The Truman Charities Podcast
Truman Charities is the only podcast that donates $250 to each of our guests' charity of choice.
Jamie Truman, connects with individuals who are making a significant impact in their communities. From New York Times bestselling authors to innovative farmers, we share the untold stories of those who are shaping the world around us. We feature trailblazers, influencers, and innovators who are driving positive change, such as the lawyer who fought Dupont for two decades to protect our water and the vital work of an organization dedicated to supporting women who have been trafficked within the United States.
Jamie Truman is the co-founder of Truman Charities, an entirely volunteer-run organization. Since its inception in 2010, Truman Charities has successfully raised over $2 million for a variety of charitable causes.
In addition to her work with Truman Charities, Jamie is also the author of the bestselling book "Vanishing Fathers: The Ripple Effect on Tomorrow's Generation." This book has generated over $80,000 for charities supporting at-risk youth, as 100% of the book's proceeds are donated to these vital organizations.
The Truman Charities Podcast
Memorial Day Special: Helping Those Navigating The Death Of A Service Member Or Veteran | Tragedy Assistance Program For Survivors Ep. 141
Memorial Day is a holiday to most, but a day of remembrance and mourning for others. In this episode, you’ll hear how TAPS (Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors) supports families through every stage of grief — meeting them with compassion, honoring every story, and making sure no one has to grieve alone.
Vice President of Development Audrey B. shares how one phone call to TAPS became the first step in her journey toward healing as a young military widow. She opens up about the grief that followed, and how the organization’s peer support helped her rebuild her life.
We also talk about TAPS’ national and global reach, including the annual National Military Survivor Seminar and children’s Good Grief Camp happening this weekend in DC. Tune in to learn more about their programs, resources, and how you can support survivors in the military and veteran community!
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This episode was post produced by Podcast Boutique https://podcastboutique.com/
Welcome to the Truman Charities Podcast. I am Jamie Truman, your host. With Memorial Day being today, I felt it was important to highlight the incredible work of TAPS Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors. This organization offers compassionate care and vital resources to individuals grieving the loss of a loved one who served in the military or veteran community. In this episode, I had the privilege of speaking to Audrey Bay, the Vice President of Development of TAPS, who is also a Navy veteran and widow herself.
Speaker 1:Audrey shares her personal connection of TAPS and provides valuable insights into the support that they offer. We discussed a significant need for their services, with TAPS receiving an average of 29 calls a day from people seeking help with their grief. We also explored impactful stories of how TAPS programs have touched lives and how you can contribute to their organization. It's worth noting that TAPS is holding its annual National Military Survivor Seminar in Good Grief Camp this weekend, right here in DC. While many view Memorial Day as a holiday for relaxation, it's important to remember the hundreds of thousands of families who are experiencing profound grief during this time grief during this time. I encourage you to join us in honoring these families and the brave men and women who have served, by learning more and supporting TAPS. Now let's welcome Audrey to Truman Charities. Audrey, I appreciate you coming on today to talk about TAPS. How are you doing?
Speaker 2:I'm doing great. Thank you so much for the invitation. I appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Of course, I really want to get into TAPS, which is the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors. But before we get into the organization and what you guys are able to provide to people in the community, I want to know a little bit about your commitment to TAPS, because I learned a little bit about you and your bio and it's not just a professional commitment but also personal too. So can you tell us a little bit about that?
Speaker 2:Yes, absolutely. You know, I came to TAPS when I was still serving in the Navy. I was newlywed, I had married a man that I had gone through training with. His name was Jason and he was amazing. We were married for 10 weeks and four days, only the first eight of which we were actually together on our honeymoon. And then he went back to his ship and went overboard in the Pacific Ocean and so he was lost at sea.
Speaker 2:And TAPS is an organization that was there for me on the third day when the search for Jason had been called off, and I was just left sitting with the heaviness of the grief. I was a 24-year-old widow. I didn't know how to even function. I felt like I was the only person in the world who had lost a spouse at 24. And TAPS was there for me. The world who had lost a spouse at 24, and TAPS was there for me. I had a moment, three days in, where I just happened to look over and see this pamphlet that was given to me by my casualty officer, and I saw the folded flag and saw that there was a phone number, and I just had a knee-jerk reaction where I picked up the phone and called, and that's when I talked to the first widow that I met, who was almost my age, and I thought gosh, if she can do it and she was five years in if she could do it, I could do it.
