A Mother's Brutal Truth About Grief After Addiction Took Her Son

Katie Rizzo lost her son Nicholas to addiction. In this episode she shares the grief no one warns you about — the kind that mirrors pregnancy trimesters, the "orangutan" of messy emotions, and the love that outlasts loss.

What we get into: 

• Why grief is more than "love with nowhere to go" 
• The coping tools that actually helped: writing, movement, community 
• Carrying other kids through the loss of a sibling 
• Why men are taught to bury grief — and the cost • Telling her son she was never ashamed of his addiction

Episode Chapters:

• (00:00) The Trimesters of Grief — Katie shares how the sudden loss of her son Nicholas thrust her into writing poetry, and how her physical and emotional body mirrored pregnancy through a "cruel irony" of stages. 
• (01:21) The Complicated, Messy Nature of Loss — Moving past societal clichés ("grief is just love with nowhere to go"), Katie frames loss as a living entity that brings unexpected challenges, like the physical claustrophobia of car rides. 
• (02:37) "How Are You?" & Navigating Audience Vulnerability — A raw discussion on how to answer casual daily formalities honestly and the difficulty of navigating digital memories when a loved one is gone. 
• (04:36) Transitive Grief: Connecting Bonds and Pet Loss — The host opens up about the fresh loss of his 14-year-old dog, sparking a vulnerable dialogue on the validity of all grief, shared parental guilt, and intense attachments. 
• (06:55) Leaving a Legacy & Honoring Digital Memories — Analyzing how creative mediums—podcasts, community groups, and media—act as modern pipelines for generational healing and preserving family stories. 
• (08:08) Moving Through Loss with Action — Practical self-care coping mechanisms, including the healing power of everyday physical exercise, writing poetry, and picking up an instrument to channel unexpressed emotions. 
• (10:55) Mourning Fleeting Eras of Parenting — Exploring the subtle "micro-griefs" parents experience simply watching their children grow up out of footy pajamas, and navigating life transitions across different towns. 
• (13:58) Breaking Societal Stigmas on Male Vulnerability — A critical look at the dangerous isolation boys and men face regarding public displays of emotion, the trauma of suicide, and the desperate need for open support systems. 
• (15:58) Guiding Surviving Siblings on Their Own Time — Katie details how her two surviving sons navigated their brother's addiction and memorial service, highlighting why parents must grant children autonomy over their own healing timelines. 
• (18:38) Re-framing Guilt and the Real "Ultimate Goal" — Moving past parent shame, shifting focus away from what society demands, and finding a tightened circle of safety within the local fitness community. 
• (21:30) What Really Matters: Love, Trust, and Broken TVs — Katie guides the host through a profound perspective shift on everyday parental frustrations, transforming a stressful home accident into a powerful checkpoint for emotional grace. 
• (23:25) Outro & Creative Pipelines — Where to pre-order The Trimesters of Grief and None of Them Are You, finalizing a beautiful masterclass on parental love.

About Katie Rizzo

📖 Katie's books: The Trimesters of Grief & None of Them Are You 

Website: https://www.katierizzo.com/

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Transcript

The Trimesters of Grief

SPEAKER_00 0:00

And I was a writer before Nicholas passed away, and but I never wrote poetry. Probably the day after he died, I started writing everything down because nothing was making sense to me.

SPEAKER_01 0:14

Like it just this is so you wrote that grief mirrored pregnancy, nausea, then numbness, and then showing. How did you, you know, given all that, how did you learn to just get through every day going through the mo like, do you just go through the motions of that, or how did you navigate through all those different emotions and the grief that's just overshadowing everything?

