What Remains When Everything Falls Apart

Ever wonder what happens when the person who holds everyone else together loses their own foundation? That's the story I'm sharing in this deeply personal episode of She Suite Society.

While I've spent countless hours creating space for women to share their authentic stories, I realized I've been asking for vulnerability while keeping my own deepest experiences hidden. That changes today with the launch of "Stories from My Life" - a raw, unfiltered look at the moments that shaped who I am.

This first personal story takes you through the most devastating loss of my life - my mother, my person, my rock. The woman who taught me what unconditional love feels like, taken by cancer just days after my birthday. I share the moment my world split into "before" and "after," and how I found myself completely shattered, with no idea how to move forward.

The turning point came from an unexpected source - a photograph of my five-year-old self. Looking at this joyful little girl with disheveled pigtails and a rainbow shirt forced me to ask: if she met me today, would she be proud of who she became? That question became my north star as I rebuilt my life brick by brick, through divorce, single parenthood, and professional challenges.

What I discovered through grief's strange alchemy is that when everything is stripped away - all the labels, titles, and external markers of identity - what remains is our essential self. The same curious, mischievous spirit that existed before life's complications. And that discovery contains immense power.

If you're walking through darkness, questioning your strength, or wondering how you'll ever feel whole again, this story is for you. Because sometimes our greatest empowerment doesn't come from avoiding pain, but from learning to navigate it and discovering what we're truly made of. Let me be your guide through that darkness.

