Grief, Guilt, and the Choice to Live, shared story with Melissa Hull: Episode 384

A split-second of ordinary life can become the moment you measure everything else against. Melissa Hall joins us to share the day she lost her four-year-old son, Drew, in an irrigation canal near their rural home and what came after: the panic, the seven-hour search, and the crushing guilt of believing one exhausted mistake defined her worth as a mother. We don’t soften the hard parts, including how grief can hijack your body, your breathing, and your ability to imagine a future.

What changes the trajectory isn’t a miracle cure, it’s connection. Melissa opens up about a letter from another bereaved mother that met her with honesty instead of platitudes, and how that simple act of being seen helped her step back from the edge. We talk about complicated grief, survivor’s guilt, suicidal thoughts after loss, and the slow work of choosing life one day at a time. Her perspective is both tender and practical: grief is not the absence of love, it can be the presence of love demanding a place to go.

We also dig into how Melissa turned pain into purpose through water safety education and child drowning prevention, especially for families living near open canals and waterways. She shares what she’s learned through journaling, coaching, and writing Dear Drew: Creating a Life Bigger Than Grief, plus why community support matters when people you expected to show up don’t. If you’re searching for grief support, bereavement resources, or a way to honor someone while still moving forward, this conversation offers language, tools, and hope without pretending healing is tidy.

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To Reach Melissa Hull:

Website: www.melissahull.com

Instagram: www.instagram.com/greaterthangrief

Facebook: www.facebook.com/greaterthangrief

©2022-2026 Soul Healer17:77, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Any copying of this poetry and audio in whole or part is prohibited. *I do not own the rights to the royalty free music*

Have a lovely day and stay blessed

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Introduction

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Gonna be good, Robin. We're gonna get this. Welcome back, listeners. I'm Robin Black. This is It's All About Healing Podcast. And today we have a special guest, Miss Melissa Hole. She is brief and grief coach. And we're gonna just speak a little bit today. We're gonna just talk a little bit about the quiet part out loud and her experience and her journey with grief and loss as well. Melissa, how are you?

SPEAKER_02 0:26

I'm well. Thank you so much for having me here today.

SPEAKER_01 0:30

No problem at all. And I know briefly before we started, you were telling me a little bit about the loss of your son. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

The Morning Drew Disappeared

SPEAKER_02 0:39

Sure. So on May 19th in the year 2000, my oldest son, Drew, woke up very early. I was the mother of two little boys, four and a half and three, married to a, you know, a dentist who was traveling a lot for our for the development of our business. And so I found myself alone at home that morning with the two boys. And my younger son, Devin, has asthma and had real severe asthma as a toddler. So I had been up that night before giving him breathing treatments. And Drew was my vivacious up at the crack of dawn, ready to just live life every day to its fullest. And on this particular morning, he woke up very early, about 5:30 in the morning, and he came into the room with so much joy. He's like, Mom, mom, the sun is in the sky, you know, which was the rule. He couldn't get out of bed and come wake us up until the sun was literally in the sky because he had this habit of waking up really early and just wanting to start the day. So he waited until the sun was in the sky. He came into my bedroom where I was laying with his brother, trying to keep him asleep because we had been up the whole night before. And I'm like, you're right, sweetheart. The sun is in the sky. It's time to get up. And so I got up with him and he asked for Rocky Road ice cream for breakfast and beef raviolis. And so we, in my exhausted state, I said no to the Rocky Road ice cream, but I relented on the can of beef raviolis. So I opened up a can of raviolis, I warm it, I sit him down in front of the television and I give him some crayons and some paper. And he's watching Thomas the tank engine, which was his favorite. And I said, Sweetie, I've got to go check on your brother. I'll be right back. And he said, Okay, mom. And I went back to the bedroom. I noticed my younger son Devin was really starting to struggle to breathe again. And so I laid beside him and I started to pat his back just to comfort him. And I inadvertently fell asleep.

SPEAKER_00 2:44

Yeah.

