Episode #027 Life with Grief with Samuel Lewis
In this personal episode, Laura sits down with guest Sam Lewis to explore the lifelong echoes of childhood grief. Sam's father, a commercial fisherman in Alaska, died when he was just six years old - a sudden disappearance at sea that shattered his world before he had the language to understand it.
Sam opens up, for the first time in his life, about what it meant to grow up in a family where emotions were contained, crying was discouraged, and the truth of his father’s death was softened or avoided. He reflects on the confusion of those early years, the identity he built in the absence of answers, and the grief that threaded itself quietly into his adulthood.
Together, Laura and Sam unpack how unspoken loss can shape a lifetime from self-worth, to drinking as a coping mechanism, to the long path of learning how to feel again. They talk about the unexpected ways grief resurfaces, the inherited messages we carry about emotional expression, and the slow work of building tolerance for the hard things we once ran from.
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