Sally McQuillen on Carrying Her Son’s Light Forward After His Death

00:00 Some moments split a life in two. For Sally McQuillen, that moment came in January 2016 when her son Christopher, a bright, magnetic, and beautifully wild soul, died in a tragic accident at just 21 years old. In our conversation, Sally opens her heart about love, loss, and the way she's chosen to keep going, carrying Christopher's light forward while finding her own. This is a story about holding grief and gratitude in the same hands and what it means to keep your heart open 00:30 even when it aches. There were a bunch of guys up there and four of them, including Christopher, decided to get into a canoe on a frozen lake and none of them survived that decision. So it's excruciating. I'm Maciel Houli and this is The Life Shift, candid conversations about the pivotal moments that have changed lives forever. 01:10 Hello, my friends. Welcome to the LifeShift Podcast. I am here with Sally. Hello, Sally. I'm Matt. So good to be with you. Well, thank you for wanting to be a part of the LifeShift Podcast. This is a journey that I never knew that I needed. And it has been such a, I guess pleasure is the right word, but it also sounds wrong because of some of the stories that I'm holding, but such a pleasure to be able to connect with people that I probably never ever 01:40 would have bumped into in the world and have these deep, meaningful conversations and see how much we have in common despite the fact that our stories are wildly different. So thank you for just wanting to be a part of it. Absolutely. I love that. I'm all about wanting to connect with people's hearts and insights. And I do that as a therapist and as a mom and as a human. 02:09 It really has been a pleasure, even though I speaking about grief, to be interviewed and have more intimate, deep conversations with people and get to know them. It's such a gift. Yeah. Grief is like one of those things where I think for many of us, we grew up and like we weren't allowed to talk about that. Or it was like the family secrets that we keep behind closed doors. We only celebrate the big important things. 02:40 For me, know, the Life Shift podcast really exists because of my own personal experience. When I was eight, I was visiting my father on a vacation and my mom lived thousands of miles away. I lived with her full-time, but I was visiting my dad and she was going on a trip. And one day after summer school, my dad brought me in his office saying he would tell me that my mom had died in a motorcycle accident. And at that moment in time, because I lived with my mom full-time, 03:09 And now suddenly she was gone. Everything that I had ever dreamed of my future or everything that I thought or imagined that I would be doing was now no longer possible in that little eight-year-old brain. And now all my safety was gone and my identity and all the pieces that came along with it. And I say that because at the time nobody was talking about these things. And so I just push it all down. And this eight-year-old trying to exist in the world, not... 03:39 talking about his grief, not talking to anyone about anything, trying to figure out how do I get over it. And it took me about 20 plus years to kind of go through the grief journey of losing my mother. And once I was able to start talking about it, now I can't shut up about it because I think it's so important, right? Like, it's just part of the human experience, unfortunately, but also fortunately because, I mean, it's really taught me a lot. So I don't know if you feel the same about your grief journeys. 04:09 I very much do. Oh, there have been so many gifts. when my son Christopher died over nine years ago now, I felt very much the way that you described feeling, the trauma of my life shifting. It's sort of akin to when Christopher, who was my first born, was about four. 04:39 daughter was two, we had lightning strike the tree next to our house and our home, the attic caught fire. And it was pretty, you know, it was sort of like the scene in a movie where all of a sudden we're racing out the door in, you know, this rainstorm and I've got two babies in my arms and we're smelling smoke and we 05:06 ended up having to move out of our house for like five months while it was being put back together after being rescued from the fire. And lo and behold, someone reported to me that across the street, like maybe I want to say 200, 500 yards away were these shavings from the tree that had been 05:35 hit by lightning. And that was sort of how I experienced, I felt like when I was informed that my son had died, it was like my heart had just been hit by lightning. And I felt completely eviscerated. And there's something about an experience where we are broken open in that way. 06:04 that is both excruciating and beautiful at the same time. Yeah, and it's like so hard to say and I'm so sorry for your loss and I know we're going to get into that and how that really changed things for you. But I want to want to set the scene a little bit. I think that. 06:25 these experiences and sharing them are so important because I don't know if you felt this way, but when we're in these moments, these really hard moments that we were describing, it feels like we're the only person that's ever experienced that