The soulnotskin Podcast with Jen SluMac
A podcast about the stories that shape us, connect us, and help us live with more honesty, compassion, and purpose.
The soulnotskin Podcast shares honest human stories that help us see ourselves in each other. Through reflective conversations about childhood, identity, family, adversity, recovery, reinvention, and service, guests explore what shaped them, how they learned to cope, what those patterns protected or cost, and what helped them choose what came next.
Listeners leave with greater recognition, compassion, and—when appropriate—a practical next step to explore.
Real Stories. Real People. Real Insight. Becoming Who We Are.
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The soulnotskin Podcast with Jen SluMac
Grief Changes The Relationship
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A moment with your host, Jen SluMac - one-off episodes I'll publish to share thoughts or learnings as I go through my life.
We sit with the raw reality of losing a mother and the strange ways grief can sharpen focus, stir creativity, and reshape what matters. We talk through the shift from physical presence to spiritual memory, and the faith questions that hit hardest when goodbye becomes paperwork and ashes.
- • a daily grief reader as a morning anchor
- • the idea that death changes a relationship rather than ending it
- • a creative surge after loss and making room for it
- • carrying forward the best parts of a parent like an inheritance
- • bedside moments with dementia and the way they reorder priorities
- • stepping back from stressful work that no longer fits
- • doubt, afterlife questions and the search for a God that still feels good and loving
Resources & Workbooks:
Book • Free Starter Guide • Heal What Raised You Workbook • Website
© 2026 soulnotskin. All rights reserved.
A Daily Reader For Grief
SPEAKER_01A friend of mine gave me a book that she received when she lost her son. And the book is a daily reader, a morning inspiration, something to start your day dealing with grief.
Love Continues After Death
SPEAKER_00The one I read today said something along the lines of When you lose somebody that you love, it doesn't end the relationship, it changes the relationship. From a physical one to a spiritual one. Rather than living with the physical person, now you're living with the memory of them. And it's said that sometimes when you lose the one that you love, their absence can help you grow stronger. Which I thought was kind of wild.
SPEAKER_01I have felt pieces of that.
Losing Mom And Finding Creativity
SPEAKER_01I have felt surges of creativity since I lost my mom. It's been four months today that I lost my mother to some cocktail of cancer, radiation, chemotherapy, dementia. Body just couldn't take it anymore. 77 years old. And with all of the challenges we faced as a family, my best friend on the planet.
SPEAKER_00So when it said that, it kind of made sense. I mean, a few thoughts that I've had, one of which was wow, this creative surge is really something. I have to listen to it, but it doesn't, I can't really fit it into my life. But I've made some changes in my life to make room for
Inheriting Her Gifts And Courage
SPEAKER_00it. It's almost like standing in the closet when my mom died. It's almost like standing in her closet and she's looking through her clothing and she pulls out a shirt that is creativity, that is her crafts that she's done her whole life, or her ink drawings, or her uh flower arrangements, or her garden, you know, all of that summed up in this uh metaphorical shirt that she pulls off the hanger and sort of snaps to straighten it out and holds it up and says, Would you wear this?
SPEAKER_01I'm not gonna need this anymore. Would you wear it? Do you want it? That's what it feels like. It feels like my mother gave me the best parts of herself to carry on, which is pretty beautiful. She used to say that me and my brothers are the best things she ever did.
SPEAKER_00We are the best parts of her. I think she was pretty exceptional on her own, but uh, I also appreciate that. I feel like there's a bit of her having stumbled through the latter part of her life's race, but handing me the baton. And when she did sort of collapsing and saying, I know you can, sweetheart. I love you. Go get him. Which she had a habit of saying to me her whole life, one way or another, anyhow.
How Grief Sharpens Your Senses
SPEAKER_00I do think that there's something to be said about grief sharpening your senses. I've heard that too. I probably butchered it, but I know what I mean. Something about how, you know, the absence really just sort of puts things in perspective.
Work Stress Stops Making Sense
SPEAKER_00And it did for me suddenly, uh, it was very clear that while I could align with the mission of the company that I was working for and the intentions behind the motivations of all that we did, being on the executive team of this organization uh began to prove itself far more stressful and uh soul-sucking than I was willing to
Watching A Life Fade Away
SPEAKER_00do. You know, there's something about sitting at your mother's bedside as she fades, watching the life weave, stop animating her body, her personality, her smiles. You know, with the week where she just stops opening her eyes or she just stops talking, but she's still there, but she's not there. There's something about watching your mother lose her faculties to dementia, something about when she looks at you in the hospital bed and says, Honey, I'll think I'm dying. There's something about those moments, as precious and as tragic and as beautiful and as painful as they are, all at once, wrapped up in one. There's something about it that really makes you want to pay attention to the way that you're spending your time and your money and your breath.
SPEAKER_01So I had to reconsider what I was doing.
Faith Questions After Loss
SPEAKER_00It also makes you look at your idea of God. Some people they came up in the tradition of Christianity or something like that, super clear on what it is that they believe, what the tradition in their family believes, what their parents believe, what they were told to believe, all of these things, very clear on it. Even when somebody dies, they say beautiful things like they went home to Jesus, or they're in a better place, or they're not in pain anymore. I tell you, faith of my youth, the faith of my family, the tradition of my family's faith has been a challenge for me for myriad reasons.
SPEAKER_01Uh I've been coming back to it more recently.
Cremation And The Hard Doubts
SPEAKER_01I have to tell you that when my mom died and we had to go and sign papers for the cremation. I really started to doubt everything that I've learned. Very fantastical, very wild in terms of wait.
SPEAKER_00There is nobody. How is she back in her best body? Well, where is she? Can she hear me?
SPEAKER_01Can she see me? What is God? Where did she go? Ashes to ashes, dust to dust? What happened to the hands that used to hold me? What happened to the voice that could talk me down from a tree? Not literally.
SPEAKER_00But when I would make myself crazy, what happened to the voice that yelled at me to try to set me straight when I was a knucklehead? What happened to the sounds of the brush? When she would flip her hair upside down and brush it out and then flip it back and brush it down?
SPEAKER_01Where'd she go? Can she hear me? Can she see me?
SPEAKER_00Does she still boil cinnamon on the stove on the days off for me to come home from school to? Does she still like the windows open in the middle of winter?
SPEAKER_01Just for the fresh air.
Holding On To God As Love
SPEAKER_01I believe God is good and God is love. I start to struggle when you try to embody God. When you try to engender God.
SPEAKER_00When you try to putting a race on God. I understand the story of Jesus being God in the flesh and having a Jewish an I mean, I get it.