The Canal Search And Aftermath

SPEAKER_02 2:44

When I woke, I woke up in that kind of state of panic. Like right away, I'm like, I fell asleep. I didn't mean to fall asleep. Where's Drew? You know, where's Drew? Because Drew was always doing something. Like he was just always busy. And so sometimes that was not a good thing. You know, he would get himself into like little precarious situations. So I immediately hopped out of bed and started to look through the house for him. And he wasn't where I had left him. And he wasn't in all the obvious places. And so as I'm going through the house, looking behind curtains, looking, you know, maybe he fell asleep, you know, on the looking in bedrooms, looking under beds, looking in closets, looking everywhere. I'm not finding him. And this is when I start really feeling that panic in the pit of my stomach. And as I'm going back and forth, calling out for him in the house, I noticed that we we had a sliding glass door that was open, maybe just ever so slightly. I missed it. The several times that I had been running back and forth by that particular door. When I noticed it, I thought, okay, great, he's just outside. He's just outside. So I went outside and I started calling for him. Nothing. And I live in a very rural area. I'm surrounded by farmland and open canal systems. And it dawned on me that, oh my God, the canal.

SPEAKER_00 4:09

The canal.

SPEAKER_02 4:10

And I look down and I can see his footprints leading away from the house and towards this irrigation canal. And as I start to run towards the canal, our dogs start running toward me.

SPEAKER_00 4:23

Yeah.