and no one could understand. we know logically that we're not, but it feels so isolating. And so I always think this podcast like... 06:51 finds the right ears where someone's listening and they're going through something and they're like, oh, I'm not alone in this. I did feel and have felt, you I was a little girl who always felt things deeply with a certain degree of sensitivity. And that meant, you know, now it's interesting as a therapist who helps people who may be struggling with depression recognize what's 07:19 some of those symptoms really, how to articulate what that experience is for themselves. it's inevitably you feel alone. And so as a little girl who had some degree of sadness, I imagined that no one else knew what this was like, you know, to be. And I think that even persists, you know, now into my 60s and when I was 07:48 writing this, think there was a certain impetus to try to explain from the inside out what it feels like to be me and to be feeling these things deeply. And there was a yearning for the connection that you described because there's certain, like this losing a child and losing a parent is highly alienating. Especially like 08:17 You mentioned in the 80s and even now in 2025, we still have so far to go to be able to broach the subject of death and grief in such a way that people's first instinct isn't to run from it. You've kind of hinted at a couple of things of 2025, Sally, but 08:43 If someone would say, who's Sally in 2025? How do you identify? How do you show up in the world? Where to even begin to answer that question? But I feel like right now I'm in this really cool, it's not the Twilight chapter, but it's sort of like I'm 62. I put my book, this memoir, Reaching for Beautiful, all about what it's like to have lost and loved and raised a wild child. 09:12 middle child, my daughter Caroline is getting married in a couple of weeks. I'm looking forward to grandparenthood, my youngest. It's just, it's a really, it's really cool. Everything is kind of feeling integrated in my life in a beautiful way. The perspective that I gained from my trauma, from more than one trauma, but certainly from the trauma of losing Christopher. 09:40 is informing my work, it's giving me purpose. I don't plan on retiring anytime soon. I feel sort of enlivened in this stage of my life when it otherwise feels like things are wrapping up. I feel like I'm just getting started. Yeah. So maybe you can, and however you want to do this, paint the picture of the Sally before. 10:07 Whichever kind of life shift moment you want to talk about. I know you've mentioned Christopher. If that's where you want to start, you feel most comfortable to start sharing your story, the before version of you. So I grew up as the daughter of an alcoholic and a child of divorce. And I was the oldest child and the only girl. And it turned out that my father didn't know what to do with a girl. 10:37 I've said this at various times more recently, and my brothers have corrected me. I've said, he didn't really love me, but the truth is I think that he didn't have the capacity for great love. And so his capacity was very limited and he did the best he could, right? But he was very much compromised by his addiction. 11:05 So that is a thread through my story, my life story, and it's a thread in the story of Reaching for Beautiful as well. I ended up, and I do credit my father with this, I ended up getting sober at the age of 25. And that opened up the beginnings of spiritual life where... 11:31 I began to have the opportunity to find answers for so many life questions that I didn't have, I just didn't have answers for. And having a volatile father like mine sort of set the stage for becoming a fearful, sad little girl. And I also think genes play a role in all of this nature nurture. But I then 12:01 after getting sober at 25, met a man who was also sober and we became best friends and got married and went on to have children. And that was about the time that I decided to, because I was getting like this introduction to a life that was more service oriented. 12:30 I decided I wanted to leave the marketing world behind and reinvent myself as a therapist. And I remember going to social work school and hearing about nature and nurture and thinking that when we had children, we would just nurture the heck out of them such so that they would not 12:58 inherit any predisposition to alcoholism. Well, I was naive and didn't appreciate that. It turns out if you do have two parents with any alcoholic genes, you are up to eight times as likely to develop addiction. And so there was no amount of loving 13:26 my children so much that I could offset their proclivities. so with Christopher, raising him was challenging because he was, again, not only did he inherit our alcoholism, but he inherited 13:50 a recklessness and a wildness and a free spiritedness that both his parents possess. he also had attention deficit, which at that time we didn't know. And it sort of seemed like that's my path when I was finally diagnosed with depression and anxiety. 