Hope Comes to Visit
Hope Comes to Visit is a soulful podcast that holds space for real stories, honest conversations, and the kind of moments that remind us we’re never alone.
Hosted by author, speaker, and former TV journalist-turned-storyteller Danielle Elliott Smith, the show explores the full spectrum of the human experience — from the tender to the triumphant. Through powerful interviews and reflective storytelling, each episode offers light, connection, and presence for anyone navigating the in-between.
Whether you’re grieving, growing, beginning again, or simply craving something real, Hope Comes to Visit will meet you right where you are — with warmth, grace, and the quiet belief that even in the dark, transformation can take root.
New episodes drop every Monday and Friday, so you can begin and end your week with a little light, reflection, and hope.
Hope Comes to Visit
Broken Open: What Grief Teaches Us About Living
Grief shatters us in ways we never imagine possible until we're standing in its wreckage.
When Marty died suddenly, almost 2 years ago, on August 13, 2023, I found myself navigating the rawest form of pain while thousands of miles away in Greece with my children. The frantic journey home, the 17 days by his hospital bed, and the impossible decision to let him go fundamentally altered who I am.
Grief doesn't follow stages or timelines.
Grief needs witnesses, not wisdom; space, not sermons.
Through this experience, I've discovered that grief carves out places within us we never knew existed—spaces that can eventually be filled with new forms of love and purpose. The loss that broke me also built the foundation for who I've become. It led me to my fiancé James, a love that wouldn't have been possible without everything I walked through first. For anyone currently drowning in grief, please know this isn't the end of your story.
Hope returns, not as a roar but as a whisper, a flicker, a reminder that pain transforms but doesn't define us.
You're not broken—you're human, and you are not alone. There is life after grief, not in spite of it, but because of it.
Thank you for listening to Hope Comes to Visit. If this episode resonated with you, please follow, rate, and share the show — it helps others find their way to these conversations.
New episodes drop every Monday and Friday, so you can begin and end your week with a little light and a lot of hope.
For more stories, reflections, and ways to connect, visit www.DanielleElliottSmith.com or follow along on Instagram @daniellesmithtv and @HopeComestoVisit
Welcome to Hope Comes to Visit a place for soft landings, soul, truth and the unedited middle. I'm Danielle Elliott Smith and today's episode is an invitation into one of the most tender, transformative chapters of my life. There are things I never imagined saying I lost the man I love. He's not coming home. I watched him slip away one breath at a time, but I have said them now. I've lived them and this episode is my offering for anyone who has walked through loss or sat beside a hospital bed praying for a miracle, or woken up and realized your world has shifted forever. Let's take a quick moment to thank the people that support and sponsor the podcast. When life takes an unexpected turn, you deserve someone who will stand beside you. St Louis attorney Chris Dulley offers experienced one-on-one legal defense. Call 314-384-4000 or 314-DUI-HELP, or you can visit DulleyLawFirmcom that's D-U-L-L-E lawfirmcom for a free consultation.
Speaker 1:In August of 2023, the man I loved, marty, died. It was sudden, cruel, unfathomable. I was in Greece on vacation with my kids and my ex-husband yes, my ex-husband. He and I are very good friends. In another episode, I promise we will talk about successful co-parenting, but Marty was at home. An urgent call from his son left me stunned my dad's in the hospital. He's not okay. I think he's had a heart attack.
Speaker 1:There are no words for the hours that followed, the frantic packing, the 26 hours of travel, the way my body shook from adrenaline and panic and love. I remember begging the skies to hold the planes to fly, the hours to pass quickly. I just needed to get to him and I did. I walked into that hospital room in the middle of the night. I touched his face. I told him I loved him. I made good on my promise. I came home. I stayed with him for the next 17 days. I cried, I held his hand. I covered his room with photographs begging the doctors and nurses to see the man, the father and son, the friend beneath the ventilator and the IVs. But the love and hope and whispered prayers from all of us couldn't change the fact that the damage to his brain was irreversible. I continued to believe in the possibility of a miracle, mentally preparing to help him heal, if only he was granted the chance. But sometimes belief isn't enough to bend the laws of this world and eventually I and his family had to do the impossible. We had to let him go. At the time it was as though I had lost the ability to breathe.