Transcript

Introducing Stories From My Life

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to a special episode of She Suite Society. I'm your host, Dahlia, and today I'm doing something different. While this podcast has always been about creating space for women to share their authentic stories, I've realized that I've been asking you to be vulnerable while keeping my own deepest experiences close to the chest. So I'm starting a new series woven throughout our regular episodes called Stories from My Life, where I'll share the moments that shaped who I am today. These aren't the highlight real moments or the carefully curated versions of my journey. They're the raw, unfiltered experiences that force me to grow, often when I least wanted to. Today's story is about the most difficult chapter of my life, losing my mother. For those of you who've experienced the death of a parent or your person, you know there's no preparing for that moment when your world splits in two before and after. But what I want to share with you isn't just about grief. It's about how the most devastating loss can also become the birthplace of your deepest empowerment. This is the story of how losing my person, my anchor, my teacher of unconditional love ultimately taught me how to find my own power. It's about the strange alchemy of grief that can transform the deepest pain into the strongest foundation you'll ever build. If you're currently walking through loss, questioning your strength or wondering how you'll ever be whole again, this story is for you. Sometimes our greatest empowerment comes not from avoiding the darkness, but from learning to navigate it and discovering what we're truly made of. So settle in for more personal conversation, one where I'm not the interviewer, but simply a woman, sharing how life broke me open and taught me to rebuild myself from the inside out. So I'm gonna tell you a little bit of my story so that you have um that sprinkled in as promised in one of the earlier episodes. Uh I am that person, I am that rock. They call me the helper, the fixture. Literally, my title is VP of stuff at my job. I'm I'm the person, the go-to person for a lot of people, whether it be at work or personal. Um I'm my kids' safe space, I'm my friend's confident, I am that rock. Um, your one phone call. Hopefully not from jail, but if you, you know, I'm there for you, there too. Um what's funny about people like us, because I know I'm not the only rock out there. In fact, a lot of these women that I've had on this podcast are the rocks of their families too and their circles. Um I also have a rock. Every rock has a rock. And my rock was my mom, but she was more than my rock. She was my person. Um, she was she was my person. We we were, for lack of better words, we'll it's not. She was my person, and she she was the type of person for me that I would call, we could talk about nothing or everything in between, and just literally that that comfort that you get from being with your person. I was hers, she was mine. We equally went through a whole heck of things that I'll I'll tell you some extra stories in some other episodes. Um, but for this one, I just want to explain if you have your person out there and they're still with you, I hope you hug them so tight. Because once you lose them, especially their life, um, it's gone forever. I mean, you have bits and pieces. So she was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer. And two years to the date of her diagnosis, she passed away. That also happened to be seven days after my birthday. Um, and anybody that's lost anybody to a debilitating disease typically knows that um right before they pass, they get this rally, this like last burst of energy. And you think like, oh, they're gonna get better, it's gonna change, they're gonna do great. Uh, but really, it's just that that last big energy before they pass. And her last big rally was right before uh right on my birthday. Um, she got her last big hurrah just to sing me happy birthday. That's how much of my person she was. Um, and I could talk forever about the coincidences and the synchronicities of the dates and all things like that, but that's not for that episode. So she passed, and I had no idea how I was going to move on. I didn't know who I was, I had no foundation anymore, I had no sense of reality, I had nothing. I was broken, really broken. And I looked to my husband because you know, that's why what a lot of people would do is you look to the partner you chose in life, and um we were not equal. He could not, could not meet me at the level or the depth of grief that I was in. And I don't fault him for that. Uh, it was it was something that he just couldn't touch, and I'm not sure he'll ever be able to. Um, and that's okay, but it wasn't okay for me. I needed support and I didn't know what to do. I still have these two little kids, and they're looking to me, and I had nobody to turn to. Um, so you really have a few choices then. What do you do? What do you do? So as I'm sitting there trying to figure out what the meaning of my life is, having lost the one person that helped me make sense of both our lives, uh to say I was lonely is an understatement. So I went through some old pictures because, you know, I was reminiscing about old times and what it was like when she was here, and I ended up finding this five-year-old picture of myself. You kind of see it. How can I look at this little girl and not recognize me? My mom taught me a lot of things, one of which she loved me so profoundly, so unconditionally. I didn't have to do anything, I just had to exist to be loved. And likewise, it's all she had to do when she was with me. That's, I think, a good telltale sign of that's your person is you just sit with one another and you don't have to do anything, be anything, say anything. Just the fact that you exist is all you need. That's the love. That's that love, so profound. How can I look at this little girl? Look at her. She has these disheveled hair, pigtails, braids, rainbow shirt. She's so excited for life. She's so happy with who she is. She's she's just this little girl. And if I'm looking at her, and then I looked in the mirror, and I and I just thought, if she if I met her today, if she met me today, if she was like, Oh, that's how I turned out to be, would she be proud? Would she look at me and think, yeah, I'm gonna do great? And it took me a moment to really sit with that thought. And uh, I knew without a shadow of a doubt that she would. She would be proud of all the stuff that we would go through together, of all the things that we would get to. And at the end of it all, I'm still her, I'm still me, and I'm still here. Yes, I lost my person. Yes, that was shattering and devastating, but I'm still here. I didn't go. So if I'm still here, I better make her proud. I better make me proud, and I better do something with it. Because I'm still here. So I started rebuilding my life brick by brick, piece by piece. Marriage was gone, that's okay. I had to heal from that grief too. Uh becoming a single parent, not easy, but I could do that too. Because it in reality, and this might not be great for people to hear, but in reality, losing my person, losing my mom was to date the hardest thing I've ever gone through. It wasn't the divorce, it's not being a single mom, it's losing my person. Because once you understand that, you can't get that back, you can't get back the time that you have, you start to understand how precious time is. And you don't want to waste a moment of it. Not with the wrong people, not in the wrong spaces, not at the wrong companies, not anywhere. You don't want to waste a moment. And I understood that. Like I just said, single mom, uh, VP, director, wife, friend, all these labels, all these labels mean absolutely nothing. I know some people worked really, really, really hard for these labels that they got. Obviously, like PhD, doctor. It's all feeding your ego. You are still you. You are still a human. You can still and are capable of caring about one another and lifting one another up. I had a network of people at the time, but they were they were sprinkles of people, right? Sprinkles of friends that were trying to lend a helping hand to try to lift me up. And I'm forever grateful for those people. I am forever eternally grateful for my mother for teaching me how to love so unconditionally. Because now I love myself just as hard. And when you learn to do that for yourself, when you learn to wipe away all the labels, and you are just you, that kind of power, that kind of strength is immovable. It's immovable. I am who I am today. Still that five-year-old little girl, curious and mischievous, still up for a good bit of trouble. But I really do love that I exist right now to teach people how to do this too. That no matter what you've gone through, I promise you're still here. And you can empower yourself too. Sometimes it just takes that remembering. It really does. I don't know a five-year-old at all that's like, yeah, I want to be a VP of XYZ, or I would like to work in finance. Nobody says that, nobody talks like that. Not when they're five. Just remember who you are. Remember who you are. So face yourself, face the darkness, walk through it. Because I'm still Dahlia. I'm still here. So if you've ever lost your rock or your anchor, I see you. I hear you. You are not alone. You feel alone, but you are not alone. I finally see me, and I refuse to hide under labels again. Minus I like that I call myself the empowerment sherpa because that's what I'm doing. I'm guiding you to find you there, but I'm just telling you, you are still here. Not you as a mom, not you as a CEO, not as a VP, not as a manager, not as a director, not as a wife, not as a daughter, not as a friend, not any of those labels. You are here, and you are just you, and all you need to do is exist. And I challenge you to see yourself that way. I challenge you to go find that five-year-old version of you, sit with that person for just a moment, and then look in the mirror. Look in the mirror and realize you're still there. To this day, it's you without the labels. So thanks, mom. Because I carry the girl that I was, the woman she raised, and the legacy she left. She might not have been a millionaire, she might not have been a name that's taught about in history books, but she was more than that because she understood that the impact you have on those closest to you with the time you have is all that really matters. And that love coming from love, people can't take that from you. They can try, they can take everything else away, they can try to break you down, but they can't take that from you. And darn it, you shouldn't be the one doing it to you either. So go find yourself, go find your picture. And if you need help, if you're going through a dark time, call me. That's my specialty. Walking you through the darkness because you're not gonna get there hiding, hiding from it. You're not gonna get there escaping using whatever excuse you have. You don't have to live that way. And we really can support one another. We really can be here for one another. So that's a little bit about my story. I'll tell you more later. Till then, just remember that your life is yours to live. Why not make it extraordinary?