14:15 It was so funny because I'd probably been depressed and anxious all my life, but had never had words for it. And I thought, wow, this has been true for so long. And I was sort of on the cutting edge of beginning to talk about it. I felt sort of like a guinea pig as a mother for somebody who, a child that was different, that was hard to control, that didn't sit still. And so there was this... 14:45 feature of my life of sort of being always feeling different. And like we talked about earlier, feeling a little alone in my differences because people weren't yet just like you, people weren't yet talking about these things. was not, they weren't conversations being held. I think when my parents got divorced, we were the only ones I knew where that had happened. So I feel like that's just been my path. 15:14 I remember when I was in college and very wild and parting and thinking in terms of the 1980s as being the last of the extra wild children, although my son later proved me wrong. But I think it's just been an interesting position to be in that there have been different pivotal moments where I've been facing challenges. 15:44 sort of out ahead of things and feeling like I don't know where to turn. I don't know if that hold it through, but. No, think that I think what's important is all the things that you talked about are things that I think society used to probably still does in some cases assign some kind of shame to where there shouldn't be. And so many of us grew up in this where 16:14 where whatever we were addressing in our own self, whether that was some kind of attention deficit or whatever it may be, we assume that we should be shamed, about it and not talk about it. When in reality, we're probably not the only ones that feel this way. We're probably not, you were probably not the only parent going through something similar with a child like Christopher, you know, and the more we're able to talk like we do now, hopefully, 16:42 people don't have to feel like so isolated and alone. But at the same time, hearing your story, it's like you have these really challenging moments. And for some reason, and maybe you have more insight into this, you chose to change it. For instance, getting sober. Like that's a big, big decision that's probably very easy to continue down a road of drinking and. 17:10 having a wild time while you're doing it, right? So there's gotta be something deep within you that's causing these changes. Have you kind of identified why you make these bigger moves? That's such an interesting way of framing it. I remember when I did have the opportunity to stop. 17:35 drinking and got really lucky that I was able to do so because it was extremely challenging to change my life entirely. That meant not spending time with so many people that were dear friends. Even today, was just recently talking to somebody about I have some friends that I partied with right out of college that I had to. 18:03 ways with and we've maintained a connection. But regrettably, we can't have as much of a connection as I would like because their lifestyle is different than mine. And truth is, I would love to be going to one of my old friend's daughter's weddings this weekend, but I'm sure she would have thought, oh, Sally would not be interested in coming because it's going to be kind of. 18:31 you know, there's going to be a lot of alcohol being served, you know. And so there is some loss around having, you know, entered into a new way of living. It's funny, it's very analogous. And I think maybe that's why this is coming up in this interview. Getting sober and losing a child are 19:00 two incredibly like pivotal platforms where there's a lot of loss. know, you're letting go of, you're letting go and then you're sort of taking a plunge. You've got to have faith to be able to survive them. Yeah. I think there's, to add to that, I think from the human side, there's a lot of choice that comes in both of those and Hear Me Out in the obviously, 19:29 When someone dies, we don't necessarily have a choice there, but we do have a choice of how we move through and what we do after and how we become a different version of ourselves. There's so much opportunity for us to lose ourselves. It's so much easier to just turn into a bump on a log and do nothing. know, like it's so much easier to feed into the hard parts. 19:56 It's probably so much easier to stay drinking and party with your friends versus saying, hey guys, we really can't associate anymore until I get my life into a place that I want. Those are so hard. It's so easy to do the other thing. like, kudos to you for moving through hard situations. I mean, that takes something. Thank you so much. I, you know, at 25, 20:23 that was a different kind of hard. You know what I mean? Like now it's a hard that I could look back at and think, well, that wasn't so bad relative to other hard things. it was, it was a big turning point. I think, so I did not been for what I got in the way of gifts as a result of making that life change. 20:52 I don't think I'd have had the capacity to be deliberate in the choices that I've tried to make since Christopher went to heaven. So I think I, you know, certainly I need to be really open with, especially if there are any other grieving parents listening, that I don't know if there is a grieving parent who doesn't 21:21 struggle to survive, who doesn't at some point during the course of their grieving period ask themselves if they think they might want to die themselves. And part of what helped make it possible to survive this grave loss is to be very deliberate in my decision making to not 21:50 allow myself to fall into the trap of self-pity for too long, to move in the direction of gratitude, to not fall into the trap of any number of things that we as humans will. And I had already these pre-existing tools to help me move beyond them. There's nothing harder. 