(bright music)
- Hi, this is Lea Woodford from between the lines
and I'm with Amy Fulmer.
"Don't Trip Potato Chip."
Now, this title did not prepare me for this book, Amy.
This was not at all what I expected.
Can we talk?
'Cause this is a really personal book for you.
- Yeah, yes.
Yes.
Well, the title is, as you know, hidden message
in the book and that was by design.
It was by design.
And it's my journey, starting the night my son died,
of how I walked through the early months
and what it takes.
To going from mere survival
to starting to gather yourself.
And it's just a journey.
It's like a prescripted memoir.
- Well, this is so important right now
because children are dying.
- Yeah.
- Literally.
- Yes, in numbers.
- In numbers.
In record numbers.
- In record numbers, yes, that's true.
- And I think we all expect,
you know, our loved ones to die, but how do you cope
when it's your child?
- Well, Lea, this is the deal and this is an important,
really important point.
We are not taught, as a society, two things.
Number one, how to grieve our, just our regular,
first-degree family members, which are parents, sisters,
aunts, uncles.
We're not schooled for that, but when you enter a child
into the equation,
there's nothing there.
There's nothing there and I was in so much pain
and I said to myself, "Why isn't anybody talking about this?
"And where's the help?
"Because this isn't right."
And I knew that where I was, you know,
the early weeks after Kenji died, and months,
I thought, "I'm not the only mother going
"through this right now."
And let me be clear.
The reason I say mother is I was his mother;
I'm not a father.
Men feel horrific pain, fathers do, but I can't speak
authentically on their behalf 'cause I'm not a dad.
So I refer to mothers, but I'm not excluding fathers,
so please be aware of that.
- What was the hardest part of writing this book
because you're so raw and so personal in this book.
- I think the hardest part was
expressing the pain
in an authentic way,
but in a way that could
continue to move the reader through the process
without having to put it down.
As it is right now, I get credible feedback.
Mothers write to me and say, "Man, love your book,
"but I've had to put it down."
And I say, "Trigger alert."
This is a trigger alert book, as it should be.
Because what I found was the books that I was reading
in my early days,
although they were beautiful,
it was all rainbows and butterflies.
And, Lea, let me tell you,
this book is not rainbows
and butterflies. - No, it's not.
- And I think that's part of the new conversation.
We have to up the education
in an order to create compassion,
to create healing, but if we don't deal
with the conversation real,
then you're not gonna get off first base.
- So many people struggle with what to say
after a friend has lost a child.
- Right.
- What do you say to somebody who's lost their child, Amy.
- Well, this is really important
because this goes into the death cooties.
People don't mean to be awkward, Lea, they don't.
It's not what they mean, but they're so awkward
and it is awkward because our society doesn't teach us.
What I tell people is, number one, always speak
from the heart.
Don't circumvent it and sometimes it's just a hug.
Less is more.
Things like it's gonna get better with time,
probably you should stay away from 'cause guess what?
It doesn't always get better with time.
- It never goes away, does it?
- Never, ever.
Even when you're sleeping,
never goes away.
So I basically am a disabled person,
you can't see, you know, like if I was a double amputee
in a wheelchair, you would see that, and you would know that
and that would make sense to your brain.
But I'm disabled on the inside,
but I put the happy face on.
- We all do.
- And we go out into the world,
but with my process and my education,
my hope is, if you don't release this pain
and bring it to the surface,
and let it go,
it festers inside of you and this is the dangerous part.
Cancer.
The suicide and divorce rate among newly bereaved parents is
off the charts.
So if the parents don't start healing,
bad things happen to the body medically.
- We internalize all the pain.
- And we stuff it down.
So what worked for me was is it came out
and it was ugly when it came out, Lea.
It was ugly.
And I was scared.
I was scared, but I knew it had to come out of my body.
So I tell parents,
if you have to hit pillows,
go into a safe room and hit pillows.
If you think you're suicidal,
you know, do a 51/50.
Reach out, you know, you're not isolated.
Parental bereavement is very isolating.
That's one of the big fears
is I felt so isolated in my pain.
So for me, you can even reach out to me on my website.
I never want a parent to go through what I went through
in the isolation.
That's why I connect moms all the time.
I'm connecting and connecting and connecting
because there's always an email,
there's always somebody at the end of the phone.
It's almost like a suicide hotline thing
because nobody gets it like a mother does or a father.
- I mean, we're seeing so many kids.
I mean, Parkland shooting just comes up,
you know, Sandy Hook.