Guilt Shame And Marriage Strain

A Suicidal Night And A Letter

Turning Loss Into Water Safety

SPEAKER_02 4:23

And they're wet. And so I'm now I'm terrified. I know that something has happened because we don't have a swimming pool. There was no irrigation in our yard. There's no reason why the dogs would be wet unless they had gone to the canal. So as I got closer to the canal, there was evidence of where Drew had made little piles of you know dirt and shells and little things that he had collected and left on the side of the embankment. And you can see where the embankment had given way underneath his feet. And you can see that he must have fallen in. And as I'm looking at the water and I'm scanning to see if I can see him, I'm not seeing anything. And it's about that time that because of where I live, I live on the border of California and Arizona. There was a border patrol agent that happened to be driving by. I said, please, my son, I think he's fallen in. I can't find him. He I explained I had another child at home. He said, I'm calling the authorities. Go back home. We'll meet you there. And that's where my nightmare began. I went back home sobbing and terrified that I that the worst had occurred, that I was not going to find my son. And it was about seven hours later after family and friends were notified and started to show up and they looked, you know, for Drew. There was a search and rescue from the sheriff's department, the fire department, and even the FBI. They were all here. They were all here searching for Drew. And it was about seven hours after that my father came and sat next to me. And I already knew what he was going to say. And he said, Miss, I'm sorry. They found him. He's gone. And my whole life changed that morning. Every, every one of the actions that I replayed that morning over and over and over in my mind, probably a million times. Wishing, begging, praying that there was some sort of magical reset button or do over button that I could just hit and say, hold on, I don't want this to be the outcome. I want to start, I want to start this day over. I need another chance here. I felt so responsible. I've felt so guilty that my son passed away because I inadvertently fell asleep. And it was a tough road. The guilt and the shame that I experienced from that loss was profound. It took a huge toll on my marriage immediately. We weren't able to grieve together. We we made it through the funeral. And for maybe the first month, maybe six weeks, we we tried to hang in there together, but it became very clear that we needed to take time apart. And so six weeks after my son passed, my husband made the decision to move out. And my whole life, everything that I thought I knew was a certainty was gone. I had lost my son. I felt like I had failed as a mother. I felt like I let my younger son down because now he didn't have his brother. And my marriage seemed like it was over at the time. And so I was quite literally at the worst and lowest point of my life. And the very first time that my husband came to pick up Devin, our remaining little boy, to spend the night with him at his new house, I found myself in my home alone for the first time, which was completely terrifying for me. This was the scene of where it all unfolded, right? And now I'm left here in this home with all of these reminders of what will never be again. You know, I will never have both of my sons here again. I will never, you know, I had no idea at the time if my husband and I would reconcile and could we, could we come back from this? And I really struggled with the guilt and the weight of it. And I didn't think I could live. I didn't think I could carry it. It's not that I didn't want to try. I just felt so oppressed by this grief, by the heaviness that it, the presence that it carried in my physical body, I couldn't breathe. Like I felt like I was constantly having to pull air into my lungs. Like I kept, I kept, I would gasp all the time, and people would say, Are you okay? Are you okay? And I and it wouldn't even occur to me that I was holding my breath and then having to breathe in, you know, deeply because I wasn't really even breathing. I I was racing for this pain to just do me in all day, every day. And I just didn't think I could live like that. So on that particular night, I I really contemplated ending my life. I truly did. To the to the point where, you know, I had I had medication that was prescribed to me to help me sleep, you know, to help me cope. And it wasn't working. And so I stopped really taking it. And then I thought, I'll just take that and and and just fall asleep, and and that'll be the end. But then I had this conflict of what, but, but what about Devin? What about my son? He doesn't deserve this. And so I grabbed a piece of paper and a pen and I sat down to write him this explanation of why I couldn't do this. And I happened to notice this white business envelope amongst these condolence cards, like the brightly colored card envelopes. There was this white business envelope that said to the mother of Drew Gallimore. And I had not noticed it before. So I picked it up. It just speak caught my interest. And so I picked it up and I opened it. And it was a letter from a woman whose name is Teresa, a mother who wrote to me after she read about Drew's accident in the newspaper, after, you know, all the speculation about whether I would be charged with, you know, a crime because I had fallen asleep. That that was kind of the narrative out in the community at the time. And she she just spoke to me in such an honest and real way, where she shared her experience. She lost her daughter one morning when she ran into the house. She'd forgotten something inside. She left her daughter by the car. They were heading to school. Something happened, and her daughter ran into the road and was struck by a car. And so she spoke to me from this place of understanding and truly being seen. She spoke to me in a way that others were probably saying very similar things, but it they didn't penetrate. They didn't reach me the way that her words did. And this is just a letter that I'm reading. But she said the most remarkable things to me. She's she said that joy and happiness would seem fleeting or impossible. But she promised me that if I wanted a life of fulfillment and purpose and meaning, that it would be there waiting for me, but that I would have to choose to align to it and choose it every day. And that there would be good days and there would be bad days and there would be progress and then there would be setbacks. But she encouraged me to continue to look ahead and to continue to believe that my life was still meaningful, that I still had a purpose and a reason for being here, if only to carry on his legacy, to talk about him, to share his story. And that is what I did. That letter changed everything for me. Instead of writing a letter goodbye to my son, I wrote a letter to my son Drew telling him how I was going to live, how I was going to somehow, some way find a purpose inside of all of this pain. And it didn't happen overnight, but it did, it did start to emerge. I started initially to talk about water safety education and the dangers of irrigation canals. In my community, it's very much an agricultural community. And as we have grown, we, you know, developers have gone and purchased large blocks of farmland. And so these water systems are still right there. They're on the backside of all of these neighborhoods and right up against schools. And nobody's talking about the dangers that these open waterways, you know, really pose. So I started there. I started talking about water safety education and I focused on the most at risk, which are little children under the age of five, primarily boys. They have the highest statistical statistics of drowning, boys under the age of five. And so I wanted to go to preschools. And I did, I started talking to preschools, and I went to Drew's preschool first, which was so painful. It was so hard. But I knew it was the right first place to start because these children were also, they also lost Drew. He was there one day and then the next he wasn't. And they too were struggling to understand how that could be. Like, where was Drew? Was he ever coming back? And so when I went there and I spoke to his class and I looked into the eyes of all of his classmates, I knew that I was at the right place. I knew I was doing the right thing because they were listening. And not only were they listening, throughout the years I've heard from them. And they will, they, they now they're adults and they're they're parents now. They're in their 30s.

SPEAKER_00 14:37

Yeah.