22:17 that I've ever known or faced. And I think being a therapist too, it was like time to practice what I preach, you know, and apply some things to myself. Only a little bit. makes it harder from the standpoint of having high standards for myself, you know, holding myself to high standards. But I think everything is about sort of being, bringing more consciousness to 22:47 Like for example, what I thought was strong, what I would have thought was strong before I got sober and recognized that it took strength to recognize that I was actually powerlessness and didn't have any control once I picked up a drink. It took strength to be more vulnerable in allowing grief to have more of its way with me because I would have thought that that was weak. 23:17 Instead of, know, everything needs to be flipped on its head, it feels like in moving through great loss and moving through great challenge. feels like, oh, wait a minute, as a human, I'm inclined to think of, you know, oh, I've been hurt and devastated. I'm going to close up my heart now. I'm going to not risk being loving. Yeah, that's the easy route. 23:47 Right? And again, it's just this, it's exactly what we've cited from the beginning. You know, it's like, I can take the easy road. I've had, I'd had enough experience making a choice of the harder road, recognizing that there was some long-term gain. Before that, I was all about short-term gain. Yeah, I can tell you from personal experience, mean, grieving or pushing down or avoiding or just being oblivious to 24:16 how to grieve properly for more than two decades. It was the easy route, but it was hard. Like, it was probably just as hard as moving through because then you get, got to early 30s and I kind of started unlocking things and kind of processing it appropriately. And for me, it became compounded grief because what happened is I would now actively grieving the loss, but also now I'm grieving all the things I didn't do because I didn't grieve. So. 24:46 You know, as hard as those, I, to be fair, no one around me had the tools. I didn't have the tools. We didn't know what we were doing. So I couldn't really actively choose to figure it out. I was too young. But had I been introduced to any of that, maybe at nine years old, 10 years old, the whole life would be different. We probably wouldn't be talking right now. So, you know, like as easy as the route is to avoid and shrink and those things, it also makes everything really hard. 25:14 you know, later down the You're so right. It really does. And it's human instinct. Like, none of us want to touch into that kind of pain. We want to do everything in our power to avoid it. But either way, hard, right? So it's either hard with the big decision or, you know, and being really intentional and all that, or you wait so long that it's just as hard, you know? So it's like, may as well do the right thing now. 25:43 So kudos to you for making that big decision, making changes. Sounds like you found some spirituality elements to it. I mean, lead us closer to when you lost Christopher. how were you then and then after the loss? Like, what did that look like for you? You know, raising him, I was admittedly consumed with a lot of fear. I had, and still do, have... 26:11 the biggest crush on this human. son, you know, objectively was gorgeous, charming, just like, you know, I always try to sort of like a meteor, you know, I try to capture, you know, his spirit in reaching for beautiful. And because if nothing else, when people do read the memoir, I want them to have, you know, a taste for, you know, of what he, you know, 26:41 what and I try I continue to try to embody him because he was so purely in the moment and so sort of innocently loving that I want to kind of return to that. I ask you when you reflect on on this meteor of a child that you had, did you know that in the moment? Did you feel that in the moment? Or is this more of a reflection on and realizing what what a meteor he was in your life? 27:12 You know, I think I felt it in the moment. think on some subconscious level, I intuitively thought, you know, I don't, you know, it's sort of like, it's this is too good to be true kind of a feeling. really, it really, the love that I had for him was almost too good to last. And yet it's going to last into eternity. But I think that I was also, 27:41 simultaneously fearful because I never loved anything more until that moment, you know, sorry to my husband, but something about, you know, my child, the depth of love for each of my children is just beyond words. But he was, you know, also extremely challenging and difficult and defiant. so the fear comes in like not protecting, not being able to protect him from everything. 