Is there even any way you can prepare yourself?
- Lea,
You know, the Sri Lanka bombings.
There's a gentleman in there I was reading.
I'm trying to actually get to him.
He lost three children.
- Wow. - And he has one living.
The pain before this family is nothing that you and I
can wrap our head around.
I don't think there's preparation,
but I'll tell you what my quest is.
And this is my answer for today.
First of all, we have to start with the education.
This is education.
That's gonna bring the mass global population
into a consciousness of understanding.
We have to first understand what we're dealing with here.
Okay?
- Then we have to start to reach out and set up systems
that involve compassion.
And I'm involved in that right now.
Now, am I gonna fix this in my lifetime?
No.
But I hope to move it off of square one
because I think we can do a whole lot better
than we're doing.
And I do not think that parents need to suffer
the way that they're suffering now.
- No, they don't.
You know, we just had one of the Sandy Hook parents
commit suicide recently.
I mean, it is an epidemic.
And we aren't addressing it.
One of the things that you say in the book is you call
them angel moms.
Can you talk about that?
I really-- - Okay.
- think that is a beautiful way to phrase it.
- Well, you know, I didn't make it up so I can't own it.
I picked it up somewhere.
I was just reading something one time.
And
when you're an angel mom, I have to tell you this.
I think this is a beautiful thing.
You know, in past cultures,
the angel moms were always placed in positions
of political authority, in leadership roles,
and when the cultures and civilizations
started to break down,
they went to the angel moms for answers
because it was considered that the angel moms,
because their hearts were so broken
they were closest to God.
So when I heard the term angel mom,
it was just in passing somewhere,
and I said, "That's it.
"I own it."
I grabbed it, like, I grabbed it.
And I said, "This is my mantra."
And so when I interact with moms now,
I'm spreading that and it's a healing term,
but yet I feel that there needs to be
an identification of sort.
Almost like with breast cancer you have the pink,
you know, the pink bows.
The AIDs is the, I think it's a yellow.
- I'm not sure.
- Yeah, but I want to come up with something for parents
because I think if people know, like, in the workforce.
You know, you come in and you're in a business meeting
and let's say a mother decides to have a little tattoo on
that the marker for an angel mom.
I think it's part of the education.
"Oh, I understand.
"This person's heart has been broken."
I don't think we need separate or different treatment,
let me be clear.
And we're not victims.
There's no victim here.
But just like you would hold the door for a disabled person,
we have disabled bathrooms.
This is accommodating situations in life.
I think there needs to be an understanding
and holding space and holding compassion.
That goes a long way
and it buys so much for an angel mom.
You have no idea.
But angel mom is my word of sort of
bringing this up and out into the light.
Let's first give us a name.
Who do we look like?
Where are we?
We're everywhere.
It is a statistical fact
that every single human being in their life
will be looking at you like you're looking at me
into the eyes of someone that they love
who has lost a child
within a lifetime.
- So tragic.
How hard was it for you to write this book?
Or was it really cathartic for you?
- Both.
I never started out to write a book.
I'm not an author.
I've never written anything in my life.
And I started to journal 'cause I was in so much pain.
And
then what happened was I just had pounds of notes
in these little composition books.
You know the 99 cent ones? - Mm-hm.
- And then my son's
girlfriend that he was in the process of getting with,
she said, "Let's put in a ebook form.
"Let me edit it for you."
And that started the process.
And then when I read it,
I said, "Oh no, no, no.
"We gotta get this out.
"This is too powerful.
"There's too much meat here."
And that's how the process was born.
- Does it help you through the grieving process
when you help other angel moms?
- Well, let me give you a concrete example.
About three weeks ago,
I opened a private message from an angel mom
that I connect with.
'Cause I'm in a lot of Facebook groups.
And she photographed to me a suicide note
that she had written the night before.
And she was gonna kill herself and she heard about my book
through another angel mom,
went onto Kindle, downloaded it.
As you know, it's a fast read.
That was by design.
You know, you can read it in two hours.
- I did (laughs).
- Yeah and she said, "I read your book last night
"and I decided not to do it."
And I sat there and I cried.
And I just wrote her back and I said, "I love you."
You know, and there's no money, no award,
there's no New York Time's best seller...
that substitutes and I have several of those stories.
And now that I'm starting to hold onto.
I don't use names.
I treat them all confidentially.
I have mothers that are on their second and third read.
Mothers that tell me they just carry it in their purses
'cause it makes them feel better during the day.
Because they know that I know.