Building A Life Bigger Than Grief

SPEAKER_02 14:38

And it's it's really cool to have them come up to me when we do run into each other and they'll say, I've never forgotten what you said. I've never forgotten about Drew. My kids I had them in swim lessons before they were two. You know, I had my and so I can see this full circle moment about how the worst of something became a positive contribution that has served to make my community safer, um, more diligent and keeping children safe around open water canal or open irrigation canal systems. And that is where I began. I began there, and from there I wrote, I've written two books. My latest is Dear Drew, Creating a Life Bigger Than Grief, which is all about my journey from those early days through today. It's now been 20, it'll be 26 years on May 19th this year. And I have grown and evolved and come to understand that my relationship with grief has been very iterative. I've gone through many different layers, but at the core, it's about understanding that grief can be both a teacher and a blessing. And I know that's hard for people to hear, especially in the early days, it's the early stages, but grief is meant to be a reminder. It's meant to be the clarifying kind of component to what strips away everything that is unimportant and it highlights everything that is truly meaningful and lasting. I have come to understand that my grief, and for me, the greatest gift it has given me is to understand that the pain I felt was not the absence of love. It was the presence of love, begging to be recognized, asking to be aligned with. I wanted to serve this community of people that I knew needed support. And so I just chose to develop those skills for myself and then to share what I've learned with others, mainly through writing, through my books and through my blogs and on my social media platforms, but also in coaching and in public speaking. I've traveled the world as a public speaker, sharing my journey and encouraging others to lean into theirs, to embrace grief as a teacher, to embrace grief as a gift, because when you can do that, then what you discover is that there is a growth component to what grief can provide our lives. Loss and love can coexist. You know, honoring and moving forward can coexist. We don't have to stay stuck in the past. We are allowed to continue to live and move through this experience, bringing along with us our loved one in whatever way feels meaningful and right to us. And for me, that meant sharing Drew's story. It meant sharing my journey, and that's how I have arrived here today.

SPEAKER_01 19:06

I greatly thank you for that. That is an amazing, amazing story that you shared with us. And you are just incredibly, incredibly strong. And your strength just it exudes off of you. And I just I I I I thank you so much for that because I'm almost speechless. I almost there were so many times when I was getting teary-eyed, and it's it again. I just thank you. That's all I can really say. I want to say that again.

SPEAKER_02 19:39

I I appreciate that, Robin. I truly do. But if I I feel like this has been a partnership, I feel like my my life from May 19th, 2000 to today has been this beautiful partnership with my son and the the the gift of his life and the memories that I hold dear. You would think that after 26 years, you might get like it might feel like it it somehow weakens or you know, dilutes in some way. And it that nothing could be further from the truth. If anything, it feels more connected, a stronger sense of who he was and what his purpose here on earth was for those four and a half years. I think he was one of my greatest teachers. He he was fearless about living. He woke up every day and had this curiosity for what was just around the corner. And for the longest time, I felt like I maybe shied away from living, fully living. And anytime that I was really faced with that, that question of like, do I do I deserve a life of purpose and meaning and happiness? I would see his little beautiful smiling face just come like in my mind's eye and just say, keep going, mom, keep going, mom. And I know for sure that the life that I've chosen to live honors both his his life and the gift of being his mother for those four and a half years. But it's also a real honest. It's very I I share this experience very honestly. I I talk about the quiet parts out loud. I I try to give people the ability to feel seen and heard by being vulnerable about the things that I went through and the things that I struggled with and things that didn't make sense to me and maybe still don't. But how I manage them and how I use them as a foundation to build upon and not let it become an anchor that tethers me to a particular place or particular moment. What happened is I wish that there was that magic do over. Wish that there was like hold on, time out. I want to do that day over. I wish that that existed, but because it doesn't, I know I've taken the worst of things and somehow found a way to still create a life of beauty and meaning. And it wasn't by chance, it was by choice. And that intentional choice is something I really talk a lot about. We have we are powerful creators. We have agency. And when we choose to access and unleash our agency and our choice in the direction of purpose fulfillment, joy, happiness, alongside things like grief and loss and sadness and despair. There is a place for both to coexist. And both can become beautiful complements to the other. But we have to be willing to learn and we have to be willing to sit in the pain and in those painful experiences long enough for them to reveal to us the path and the answers that we are really seeking because they're always there. They're always there.

Moment Millionaire And The Books

SPEAKER_01 23:05

Yeah. And I just, and I thank you again. But I what I have gathered from this is just how God uses our pain for testimony to help others. And a lot of times when we don't see the understanding, we don't, we can't grasp that understanding as to why we have to feel so much pain and some more than others, but it's because we're here for all of us and your testimony, it is going to reach thousands of people. And the one thing that I definitely gather from that is memories are the one thing that death cannot touch. And and it makes it beautiful, it makes a sad thing beautiful. And I definitely commend you on everything that you're doing. And you said you have two books, correct?