28:13 Absolutely, absolutely. From the get-go. He couldn't easily be soothed. was colicky. He was running by nine months old. He was in the emergency room because I took my eye off him to tend to his baby sister. He wanted relentlessly to be wherever his friends were. He was extremely social. So before he ever... 28:41 picked up a drink, I could see the writing on the wall and it just sort of fear through my veins because I have always been sort of hard on myself and I thought, okay, to be a good mom, I've got to rein him in. And ironically, he couldn't be reined and I did make some decisions. 29:09 that were good ones so that he very quickly, as soon as he started experimenting with alcohol and drugs, it wasn't long before he started to have some consequences. He struggled in school. So by 16, we had to sacrifice having him home and we had the privilege of being able to afford to get him treated. 29:37 but we were without him for a long period of time. mean, of course we were visiting him. You we sent him to a wilderness program and we sent him to a therapeutic boarding school and he got clean and sober and we had three sacred years during which we could, you know, deepen our connection. And then at the point when he wanted to, because much like his mother and much like I think probably most of humankind, 30:06 We do feel shame if we feel like we're different in any way, instead of celebrating our differences. And he wanted to go off to college like his peers and be able to party again and hope that maybe having been sober, he'd be able to pull it off. Even when he was sober, he had a near death. He had two, maybe more. 30:35 I think he had three near-death experiences even before we lost him at 21 in an accident. At that time, he'd been in college. He was having an amazing time, but he was partying heavily and as were all of his friends, because that's what you do when you're in a fraternity and in a college environment. He and three boys were up at a friend's 31:04 lake house over their holiday break in January of 2016. And there were a bunch of guys up there and four of them, including Christopher, decided to get into a canoe on a frozen lake and none of them survived that decision. So it's excruciating. Yeah. 31:31 Yeah, I mean, I'm so sorry for your loss. You do light up when you talk about him and you can see it. it's excuse me for this comparison because it's not meant in any kind of negative way. But last year, lost my I lost the first dog that I've ever had that's known me through a lot of things. I'm not trying to compare a human to a dog here. 32:01 But, and this is the reason I asked you the question, if you noticed, if he was a meteor during this dog, he was crazy. As I defined him for 14 years, he was just loved everything. Everyone was running around, would go as fast as he could, would hurt himself because he was going so fast. And I would just dismiss this as, he's crazy. He's just nuts, you know? And after he died, and I'm sad that I realized this after, but after I died, I realized that he, 32:31 just wanted to get the most out of every moment in life. And as you were describing Christopher, I was thinking of my Mikey, who's back here in this picture, and thinking of like, wonder how you, like if you thought that, like if you noticed in the moment that like he was just, like it sounds like he was trying to, although he had this addiction, also trying to like live life as much as possible. Would you agree or am I way off base? 33:00 100 % no, he was packing everything and and you're right, there is a certain degree of hindsight like you had with Mikey that I have with Christopher, you know, and I've had to, you know, over nine years to think about it. But even fairly early in my grieving process, it was like, you know, you know, sometimes people say things. 33:27 You know, they don't mean they don't mean to say things that are hurtful. They don't know what to say. They don't know what to say. They're trying to make sense of things, you know, and somebody may have even said to me, you know, he wasn't meant to be here forever. And I think that that really is true. But you still don't say it. But right, right, right. Like, I don't know that I would say that to someone. But I but I do feel like that. Yes, this this. 33:57 someone asked me in a podcast recently even in an interview said, do you feel like this was written? And as I've sort of endeavored to make meaning and understand things and- That you'll never really know truly, right? Right, that I'll never really know, sort of grasping at straws. Various people have talked about different exit points and, I mean, the fact that he passed at 21, it just feels 34:27 Like, he was so youthful. I can't even know, you know, one of the ways that has been, has given me so much solace. One of the best things that has given me a means to survive this is loving any number of his friends. And many of them are, they're getting married, they're having babies. Christopher would be 31 today. And, but I can't. 34:56 even in as much as, of course I could say, I wish he were here and doing that because it's what I know he wanted to be a father and a husband. I also, yeah, he is indeed forever 21. Yeah, speaking of the people saying things, I mean, my mom was 32 when she died and I was eight and 35:22 You know, you're at the mass or whatever and people are coming up to you and they're saying the most ridiculous of things, meaning well, I think, but like, you know, she completed her time here on her task