Speaker 1:So when you called and you spoke with her, what type of program did you?
Speaker 2:join? The first thing was I found peer support. Did you join? The first thing was I found peer support. That's the core of what we do is peer support around military loss, and so the first thing that I found was that peer-based emotional support, identifying a person who could mentor me and build my hope and help me believe that this was something that I could not just survive, but I could actually thrive through it and then come out on the other end and if you can say that there's another end, but that I could use it to make meaning, to do something meaningful in the future to help somebody else, and that really set the tone for me, I think in my entire grief trajectory it helped me to know that it was possible for there to be something good that could come from it. Because it's really hard to see that, especially early on. It's hard to believe that anything good can ever come from that. But you see other people who are taking steps that are really positive and what we now call post-traumatic growth and meaning making. Seeing other people do that it really makes you believe in something different. That's possible and while it's painful, you know that there can be something positive in the midst of that as well. That's the first thing.
Speaker 2:I mean other things I wound up engaging in over time. Going to some of our events physically, meeting others, not just talking on the phone, really was going to be a lifer, I thought, and being able to wake up in the morning and know where I was going was a great sense of comfort. And then suddenly to be met with a person in the mirror that I didn't recognize, to have such a radical change in my personality, to not be able to really recognize myself, that was hard trying to figure out. What's next, who am I? And so a lot of the work we now do with our Women's Empowerment Program in particular is identity development. Who am I now? Where am I going? What am I doing with my life now that everything has changed and it's powerful?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I found your organization really unique because I've spoke with a lot of organizations that are helping men and women in the military that are serving in vets. But I thought it was really unique to focus on family members and grief and awareness of that and how much support that the family needs once they lose a loved one. So tell me a little bit about why TAPS was created. It was created back in 94, but tell me a little bit about that.
Speaker 2:We were created. When Bonnie Carroll, who is my boss, she's our president and founder she came together with the other spouses of the airplane crash that took the life of her husband and all of these other husbands, and when she came together with the other women around the table and they were just, you know, sharing a cup of coffee and getting to know one another and supporting one another, she realized that that was a piece that was missing. Realized that that was a piece that was missing. She had done a lot of work already in crisis and she thought that she understood what it was that she would need, but it was more. It was more than just here's a resource. It was being with other people who have been there and who have done that, and in her case, we're doing that. Even then she realized that there was something missing in that peer support component, and peer support is something now we talk about regularly across every area of our society. Back then it wasn't nearly as recognized for the important feature that it was for mental health support, and so it really set her on a journey to do a gap analysis of what are the resources that are out there for families when they've experienced a loss and you know, seeing that that was missing, there wasn't an organization at that time that provided that kind of support.
Speaker 2:And it's critical because you know military families, it's not just the military person who serves, it's the whole family who serves. Now retired from the Navy, and he was gone for five and a half years of the 16 years that we were married while he was still in, and every time he left things, you know, things would break, the computer would stop working, I mean the kids would be sick, I mean if it could go wrong, it went wrong, and so I was holding down the fort. As military spouses do, the children serve. You know there are sacrifices that everybody makes and you give up a lot. You give up a lot, especially as a spouse when you, you know, don't have a career because you're supporting your military service members. So there are a lot of supports that family members need.
Speaker 2:Especially when you're serving in the military, your family winds up going, typically someplace else where there is no family support. You're not back home, and so you're trying to put down roots as quickly as you can and create stability and, you know, find all the resources that you need, and then all of that is upended and then you have to move again and there's just a lot of upheaval and families critically need that support and you don't know what you don't know. And so, until you're in it and you're faced with, in the middle of a crisis, having to make so many rapid-fire decisions that you're not prepared to make, you need to know what's normal, what are my options, how can I support my children, who are grieving, while also supporting myself? And they're all different ages and grieving differently, and so I'm on this massive learning curve and I just need help walking through it. And that's really what TAPS is. It's all of us who've gone through it before being there for other people who are going through it now.
Speaker 1:Now, once a year you guys have your National Military Survivor Seminar in Good Grief Camp. That is annually in DC over Memorial Day weekend. It's been happening since 94. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. It's a great opportunity for family members from across the country and now around the world to come together in person with others. We host a variety of workshops that people attend to meet them at different areas of their grief. We have the Good Grief Camp for children. That's concurrently running and so children are learning coping skills and spending time with peers, maybe for the first time, other kids who have lost their loved one as well. You know, if they lost their father, another child right at their elbow who's lost their dad, and being able to surround yourself with people who get that and not feel alone and isolated.