SPEAKER_00 0:42

I was floored. When he was gone, I was like, this is not a possibility. Like my brain, it could not connect. And my body started responding in ways I was very familiar with having three kids. And it just felt like a really cruel irony that there were some stages that I went through that felt very similar to the three trimesters. My dad says, I'm from one to ten, I used to be a nine on the happiness always. And he said, now you're a six. And he was like, How do we get you to be a nine? And I'm like, I

The Complicated, Messy Nature of Loss

SPEAKER_00 1:24

am very happy thinking about Nicholas and being a six. They say love or grief is love with nowhere to go. And I don't think that's true. I feel like grief is something that Nicholas and I made together. Like, I love Nicholas, and my grief is not just love. It's anger, it's justice, it's sadness, it's the future, it's the past, it's just a lot of complicated, messy things. And some days this little orangutan will just want to destroy a room, and other days it just wants to sit and be held. And it's especially hard getting in a car. I don't know why. I think it's kind of true for a lot of people who have pretty deep grief that you get in a car and that little orangutan feels trapped and your head just starts spinning. So I don't know. It's kind of a nice analogy to think like, okay, grief, we're gonna have to take this car ride, it's gonna be terrible. Thinking about what does my grief need? Not just what do I need unless car ride, like water and and we need to give the car gas or whatever. But what does this grief need? And a lot of times it's a pretty demanding thing.

SPEAKER_01 2:33

You know, when people do ask how you're doing, it's kind of this formality

"How Are You?" & Navigating Audience Vulnerability

SPEAKER_01 2:37

of they're expecting you to be like, good, how are you? You know, kind of thing. Like do you how how do you handle that? Do you actually are you vulnerable with people? Or are you just is it more just like you brush it aside because you don't want to get into those deep emotions? Or how do you maybe just depends on the relationship with that person?

SPEAKER_00 2:56

Yeah, it does depend on the relationship. Billy Bob Thornton says that he's always gonna his brother died, and he said, I from here on out, I've been 50% happy and 50% sad at all times. And so if I'm feeling like I can talk to somebody about it, if it's somebody who I'm a part of a lot of grief groups, so a lot of times I'll say, you know, pretty good for a mom who's got a dead kid. Because that feels really honest, like I'm never gonna be a hundred percent again. But yeah, there are times from now when I can know my audience.

SPEAKER_01 3:33

I'm so sorry. Yeah, I'm just pale as a comparison, but I just lost my my little doggie for 14 years. And I feel I feel in some small manner the same way. Like I'm never gonna be as happy, I'm never gonna be as whatever, because it just there's that piece of grief. I'll just start crying, or I'll just, you know, you see the go-photos or whatever, the slideshow, and you know, like I'm happy that we have the access to the technology and all the videos and all the photos, but it's also it's gotta be one of those moments too, where you're just like you want that moment in time back, or you want that person back more than anything, and you can't. And so it's almost like torture where I've had to turn away the screens or stop those slideshows because it really just does trigger me. And I'm you know, it it's so raw and fresh in my mind that you know it can ruin my day. So I mean, did you deal with stuff like that? Are you still dealing with where the memories are, you know, you want like how do you deal with that? Because it's like you want to

Transitive Grief: Connecting Bonds and Pet Loss

SPEAKER_01 4:36

like we have access to all this these digital memories. It's like that is that almost detrimental having so much.

SPEAKER_00 4:44

Grief is grief, like some might be deeper, some might be more shallow, some might be more permanent. I don't know. I think grief is grief, and I think love is a beautiful feeling, and it really is the cost of it leads to grief. So I'm sorry about your dog.

