Turning Pain into Purpose One Picture at a Time: Tara Cory’s Story of Grief, Photography, and Healing

Yeah, it is.

It's life altering.

I mean, yeah, we talk about this all the time on the podcast and how people choose to take that grief and... navigate you know it takes all shapes I mean there's definitely that anger there's the why there's an aspect that's lonely even when you're surrounded by people some people want to talk about it some people don't want to talk about it I mean but I think the foundational element is it changes you and there's no going back there's no like unwinding that to your to your point yeah

Can I ask you, I don't think we've ever asked anybody this that's lost somebody, but in your grief process, what stage do you think gave you the most difficulty? Where did you maybe get stuck or struggle the longest or maybe still are?

I think if I had to like...

I think obviously getting pregnant with my other two boys had to be one of the big parts of like, shit, she was there in the delivery room with me with my first.

Like now, you know, granted, I have an amazing partner right now.

But like...

That doesn't duplicate my mom, you know? But when I found out, funny enough, yesterday was my youngest cleft lip smile-iversary.

So when I found out at 20 weeks that he had a cleft lip, oof.

I needed to have my mom, especially from a medical side of things.

And that I went through a really rough time, very rough time.

Because it was like grief happening all over again.

Okay, what did I do? What did I do to cause this?

It does feel like a punishment.

It feels like a punishment.

I think the same thing.

I still do, even though I know it's irrational.

I still think, God, what if I would have said something more to Hallie? It's like this what if and to your question on what stage.

I don't feel like grief has a stage.

I feel like it is just this wadded up ball of freaking mess all the time.

There's times where you feel sad.

There's times I'm sure that for you felt so lonely, so much anger, so much sadness, like just all wadded up.

And then you have to figure out how do you chip back away at that to get back to a level where you can function.

Yeah.