Speaker 2:We come together to go through these workshops, to have these opportunities for sharing, to really normalize the experience of grief, to have a different language for the grief, to understand that it's a roller coaster and the roller coaster is normal, and to be around people who don't shrink from it. The reality is, I think a lot of people are uncomfortable in that uncomfortable they don't. I actually have a sticker on my computer that says seize the awkward. We have this beautiful way of seizing the awkward and not running away from the grief, because it's really heavy when people don't know what to say to you, and so this atmosphere that we create is this beautiful, safe space for people to come and listen to experts in the field of death, dying and bereavement, but also to hear the experiences of others who have walked that journey as well, and then to know that they are maybe years out from their loss and that they're really functioning well and that they've been able to learn and grow through it. People walk away with this sense of encouragement and also, you know, we have this opportunity to honor when we're in our home places.
Speaker 2:You know it's either the grocery store and people will. You'll check out and the cashier may say happy Memorial Day. Well, for us it's not happy, even when we reach a point where we can be grateful that we have this opportunity to honor and remember. It's a reflective somber day, it's a reverent day and most of the world around us doesn't necessarily recognize that. But we come together and we honor the reverence of that day and we have those moments of silence and we bring our person into that space. We say their names, we remember them again and we do it in a way that feels comforting and inclusive and gives people a space. We don't shrink from it and that's what's beautiful, whether it's the seminar that we have over Memorial Day or any of our other events. We create that safe container within which a person can say things that maybe most of the year they even stuff inside because people just don't know how to cope with that with them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I really liked when I was on your website and I saw that you have different events for basically like for everyone. So you have an upcoming event in Montana which is a men's retreat. You also have a widow's fiance and significant other retreat that's going on, and then, as you were talking about, you have things for children as well, right? So you have so many different programs for so many different people, so you can find the one that's right for you, right? And so do you have any stories from individuals that have went through some of these programs that it's obviously made a significant impact on you and the founder of this organization, but anyone else that comes to mind that this has really helped?
Speaker 2:Oh, so many, so many you know sometimes. I'll tell you two that immediately come to mind. One was a mom who had lost her son and he had died by suicide. When I first met her at that first event, she didn't even speak. Her husband was really responding for them both, answering the questions. She could hardly make eye contact. She was so completely in the throes of grief. That was Friday, around three o'clock in the afternoon. By Sunday morning I was sitting at breakfast with her at this event and she was laughing and telling stories of her son and remembering some good times with him. Now there have been a lot of tears as well, but the complete 180 that she did when she found that she had a safe place to talk about her son, in spite of the fact that he had died by suicide and in her world that was highly stigmatized no one wanted to even acknowledge that he ever existed because suicide was so stigmatized. So having a safe place for her to be able to still remember him and to say my son died by suicide, powerful One of the things that we happened.
Speaker 2:Our National Military Suicide Survivor Seminar is also every year in the fall and families get to come together just with those who've experienced that kind of loss, that validation of you know that I'm still going to honor their service. Their life is about more than the last moment and when they died, and so those are beautiful opportunities. But I also think about the families who you know they have complicated relationships with their service member. We tend to talk a lot about heroes and most people do think of their military service members as a hero who served and gave so much to our nation service members as a hero who served and gave so much to our nation. And yet a lot of our families have expressed frustration that their person, they don't see their person as a hero because they struggled so much maybe with service, with PTSD, that it turned into domestic violence and so you know, even a sense of relief now that they don't have to live with that domestic violence. The spectrum of experience of our military service members and their families is really broad and some of our families do come and they absolutely honor and others say I can't honor the person he was when he died. I can honor the person that he was when I first married him and he was wonderful, but at the end it was extremely difficult.
Speaker 2:And where do you find support for that? And yet we do have many people who have had those complicated dynamics in their family and were able to connect them with other people who've had the same complicated dynamics. That's the beauty of it. How do you otherwise find someone whose experience was varied in that way? If you don't have this pool of people with this broad set of experiences, you know from which to draw, and so we know those stories and we're able to connect people under those circumstances with others who truly do understand. There are so many stories that I can think of People who have gone on to become, you know, go through our Good Grief Camp, who've gone on then to come back and mentor other children, like for a little kid. There's nothing like meeting an adult that you see as an adult and then finding out that they lost their dad when they were a kid too, and what's possible in those conversations gives me literally. I have goosebumps over my whole body right now just thinking about all the stories that I could bring into this space.