SPEAKER_01 5:03

Yeah, I'm sorry. This is the first time I've had on the show, so uh it's just raw, and this is like it's a very up and down and I we ended up getting a new dog and I love him, and but I just I sometimes I'm just like oh man, yeah. It's not gonna be like you go through the whole like oh we should have we should he was 14, you know, it's not like he lived a long, happy life, but it's still like oh we should have done this, we should have done that. You know, like I could have I could have been better parent to him, I could have gone for more wobs, I could have, you know, and it's just like I beat myself up constantly about it because um before I had my kids, that was my kid. Like it was like I came home on my lunch breaks to check on him. You know, I um I would not go on vacations because I didn't want to leave. You know what it like it was that kind of tense bond. It wasn't just like, oh, this dog that sits outside all day and you know, we don't, but no, it was like it was just like very much this like so that's why, you know, I I'm trying to tap into a little bit of this because you know, like when people say they can't imagine, it's like on a much grander scale with our kid, you know, that now that I have two kids, almost five and two, that's just a whole nother level because it's like, you know, once your kid's born, you know, like my dog became second. I mean, it's just it just it is what it is. You gotta feed your kid every hour, you gotta change diapers, you've got yeah, like there's just you don't have any any other way about it. But yeah, so that's just what I'm trying to I'm trying to put myself in your shoes a little bit, and it's just very it's it's heartbreaking for me to be on this side and and hear you go through all this. And I I wish there was a magic wand. I could just I was just gonna say, I think that podcasts like this and the support groups that it sounds like you're part of are definitely a you know an instrumental part of that grief, that

Leaving a Legacy & Honoring Digital Memories

SPEAKER_01 6:55

grieving process, but also like healing process, right? Like you can kind of build that camaraderie with other people that have been through similar events, or even just talking to people, you know, in the parent circles about some of this stuff and help knowing that what you're doing right now is honoring your legacy of your son, but also it's helping potentially you don't know who this is gonna reach, right? It might reach a parent right now in the car listening. That's hey, you know, my son is kind of spiraling here. This is what I should have, this is the interventions I should have. Or you might it like it might help save lives. And so I think knowing that hopefully it helps you feel a little bit better, knowing that at least you're doing something to help and you're you're gonna help other parents not have to go through the same ordeal.

SPEAKER_00 7:42

Something you said about the pictures. My husband did not want to see pictures like the minute that it happened, he came home and crumbled. That's the best I can say about how he reacted, but he couldn't look at any pictures. So every picture, and we did a ton everywhere came off the walls. We have a a frame that is a digital frame. He was like, put it away.

Moving Through Loss with Action

SPEAKER_00 8:08

And I responded, I need to see those. Like I like, I feel like I was going insane, like he was here, right? I'm not imagining this. So I we have an area where I have a lot of pictures and I can look at the frame. And something that's helped me a lot is well, a few things. One is exercising, which sounds so weird, but I think that you need to move grief. And if you like I used to try to, I would just get so overwhelmed that I would just crumple too. But I've been trying to exercise every day, even if it's a walk with my dogs, because I think you need to move through it. And I think action, you can't think yourself into action, but you can act yourself into thinking. And that's helped a lot. Arts helped a lot, which sounds silly, but for you, for your dog, I'm just wondering if you could like listen to music or I don't know. My poetry has really helped me feel comforted or closer to him, or a way to like reach out and throw it into the internet and be like, listen to me, Nicholas. I need you to know I'm still here and I still really love you. And my husband started playing the guitar, and I think well, I know he plays the guitar to him and he's taking lessons. And I think I think it's I don't think it's good to shove it down, but men and women, although we are very the same, my husband and I uh have dealt with this very differently. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:50

Yeah, yeah, I can relate to that with with how my wife and I have dealt with the the loss of a longtime pet. And you know, obviously I I don't want to throw that comparison out there because I know it's way different, but I'm just in in some small manner, I I can't relate. So that's all I was just trying to make that point there. But again, you're good. It's different having kids, and but it's yeah, there's a very special episode I have planned, and I have the song, like all the script wrote out and stuff. And that was like gonna be honestly one of my first episodes because I was like, I need to find an outlet to vent and to sort of just get this out there. And because I know that there's and and one of the people I tried to get on the podcast early on, she was telling me this before I even had kids. She was like a former boss. She said that once you have kids, your pet just kind of the bond you have with your pet isn't it pales in comparison. And I was like, no way, like because at that time my dog was like my world. Like dad, I'd go on business trips and I'd be like, I miss my dog. You know, I did like it was one of those things. Yeah, I don't want to do this because I just miss him so much.