It's this thing about, "You know what my pain is."
When I meet an angel mom,
I don't know what her favorite color is.
I don't know what kind of wine she likes to drink.
I don't know if she's married 'cause none of it matters.
I know her.
Lea, I know her.
I don't need to know her, I know her.
And I hug her.
- And that's where the-- - This is--
- healing starts.
- This is really a difficult conversation.
I'm in tears.
There isn't a parent alive that doesn't have this fear.
You know, and in today's world,
it's really, really frightening.
- I don't know what's going on
because even since I've written my book,
epidemic is the word.
Young people are dying now
at a pace I've never seen in my life.
And I don't understand.
I don't understand.
Now, I can't fix that 'cause I can't fix everybody.
Yeah, believe me, I'm trying (laughs).
Yeah, I would if I could.
I don't have that magic wand.
But my mission is to get to parents.
They need a lifeline.
And as you know, one ounce of grief relief
can make the difference between suicide or not.
And they just need to get through that next minute.
It's a lifeline.
And then the minute turns into an hour.
An hour turns into a day.
Then maybe they're a little happy.
And then they're okay.
And then they're not.
And then they are.
But I have to be very honest with you.
One of my next up-levels, if you will,
in the education process is
there comes a choice in every angel mom's grief walk.
They have to make a decision.
And they have to decide do they really wanna heal
or don't they wanna heal.
After they get through the initial shock
and the physical, now they're into it six, nine months,
a year, some a year an a half.
Then they have to look themselves in the mirror
and have a hard conversation.
And then that's where the work starts.
How much are they willing to invest in themselves
to try to put the pieces of their life back together.
You never move on.
There's no moving on.
That's a myth.
There's no moving on.
But where do I take my life from here?
And this is the first stage.
I'm hoping to write another book
that will sequel into that.
I'm not there yet
'cause I'm still involved on my rehab.
You know, I can't lose me first, right?
- Tell our viewing audience when this happened.
Tell us about your son.
- Oh, well, like every parent,
we think our children,
you know, the earth rises and sets and...
- Right.
- My son was magic.
Really funny, very intelligent.
He had a neurological makeup that is often associated
with high intelligence.
He had epilepsy.
He was bipolar.
These are very common things, by the way.
They tend to all go together.
Depression.
And he started very young
when he was medicated for his epilepsy.
I'm not saying that drew him into drug addiction,
but he learned very early on
that when things aren't right in his brain,
he can take something and that will self-medicate.
So he started, very early on, smoking pot
and then it escalated.
Because these drugs are very accessible.
And opiates and benzos, the pharmaceuticals, are dangerous.
This is another education, Lea.
Parents and people are not aware.
There are people that still, to this day,
do not know what fentanyl is.
Believe it or not.
- Wow.
- So then once that gets into your body,
it's almost like game over.
My son fought
tooth and nail 'til the day he died.
He did not wanna be a drug addict.
He was talented, smart, I mean, my house was comedy central.
Drug addicts are not what people think they are.
Children don't wake up one day and say, "You know what?
"When I grow up, I'm gonna be a drug addict or fireman."
It doesn't go like that.
Behind every drug addict is usually a series of events
that they...
There could be abuse, a neurological issue,
something is at play that they're fighting for help.
It's a reach-out.
We do not
know how to deal with our drug addicts
in our society.
- No, we don't.
- And talk about an epidemic.
- Yes.
Yes.
It's a crisis, actually-- - No, it's beyond
what you know and getting worse by the day.
I will say this.
I have the utmost of respect for drug addicts now.
When I see them on the street,
I look at them in a completely different light.
And I speak with them when I'm in Los Angeles.
I send them love, I never give them money.
They all want money and I'm like, "No."
And I tell 'em, I say, "My son died from drugs."
I gave him lunch money.
He spent $12, his lunch money, on the fentanyl patch
that killed him.
So I don't give up.
I never give cash.
But I'll tell them, you know, I say kind things to them.
We do not understand.
And we need resources and help
and education and understanding.
It's a big body o' work.
Huge.
- It is and unfortunately
we just don't have the time to talk more.
Will you come back?
- I would love to come back.
Any way that I can spread my work and my word.
Because let me tell you this:
Thank you for having me.
I will promise you there will be a mom,
an angel mom, watching this.
And the way my work is getting out globally is miraculous.
- Thank you so much, Amy.
This is so important.
Thank you.
- Thank you, Lea.
- You're welcome.
Thank you.
This has been Lea Woodford with between the lines.
Thanks for watching.