Speaker 1:I did. When you go onto your website, there are just so many different stories that I kind of just sat there and was reading through them and it's really incredible the effects that some of these programs have had on individuals. If someone's listening to this and they're struggling right now with the death of a family member that was in the service and really thinks that they could benefit from your organization, how do you go about that?
Speaker 2:Well, there's so many ways to connect with us. We have our 24-7 National Military Survivor Helpline that is there and staffed by survivors just like me, and we're there at 800-959-8277. You can reach us again 24-7, and that will be conversation, one of many where we listen to see you know what it is that you're dealing with right now. What's the most helpful thing, even if it's just listening, or do you need a resource? Is there something specific that we can support that you're dealing with? So it could be that you call us. We also have a fantastic website at tapsorg where you can fill out a really quick form with just a little bit of information and we can proactively reach out to you.
Speaker 2:Some people send us an email at info at tapsorg and they just write their thoughts and you know their name and their phone number. So, no matter how you get to us, there's going to be help. Some people will, you know, send us a message in the middle of the night and they hit send and within a minute they're getting. They're getting a phone call and they're so surprised that they actually get a person. However you get to us, just get to us. However you can, and we're going to be there.
Speaker 1:So how do individuals, how can if they're listening to this, they want to help your organization either, you know volunteer, donate? How can someone get involved within your organization?
Speaker 2:Sure, well, again, whether it's emailing us, if it's going onto our website at tapsorg slash volunteer, you can see the various ways that you can support there. We do need a lot of support moving in. Like for our national seminar. We typically have around 300 volunteers who are coming out to help us move into this hotel space, set up all the spaces for the kids' camp. We'll have approximately 450 kids at our house at an event like this, plus a couple of thousand adults who are there either getting support, giving support, going through training, all of that. So you know we need a small army of people to help us move in to one of these events for one of our seminars. But we also have you know whether you are running in remembrance of one of the loved ones who've come to TAPS, or you're fundraising, doing a Facebook fundraiser, or you know, doing some other type of fundraising We've even had a seven-year-old little girl who did a lemonade stand and donated her lemonade stand proceeds to TAPS or if you are connected to a company or a foundation who wants to support a really, really good cause. We are always looking for donors whose values align with what we do and they want to be a part of supporting military families. One of the things I'll say is that there's no better way to support TAPS than to see what it is that we do from the inside and so coming to one of our events and providing the support and seeing the programming firsthand, seeing the power of what we do, there's no better way to support us than to have that personal insight so that then you can turn around and tell people about TAPS and you never know when you're going to need the information.
Speaker 2:I've met people on airplanes and in elevators and at restaurants and random people at grocery stores who were military families who had lost loved ones and they had no idea we existed.
Speaker 2:And as much as any other resource that you could give to a person, taps is something every American needs to know because we all know military-connected families and, regardless of the timeframe of the service, the status of the service if it was active duty, guard, reserve doesn't matter. What the cause of death was, the location of the death veteran or active it doesn't matter. We are here If that person ever had military service and they pass, their families have access to TAPS and they pass, their families have access to TAPS. And it's different for everyone because there's always an assessment, there's always a starting place of listening to see what it is that the person is dealing with, and then we tailor everything from there, and so everyone needs to know about TAPS. That's the best volunteer and leveraging your own social media. If you've learned about taps, share the information so that other people can gain that information as well, and so amplifying the message. Go into our social media handles and pull in that information, reposting it, resharing just to amplify the message I do like that.
Speaker 1:you're helping people nationwide, so wherever someone's at you can find, you have resources to help them and connect them with other individuals. Is there anything that we haven't discussed that you think people should know about?
Speaker 2:Oh, there's so much. One of the things that people aren't aware of is that TAPS actually operates in globally. We provide support for other organizations who are working with military families in their countries, giving them our best practice model for how they care for the service members in their countries. We help to stand up TAPS Ukraine, so they have this organization operating there and has been now for many years providing support for the efforts that are ongoing in Ukraine. We have TAPS Italy. We're working in over 50 different countries in various capacities to help their governments and their people understand how they can leverage what it is that we do in their space so that they can care for people as well. Their institutions look different but they can learn from what it is that we do, or we can partner and learn from their best practices for those countries that also have organizations that might have a similar mission to ours. But you know, grief is not something we don't corner the market on it. I think of us as grief experts, period. We just also have the military cultural competency component to go resources on it.