here on Earth or she's in a better place. And I'm eight. Like, just a note to anyone listening, please don't say those things to like a little kid or an adult, really. Just be there. Say you're there. If you need anything, let me know. If you need to talk, let me know. You know, like. 35:50 Those are the things that we need to hear. It's so true and it's so hard and I myself have formally made mistakes and still sometimes don't have the right words or know what to say and there are no right words. But you know, we were speaking about the healing power of connection and feeling less alone. And so whenever anyone has been in this situation, 36:20 you know, and not known what to do, there's, there's going to be another chance to get it, you know, to do it better. And, to do it better only means just sort of dipping in with a little bit of compassion, a little bit of empathy, a little bit of, oh, you must, this, this, this must be hurting so, so deeply. And I'm here. Yeah. We really love those acknowledgements, right? Yeah. It's just, 36:50 recognizing or seeing our grief or witnessing our grief, I think is really important. And just being there and letting the person know that you're there. That's all I can do. That's all I know I can show up for is like, hey, I don't exactly know what you're feeling right now, but I've been through something similar. So if there's ever a time you want to talk about anything, you know, like we can talk, we can laugh, we can do all the things we can do. We don't have to be sad all the time. That was something for me. I felt like I always had to be sad. 37:20 whenever I talked about my mom and it's like, well, no, you're a human. So like there are other emotions that can also come through. So if you laugh one day when you're watching a sitcom and it happens to be two days after someone died, that's also okay. And like the permission was so missing in my life, but I'm sure other people have been there too. No, think that's really, it's interesting that you mentioned that because I have a quote in the beginning of Reaching for a Beautiful. 37:50 from poet Mark Nepo, and it says something like, everything is beautiful and I am so sad. It sort of is designed to get to the fact that, and it wasn't until grieving Christopher that I even recognized that there could be so many divergent simultaneous emotions all at once. And like that, 38:18 it was imperative to let them all be present, including moments of, if there could be a moment of joy, that it wasn't disloyal to my child to actually welcome that to. Yeah, that's something, it took me a long time to learn that, but it's so important that we can and we should be allowed to show up as full humans, even deep in our grief or whatever thing we're facing. 38:48 I'm curious, and you don't have to go back to this moment if you don't want to, but when you found out that Christopher had passed, what is life like at that moment for you? Like, what is, is that a, I've totally blacked out and I can't remember? Is that something that you vividly remember? I vividly remember it. It was a lot like free falling into, you know, 39:17 It sounds so trite, it's like you really lose the like, people talk about you lose the ground beneath your feet. I felt as if I lost the ground beneath my feet. Like I felt like my world was rocked and I was free falling and I. It doesn't sound right, by the way. You know, it's sort of like the words that we sort of like that, you know, that maybe sound until you've gone through it, you don't understand it and. 39:46 I bet a lot of people understand that feeling, unfortunately. As a mother, I was especially traumatized by imagining that my child may have been afraid or imagining that he may have suffered in any way. And then that I couldn't be there. I write about this, I, I, so he was reported missing at first and I knew. 40:15 I knew then that he had died, but I couldn't catch up to it. I was bargaining. And my husband went to go find out what had happened, driving up to Wisconsin from Illinois. I was foxhole, prayer-ing it. was like, God, tell you what, take me. Take me. 40:44 you know, because I obviously had some sort of premonition and I just knew, I just knew. So I needed to do, I am a therapist, so going to a, you know, I was seeing a therapist at the time. Thankfully, I worked with my therapist and then worked with a specialized therapist who helped me deal with some of that specific trauma around his death itself. 41:13 And that was EMDR therapy, which you may or may not have heard of, but it's just a more specialized means by which, you know, trauma can be lifted. Yeah. I've had many people on this podcast talk about the breakthrough of EMDR and how it's helped them uncover all sorts of trauma and move through. yeah, so definitely modalities are so important to think about. think so many people only think about talk therapy. 