SPEAKER_02 23:51

I do. My first book was basically kind of everything up until a few years after the accident. And there was a lot of a lot of turmoil, a lot of a lot of you know, life adversity that I would faced even after the Drew's accident. And it just helped me kind of make sense of it all. So I just wrote about where I was, what the challenges were, what I had learned, and talking about my my journey. I'm talking about my relationships with my friends, my family, my marriage, my children, and my my outlook, which has always been one of maybe like I bend, I don't break. I don't know what it is about me. I have a resilience and an inner strength that even kind of mystifies me. But I do, I possess this ability to alchemize unthinkable circumstances and still find a way to believe the best in myself and in the world and in others. And that is something I never want to see change. I want to lean into that even more. And I sometimes think be careful what you, you know, you wish for because we will be, we will all be tested. We will all have people that we love that we will lose. And someday we will be the person that the people who love us will lose. And I never wanted that to be something that people feared. I wanted us, I wanted to talk about it. I wanted to make sure that people and the people in my life understood that what was most important to me were the memories, was the time, was the the connections that we were forming. And I I have a little phrase that I blurted out one day and it just kind of stuck. I said, I want to be a millionaire of moments. I want to be a moment millionaire. I want a million moments that I leave you with so that when when it is my time to transition from this life into the next, that you are left with so much evidence of just how loved you were, just how important you were, just how much I loved my life and and how meaningful every day was to me. And so that's what I set about doing. And along the way, there were things that happened, like public speaking. I never sought out to be a public speaker. It happened because I was willing to share my story. It happened in the book. You know, the first book was for me, the second book was for the people that I met as I was out on the speaking tours and I was talking about life and how to face adversity and to see possibility even inside of challenge and in and circumstances that you didn't ask for, but to not lose that ability to see through them and still have a vision for yourself. I was asked probably at least a thousand times, how did you do this? I would have never known. How did you heal? Like, how did you do it? And then I went back to my journals and and I wrote Drew a letter every single day for that first year after his passing. And I found this kind of a blueprint, if you will. I was just, I poured myself onto pages. And then from there, I was able to construct an outline for a book. And that's where Deer Drew, Creating a Life Bigger Than Grief, originated. It originated in from those early journal entries, and then the journal entries that were subsequently, you know, written years afterwards. And I put together a book to help answer that question. How did I do this? How did I arrive here? Because that was the central question that I was being asked. And I had certain answers, but I wanted to give a complete and thorough kind of accounting of how did I really get here? So I talk about the relationships that lasted. I talked about the disappointment of people that I thought would be there for me that weren't. And then the wonderful surprise of new friendships and people that I never knew before that have become dear friends. I talk about the journey in its truth. I don't pretty it up. I'm very blunt and bold about the things that I did well, the things I did not do well, about the time in my life when I was so angry. I just kind of stomped around and everyone kind of gave me a real wide berth. And how that pain had a force behind it. And I thought that was healing. And then I realized, no, that's not healing. That's the opposite of healing. When you, you know, force is force causes people to flee, and healing causes people to lean in, you know, you included.

SPEAKER_01 28:41

And I just Melissa.

Free Resources And Practical Prevention

SPEAKER_02 28:56

I'm here. I don't know what happened. Yeah, it's like what happened. Yeah, I that's okay. Technology. As I was saying, I went back to the letter that Teresa wrote me and to those life-affirming words, and that was the foundation of my whole book. I I knew that if I could take what Teresa said to me and put that into a book format and really break it down for people, that I would, I would, that would, that's a piece of my life that I knew I'd be proud to leave here. It's a legacy piece for me. It's Drew's, it's Drew's life and my journey after and all of the learning and the growth that I have undergone and and and uh tried to acquire and and now share with everyone else. So that's that's the book. And it's available, you know, on all the major booksellers or my website, melissahall.com. But that's what I do now. I share his story, I share a multitude of free resources for people who are looking for journal prompts or healing scripts or a meditative, you know, a meditation to walk them through. I have everything inside of what I call a living library at melissahall.com for people to support themselves. And if they want to go a step further, we I have a community, and if they want to take a step further, they can contact me and work with me directly. But everything is there for them. Water safety education materials, which is my passion. I have water safety education videos on YouTube that I encourage everyone to go and look at, download, share with your children. Take the time to have those conversations early and educate your children long before you think you need to. But start the conversations now. And everything that you need to do that is found right there.