Speaker 2:Our institute, the TAPS Institute for Hope and Healing at tapsorg slash institute, has a broad variety of resources for both people who are grieving, people who have ever lost someone, whether they would consider themselves actively grieving or not.
Speaker 2:Professionals working with family members who have experienced a loss, military members, chaplains, medical professionals, therapists.
Speaker 2:There are so many resources on the website, and so we want to make sure and extend what we know into the professional space as well. We also know that there's just such a shortage of professionals in the mental health care space today. We don't have enough therapists to go around, and peer support is being leveraged in very intense medical and psychiatric wards, etc. Peer support works, and so I need people to know peer support works, and we have a phenomenal peer mentor training program where we help people know how they can extend a hand to someone else after they've gone through this very difficult thing. So there are so many irons in the fire that TAPS has to try to make a difference for our military families, and I would just simply say, if you want to know more, if you're compelled to connect, if our mission is meaningful to you, we want to talk with you and we want to be here to support or help you find ways that you can support the families that we serve.
Speaker 1:What would your advice be to someone that has a friend or family member that has just lost someone and is in the grieving process? What's the best thing that you can do for them? Because I know a lot of people feel helpless or they feel like what can I do?
Speaker 2:You know, I think I'll start by just saying show up, be there. If you ask someone, if they're grieving, and say, you know, do you need anything, frequently they'll say I don't know what I need. Just show up, be a listening ear, Don't be afraid of their grief and don't feel like you need to change it somehow For me, you know, people stopped communicating with me because they felt somehow responsible for changing it or taking it away. People have a tendency to use cliches that, oh you'll, if I had a dollar for every person who told me at 24, then I'll find somebody again, whether that's true or not. Who knows they wouldn't have known that. Don't placate people with cliches. You know time does not heal all wounds. The wound is always going to, in some capacity, be there. So just be willing to listen and don't feel like you have to take it away somehow or change it.
Speaker 2:You know Dr Alan Wolfelt, a psychologist who leads the Center for Loss and Life Transition in Colorado Springs, or in Colorado, rather. He says he has the companion philosophy that he developed, and it's 11 tenets. How do you be there for somebody who's going through something? The one that stands out to me the most it says that companioning is about going to the wilderness of the soul with another human being. It isn't about feeling responsible for helping them find their way out. And so, if a person can, if you can just relax into holding that space with that person and be comfortable, to sit in the silence until they're willing to talk If they even reach that point be there.
Speaker 2:And also, we need people when we're grieving. We don't need people to always want to hear our sadness. We also need people who just want to show up and take us bowling, you know, because sometimes you need a break from it too. And so, wherever you can feel comfortable to just show up, that's the best advice that I could give anybody for somebody else. I frequently walk up to a person. I can tell that they're really upset about something and I just lean in for a hug. I may not even say anything. Maybe a hug is all a person needs. But yeah, just show up.
Speaker 1:That's such great advice. I love that so much. Audrey, I want to thank you for coming on here and talking about TAPS with us. You know I really loved hearing about this organization and when Russell, one of our board members, introduced me to you, I thought I can't wait to interview you guys. This is going to be such a great interview for our Memorial Day special. It's so fitting and this is a great way for people to hear about you guys, because you know, I'm right outside of DC and I hadn't heard about your organization. So I can't wait to spread the word about all the wonderful work that you're doing for thousands and tens of thousands of people. And I thought it was nationwide. Now you're worldwide, so that is really fantastic news and again, I want to thank you again for coming on. Thank you so much, jamie.
Speaker 1:I want to thank everybody for tuning in to another episode of the Truman Charities Podcast. I thought that this was the perfect episode for Memorial Day. I hope you guys feel the same way. I had just learned about the organization a few months back and I'm really impressed with all the work they're doing for military families Charities. You can follow us on Instagram at jamie at underscore Truman Charities. You can follow us on Facebook at Truman Charities, and if you want to learn about our upcoming events that we have and our Bethesda's Best Happy Hours, make sure to go into trumancharitiescom and sign up for our newsletter. You can also follow me on LinkedIn at jamietruman. So I want to thank you for tuning into another episode of the Truman Charities Podcast. Until next time.