41:43 And there's just so many modalities that it's just like certain, you know, we don't like all the foods. So like not gonna like all the therapies. Exactly. And at the same time, Matt, I also feel like we need all or as many resources as possible, you know, and any which way we can, because never before was I inclined to 42:13 feel like I reason to take care of myself like this. I knew I had to. I knew it was essential that it was this therapy, that therapy, taking time off work. was getting massages. was being compassionate with myself in a way that I'd never before been because I could say things like, okay, you should be... 42:40 you should be this or you should be that. But that was a kind of cruelty that I couldn't afford to, of course I still humanly fall into that. But this is, and I would imagine you feel the same way, but for me, I will be grieving my son for the rest of my life. it took me seven years to feel like myself again. 43:11 Do you feel like yourself or a different version? Well, I think I'm a better version. A better version? Yeah. A different and better? I think so. Yeah. I'd like to think so. Yeah. I would imagine too, and I don't know if this is probably something, if someone's experienced this, like, was it hard to stay showing up for your other children while grieving? 43:41 Christopher? Very much so. And yet I forced myself to do so. And I don't know if I effectively did it. I've been able to talk to my living children a little bit about, know, try to do things, right? Like I wanted to spare them my grief. The one thing I knew I wanted to do for sure was like, 44:10 not have them feel like they had to take care of me. But were they impacted by a mother who's grieving their brother? You better believe it, of course. But I did, I insisted. remember my youngest, he was 16 and in high school and a lacrosse player. that week I could barely, I think like the next day I was 44:39 at his high school talking to the administration about how to support him. And then within a week, and neither of us probably should have been doing this, but we were doing it, we were off at a lacrosse tournament. I remember being in an airport and I couldn't eat, I could barely see. So I tried, I tried to, yeah. 45:05 That's, mean, it's really challenging because I think we want to be this, so we want to protect the people that are still here with us, you know, but we also want to honor the person that's gone and how do we do it all and we can't and we can't do it all perfectly. And guess what? That's also okay because we are flawed human beings that need to exist in this world and move through it. So, I mean, kudos to you for doing what you did. Yeah, accepting that, you know, like I continue to try to work on, you know, reminding myself that 45:35 you know, that I am only human. And one thing I did recognize is like, no, I'm going to have to resource my children and everybody processes their grief differently, but I'm not going to be the one to be able to help them with this. It's enough for me just to put my own oxygen mask on. Yeah. No, I love that. And the key, this is me assuming, but like it feels like the key for you is that you knew the power of therapy and you knew 46:04 that it was something that you should immediately jump into where there are people out there that have experienced these things have never gone to therapy because their parents said it was X, Y, and Z and they should never do it because you know, whatever, whatever that trope was for so long and you had that key and that key not only helped kind of start to open the door for you but then it allowed you to know full well. 46:30 that your kids might need a different version of it or whatever that may be. And I think there's something beautiful about Yeah. I mean, again, one of my children was reluctant to and just sort of accepting. And that helped me in my marriage very, very much. This was a shared anguish. And we were going to. 46:57 hope with it differently and just sort of respect our differences and our pace and our ways. then that's beautiful. You know, I think, yeah, like I got to benefit a little bit from certain things, you know, and I spoken about this, like I, I would have, you know, curled up in a ball gladly, but my husband needed to be out and about. so there were certain things that, you know, we could influence one another, I think favorably. yeah, you him slow down and he helps you. 47:27 step into the world a little bit. And no, I mean, the experience that you had, I would imagine that there's a high percentage of marriages that don't succeed. I think it is. It's pretty high when when someone a couple loses a child. I've read, you know, statistics that aren't very favorable and and we knew we were up against that and that it took. 47:52 work. It took that. Yeah, it took it took work. It did. It took it took work. And then also even just this like that appreciation for the very thing that I said about my children, you know, which was just sort of like, I love you, and I'm sorry that you're hurting, but I don't have any bandwidth for anything exceeding my own grief. So you're gonna have to find comfort elsewhere. You know, yeah, that's an awareness piece that I think that sometimes we put on 48:20 like we have to be a savior in all aspects, especially mothers. I feel like you all often, you know, bear the brunt of the work. And it's something beautiful to hear and give permission to other people, mothers, parents, individuals out there that like that acknowledgement and saying it out loud to someone, there's so much power and strength in that, in my opinion, to admit that like, I don't, I can't. 48:48 I can barely take care of myself. Let me help you find someone that