Advice For Despair And Gratitude

SPEAKER_01 30:55

All right. Thank you. And I'll be sure to leave all of your information in the show notes as well. But just one more thing. If for can you give advice for those who are feeling that all hope is lost, who are trying to cope with hope or trying to sorry, trying to cope with loss? What advice do you have for those?

SPEAKER_02 31:15

I remember being so confused as to what life would ever look like for me again. You know, would there be any beauty? Would there be any any sense of reprieve from this oppressive pain that I carried? And I remember having a conversation with a family, a husband and a wife who lost their son to cancer. And she said something to me that really helped. She said, you know, sweetheart, this pain that you're feeling. And I and she said that this overwhelming pain is just their mirror reflection of the immense love. And if you can hold on to that, yeah, this pain all of a sudden starts not to feel quite so bad. It almost feels like, well, this makes sense. And it did. I'm like, okay, I can hold on to that. So I kept telling myself, this is just the mirror reflection of the love that I experienced. And every time I felt like I couldn't get through the day, I would remind myself, this is the mirror reflection of the immense love that we shared. I am so blessed and so fortunate to have this pain because it means it's the evidence, the irrefutable proof of just how beautiful this experience and this love and this little boy was in my life. And it always felt different from that point. And I think another, another way to really help in moments where despair is really present is to use gratitude. I and I know that that can be hard at times, but I promise you, gratitude is the fastest way to elevate our emotions from the lowest to the highest. Because when we are in the pain of the absence, the separation, it's in the gratitude of the time that we had that we can find a way to elevate. We can find a way to say, even though this is not what I wanted, I am blessed and fortunate to have this gift of memory, the gift of the time that we did share. And for me, that I start there. I start with that little simple reframe that is a powerful, powerful um opportunity to experience grief in a new and different way. To when you can find a way to almost see some gratitude inside of the pain, it transforms it and it transcends that moment into what I was talking about, this ability to see through the circumstance or through the immediate pain and into the recognition of there is girl too. And so that's what I'm talking about learning how to hold grief and loss with grace so that you can continue to move through and forward, never leaving behind. You don't get over this. It's not like I'm done with this, but I have learned to move through life with this in a way that doesn't limit, it actually has become very expansive. And that is a miracle, in my opinion. That is a modern-day miracle. I don't, you know, when when you hear people talk about a peace that surpasses all understanding, I think I understand what that means because when I wake up every day, I wake up with gratitude. I wake up with a sense of peace and belonging and an enthusiasm for what life still has in store for me. I'm no longer ruminating on just the loss. I'm no longer just feeling and experiencing the pain. That's not to say that I don't. I do. But it's not the most dominant presence in my life anymore.

SPEAKER_01 35:08

Right. Thank you very much, Melissa. And that is that's everything that I have for today. Did you have did you have anything that you wanted to add?

Community Support And Final Words

SPEAKER_02 35:18

I just would like to add that when we are grieving, we feel like these experiences are just our own. And and every loss is unique. Every person that we lose has an indelible, they leave this indelible mark. But I do, I do know and I do understand that there are others who do have and and and understand this this process. And when we can align and find those communities and ask for the support that we need, there is there are gifts in community and to seek out the people, the places, whether it be nature, whether it just going out into nature and sitting and listening to the birds and feeling the sun on your face, finding ways to connect to that inner world that and realign with those inner resources that build you up and sustain and support you. Those types of activities are so important and so needed. And I encourage everyone to do that. So look for community, look for resources, look for voices that inspire, look for people who truly help you feel seen and heard, encouraged and you know, and held in some way. You know, that's that's very important to me. But to look for them because they are out there. People do care, people will stop. Don't be distracted or disor moved away from believing that there are good people that want to support you if if you've been disappointed by people not showing up for you the way that you thought that they might, because there are a multitude in an ocean of people that will. You just have to keep looking.

SPEAKER_01 36:59

Thank you so much. That was beautiful. And again, I'm Robin Black, and this is It's All About Healing Podcast. And thank you again for our special guest, Miss Melissa Hole. She is a coach or bereavement, sorry, bereavement and grief coach. And just thank you so much. This has been such a beautiful, beautiful story that you shared with us, and everyone, be sure to stay blessed.