Speaker 1:Grief is not tidy, it's not poetic, it does not come in stages. It is a thunderclap and a whisper, a wave and a void, a scream in the night and silence that lasts for days and weeks. And the things people say, they matter. Some words land like a lifeline, others like a slap. You're so strong, he's in a better place. Everything happens for a reason.
Speaker 1:These phrases, though well-meaning, can feel like being kicked. Because strength wasn't a choice, because there is no better place than here, beside the people we love, and because sometimes there is no better place than here, beside the people we love, and because sometimes there is no reason, only heartbreak. What helps is presence, saying I don't know what to say, but I'm here, showing up without trying to fix it, asking how someone is and meaning it, offering food, rides, silence, a hand to hold. Grief needs softness, not solutions, witness not wisdom, space not sermons. If you don't know what to say, say that. If you want to help, just stay close. People say you're so strong, but strength wasn't a choice, it was survival.
Speaker 1:I kept breathing, I kept showing up for my kids. I kept putting one foot in front of the other, not because I knew how, not because I wanted to, but because love of others kept me upright. There were days I couldn't speak, days I screamed into pillows and made sounds I didn't recognize, days I sat still for hours, and others when it was simply impossible to sit. I've learned this kind of grief. The grief that guts you is the only universal experience we all share. Not everyone will have children, not everyone will get married, not everyone will find their dream job or live in their favorite city, but every single one of us is going to lose someone we love desperately, someone we can't imagine living without desperately. Someone we can't imagine living without. And yet somehow it's the one thing we are the least equipped to handle for ourselves and for each other. We fumble, we avoid, we rush, we say the wrong thing or we say nothing at all, because grief is uncomfortable, it's inconvenient and it doesn't come with a finish line.
Speaker 1:I worked with a grief therapist who shared something fundamental with me. She said, danielle, this is more than grief. Your whole world is being rearranged. Everyone, you know, is broken up into three buckets the people who disappear during this time, the people who show up a little and try to be there for you but aren't entirely sure how. And those who are your people. The challenge is, everyone is somewhere new. So many of the people you thought would show up. They're gone Because they are uncomfortable. Your grief is too big or too hard for them. And those, the people who are there for you, they're mainly the ones who have experienced this pain and truly understand.
Speaker 1:Years ago in my early mom blogging days, a young mother in our community lost her young daughter. That little girl was the same age as my daughter, delaney. Our community called and messaged and wore purple and released balloons anything to let the family know we were there, that we remembered. In the months following, that mother wrote about her grief and it has always struck with me. She thanked everyone for the calls and the messages and the emails. She said she couldn't respond to many of the messages, but hearing them kept her afloat. However, the loudest noise it was all of the people who didn't call because it was too hard for them.
Speaker 1:At that moment I vowed to be one of the people who called. I frequently let people know they don't have to call me back, but I want them to know I'm there for them, I'm thinking about them. They are loved and it is messages just like these that kept me here in the moments when I wasn't sure I could go on. It was the 2am Facebook messages, the random texts, the notes and the calls and the voicemails. It was the people who refused to let me sit in the dark alone, the ones who did not barge in turning every light within reach, demanding I get up, get in the shower and feel better. It was the ones who let me know it was okay to take my time to move when I could, to sit when I needed to cry, if I felt it coming to sleep, if my body called for it to talk to a therapist, if I was able to let grief visit, sit, stay, be and move through me at a pace that felt right.
Speaker 1:If we let it, grief can be a great unifier, a doorway to deeper presence, deeper empathy and deeper love. It invites us to stop looking away, to show up not with answers but with open arms, to stop trying to patch pain with platitudes and instead just sit in it with someone. Grief humbles us. It reminds us how fragile we are and how sacred every single connection can be. It strips away small talk and pretense and offers something deeper humanity in its rawest form and maybe, just maybe, if we were taught how to hold grief, we'd be better at holding each other, not to fix, not to rush, but simply to stay until breath returns and color comes back and laughter feels possible again. Grief won't be solved, but it can be softened by love, by presence and by the shared knowing that we will all walk this road someday.