can or let me let you know that I just can't do it right now. Otherwise I'm going to be left with nothing. And I think there's such strength and beauty in that. I couldn't agree more. It's again that opposite day of actually instead of spreading oneself that thin. 49:16 You're so physiologically, emotionally, every which way, you're not at, you you're at about zero percent. There's just not a lot here to give, you know, but over time, yeah. No, I mean, there's so much power in moving through grief. And in your case, you mentioned, you know, that you will be grieving him in whatever way that looks like for the rest of your life. It might not be as intense as day one all the time. 49:44 It might be, you know, and that's how that goes. And in my case, it's different. And I only knew my mom for eight years, and therefore I don't really know my mom. And so for me, more of my grieving process and when I kind of felt the door close on that was the grief of all the things that I didn't have. 50:11 with a mother figure around. And so once I kind of worked my way through that, it feels like I recognize her. She was my mother. She's more of an idea at this point. And I celebrate her. And I was telling someone the other day, it's like, my grief with her is like the sweater in the closet that sometimes I will put on, but I'm not always looking at it. I'm not always wearing it. I live in Florida. So I don't wear very often. Right. It's a little different. No, do believe, yeah, it's different. And 50:41 similar in that the nature of grief is that it ebbs and it flows and that we also integrate it and your life has grown to be so much bigger, but there is a space within you that honors her, what you share. And it's interesting for me because with Christopher and I think like had it been the other way around with 51:11 you know, your mother losing you, it's almost like I have to, he's a part of me. Yeah. You know? Yeah. Yeah. And I sort of I actually feel like your mother is a part of you. But you know, it might be less. I think she would see the value in this space where now, because of that loss, because of screwing up so much in my grief journey, I now get to talk to people about these really hard 51:39 personal moments, some really positive moments as well in other stories, but and just have the space where two humans can come together. We're not trying to solve anything. We're not trying to teach anyone anything. We're just listening to each other. We're just here and absorbing each other's story. And so I think my mom would really appreciate that in the connection that her story created for me in this way. So that's what I would say. There's no doubt. 52:07 No, no, no doubt in my mind. I certainly feel that's true. And I love it. I love. Yeah, I know that our loved ones in spirit want nothing more than for us to lead very fulfilling, purposeful, joyful lives. I sure hope so. I like to kind of wrap up these conversations with a question and, you know, it's an impossible question and it's probably one you thought about because you're a therapist. But 52:36 this version, Sally, August 2025, although this will come out probably in October, but August 2025, Sally, you could talk to the Sally that was kind of foxholing, kind of bargaining, trying to negotiate something different. is there anything that you'd want to say to her or be with her and say something? Yes, I love it. I, I 53:03 I want to say you will be, Christopher will have taught you even more. There will be more light that enters into your life than you could fathom. There will be appreciation for the fact that love is the only thing that matters. Keep your heart. 53:31 wide open, even when you want to protect it. And, you know, just really know that there's so much to be grateful for. So much more to do and so many opportunities to share Christopher with the world. I mean, what you're doing now is 53:55 If people want to like check out your book or learn more about you or connect with you or tell you their story, where's the best way to find you, find all your stuff? I love it. They can communicate with me on my website, www.sallymcuillen.com. Reaching for Beautiful. My memoir is available wherever books are sold and via my website. 54:24 Thank you for your support and connecting. Of course. How are you feeling if someone's like, hey, I heard your story, Sally, really resonated with this particular part? I want to tell you. Are you OK with people reaching out to you in that way? I really am. I'm all about that. I'm all about connection any which way. Deep conversation. You better believe it. Awesome. 54:50 Well, I encourage anyone listening now, if anything that Sally said, your story might be different, but she might have said something that resonates with you or connects with you in a way in part of your journey, please reach out to her. I think that's how we make this world a better place is by connecting with each other, listening to each other, telling each other our stories. The more that we can connect, I think the better we will be. So please do that. And I'd like to say thank you, Sally, for joining me today and thank you all for listening. 55:18 I will be back next week with a brand new episode. Thanks again, Sally. 55:33 For more information, please visit www.thelifeshiftpodcast.com