds mental health resources and an app built around professional-led content for people navigating their own mental health journeys. He's been married for nearly 22 years, is a father, and brings to all of it a hard-earned understanding of what it means to fall apart and come back differently. You can find him and Mindless Labs at mindless.org or on Instagram at @mindlesslabs.

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Some of us spend years learning how to look okay when we are not. We get good at reading rooms, making ourselves small, keeping quiet. Not because we want to, but because it felt like the only way to stay safe. If that sounds familiar, this episode might feel like someone finally said the quiet part out loud.

Eugene Z. Bertrand grew up navigating a home shaped by domestic violence. For most of his childhood and into early adulthood, survival meant masking. It meant saying he was fine when he was not. It meant watching and waiting and staying alert. And then, just days after graduating college, something happened that nearly took his life. And the most unsettling part was how calmly he described it afterward.

In this conversation, Eugene talks about what it felt like to say it out loud for the first time, to sit with radical acceptance, to forgive not because the other person deserved it but because he did. He talks about EMDR therapy, about the friends who held space for him, about vulnerability as a superpower, and about the book he wrote, five to ten pages a day, just to keep moving forward.

What You'll Hear:

1. What it felt like to grow up in a home where uncertainty was the norm, and how that silence shaped who Eugene became
2. The moment he almost lost his life, and why it took a friend's reaction to help him truly understand what had happened
3. How radical acceptance and EMDR therapy helped him move through trauma without staying trapped in it
4. What it actually felt like to choose forgiveness, including the morning after when he was not sure he had made the right call
5. Why Eugene believes vulnerability is your greatest superpower, and what happens when you finally stop hiding your story
6. How writing a book became a form of healing, and what he hopes other survivors of domestic violence find when they read it

Guest Bio:

Eugene Z. Bertrand is a survivor, author, and social work student at Columbia University. He is the author of Resilience: Breaking the Chains, a fiction-based exploration of domestic violence and the long road toward healing. Eugene is a mentor, speaker, and passionate advocate for vulnerability as a form of strength and for creating spaces where survivors, especially men, feel safe enough to tell the truth.

If Eugene's story moved you, send him a message at eugenezbertrand.com or pick up his book, Resilience: Breaking the Chains, on Amazon. And if you want more conversations like this one, subscribe to this newsletter and never miss an episode.

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