Speaker 1:Here's the thing Despite the epic levels of pain I experienced, I wouldn't change what happened, not because it didn't break me it did but because it also built the foundation for who I've become. That loss, as brutal and unwelcome as it was, it placed me on the path I walk now with more clarity, more compassion, more purpose. Loving Marty taught me about truth, about presence, about how sacred and fleeting life really is. He taught me to see the deepest layers of myself, the parts I had ignored, the ones I had never touched. He showed me what I deserved in love and what I would never again tolerate or allow in my life. We loved each other in a way that was fierce and flawed and redemptive. Ours was a chapter filled with both tenderness and turbulence, and in loving him I came to know myself in a way that was fierce and flawed and redemptive. Ours was a chapter filled with both tenderness and turbulence, and in loving him I came to know myself in a new way. But what I see clearly now, from where I stand today, is that this loss was not just an ending. It was a beginning, because that love and the grief that followed carved out a space in me I didn't know existed, space I now fill with something even more beautiful, more pure and more honest the kind of love I have today with my fiancé James. It's rooted in everything I've walked through. It's kind, grounding, generous and true. I couldn't have received this love if I hadn't survived the one that came before. So no, I wouldn't change what happened because it led me here.
Speaker 1:If you're grieving for someone you loved, for a life you lost, for a version of you that no longer exists, I want you to know something You're not broken, you're human and you're not alone. Grief has no timetable. It doesn't demand that you move on. It asks that you carry love forward, that you speak their name, that you remember, that you allow joy to return, even when it feels disloyal. There is no right way to grieve, only your way and my way.
Speaker 1:It didn't feel brave or poetic. It felt jagged and raw and vulnerable and impossible. It felt like being ripped open in a world that just kept moving. I didn't feel equipped to talk about grief, I didn't feel equipped to live through it and I certainly didn't feel equipped to launch a podcast called Hope Comes to Visit, not when hope had gone missing for the first time in my life. But it's in that very unraveling that something began to mend, slowly, quietly, not in grand revelations, but in the smallest of mercies a text from a friend, a hand on my back, someone who didn't ask me to be okay. Grief cracked me open and in that cracking, light filtered. Light filtered in hope returned, not as a roar, but as a whisper, a knowing, a flicker, a reminder that maybe, just maybe, this pain wasn't the end of my story. If you're there now in that dark place, please know I see you, I've been you and I'll hold space for you as long as you need.
Speaker 1:I carry Marty's memory with deep reverence, but I no longer live in daily grief. My heart has made room for something new, for someone new, for a love that is expansive and safe and soul level. True James, he is the light that waited for me on the other side of loss, and every day I choose this our life, our love and our future. But before I could say yes to him, to us, there was a time when I wasn't sure I'd ever find my way again. I was fragile, untethered, questioning my place in the world and for the first time in my life I wondered if I was done, if there was anything left in me.
Speaker 1:Through that deep valley of grief, there were friends who never left, who sat beside me when I was shattered, who didn't know what to say but said it anyway, who worried quietly and checked in anyway, who held the vision of this life, this love. Even when I couldn't see it, they believed for me. When I couldn't, they trusted that something beautiful was still ahead, and they let me walk my own way through the pain to find it. To them and to anyone holding hope on behalf of someone else, thank you. That kind of faith is sacred. That kind of love saves lives. And to anyone listening, there is life after grief, not in spite of it, but because of it. You're not broken, you're human and you are not alone. There is power in being witnessed, in naming the hard things, in knowing someone else made it through.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to Hope Comes to Visit. I'm Danielle Elliott Smith. I'm so grateful you're here. Please keep going. I'm incredibly grateful to the people who support and sponsor the podcast. Sometimes life takes a sharp turn and when it does, having someone steady in your corner can make all the difference. Chris Dulley is a trusted St Louis attorney who personally guides his clients through criminal defense cases with clarity, compassion and experience. From traffic violations to serious charges, he shows up fully and directly. Call 314-384-4000 or 314-DUI-HELP or you can visit DulleyLawFirmcom for a free consultation.