Navigating Suicide Loss: How One Mom Turned Losing Her Son into Purpose with Erin Blechman

When grief becomes the very thing that leads you to help others heal, that’s when loss truly starts to become a gain.

In this episode, I’m sitting down with Erin Blechman—mom, certified grief educator, and suicide loss survivor—for a conversation that is raw, real, and so deeply needed. Erin shares the story of her son Max, a wildly creative, deeply sensitive, and brilliantly funny young man who lived with medication-resistant depression and epilepsy, and who she lost to suicide in June 2020, right in the thick of COVID.

Here’s what we dig into:

✨ The early grief fog: numbness, depression, yearning, and an anger that surprised even her
✨ How journaling became a lifeline and eventually evolved into a book
✨ The coping tools that helped her survive: creating a memorial garden and finding her people in a suicide loss support group
✨ Her path to becoming a certified grief educator who now leads online grief groups and speaks publicly about suicide loss
✨ The cultural problem of grief illiteracy
✨ Parental guilt, the brutal “what ifs,” and how Erin learned to reframe them into “even ifs”
✨ Why healing in community isn’t just helpful, it’s transformative

If you’ve ever lost someone to suicide, loved someone who struggled, or just needed a reminder that your grief doesn’t have to look a certain way to be valid, this one’s for you.

Connect with Erin

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