SPEAKER_00 10:54

And and I have

Mourning Fleeting Eras of Parenting

SPEAKER_00 10:55

a question for you. So something that I mourned, and I still do all the time, and I wonder if you've gotten there yet. And if not, maybe I hope you've already thought of this. But your kids are growing up, and I watched mine, and I those were just delicious times, and there I'm not getting them back. Even my two beautiful boys who are in grad school and having great days and bad days, they're never gonna wear those little footy pajamas again. And I don't get to snuggle with them when they get out of the bath. And I used to get into bed and cry about that. Like, give me back those times, because that is a little grief too, right?

SPEAKER_01 11:44

It is, and I I heard we're weird Al Yankovich, which is kind of like you're getting advice from weird owl, but no, he said like he wished, because he I think he was talking about his daughter. He wished he had a version of her when she was one, when she was two, when she was three, right? Like an individual version of each year because the person becomes different, right? Like it's yeah, he he has a I think a young daughter in her 20s now, but he miss, he grieves, he mourns, he misses the three-year-old daughter, the five-year-old daughter. And I I do that too. Like I look back at the photos, you know, I have I have the Google sync, and it's like three years ago, you were doing this, you know, and I was we were in a different town, a very small, remote town in a in a park that you know we went to all the time. And now we're in a different, different location. We don't go to that park anymore. We'll never be at that park anymore. I'll never be there with my dog. It's just like you start to think about all like how life has taken you on this winding road, and you're never gonna go back to those. Like, this is just gonna be, or I remember regretting, like, oh, every day we go to the park, or every day we do this, or you know, just being that kind of grumbling, like, oh, I have to like babysit while my wife cooks dinner because she's gonna throw a tantrum. But I I miss those moments of like jumping on the shampoo with her, or my daughter has a YouTube channel. Um, I'm gonna I always shout that out because it's like I you know, I'm the producer on that, I'm getting up. She's got more subscribers and more views, way more than I do. That is up to her. It's a little bit of a competition. Okay. Um, she's four. Okay, good. Uh by the way. But no, like she loves doing like those videos and like actually like and I I love it too. And it's like we have those family connections and bonds, and it's like no matter what I have that out there. And I yeah, hopefully, these podcasts in some way, my kids can can have this too. Because it's like I wish my parents would have left me. I wish I could have seen them, you know, in their 30s or 40s or whatever. And it's just like just technology has changed, and I think that it's it's special to kind of leave those those memories for your you know, your

Breaking Societal Stigmas on Male Vulnerability

SPEAKER_01 13:58

family, like you, you know, you your two other sons, two other sons, right? In college. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they're gonna hopefully they're gonna listen to this podcast, right? I don't know. I mean it, you know, it's gotta be a cool thing to see mom. Yeah. Moms dealing with it. Because I think that, you know, there's gotta be a lot of emotional process that they're going through too. Oh, and especially I think being men in this day and age too, we're told you can't cry. It's just kind of this generational thing. Like, people look at you weird. Like when I when I was crying at the gym, I felt so ashamed and stupid. Like, I'm just gonna be honest with you, because it's like people think that you're like losing your your you're not supposed to do that in public when you're 40. You know what I mean? Like, that's what that's what I was feeling. It's just not acceptable to do. But I know from my friend's suicide 10 years ago that you know what, if he would have opened up, if he would have expressed 100%, I think there's a good chance he would still be here. But he bottled it up because society told him, you know what, you don't tell people that you don't have emotions, you you kind of just move on, you suck it up because you're a man. Like, and so that's when I went experienced that, and I'm like, you know what? No, that's not the way to approach it. It's just to be vulnerable, wear your emotions on your sleeve. If somebody doesn't accept, that's cool. But men, the suicide rates for men are way, way higher than women. And I just gotta think like a lot of that attributes to the societal pressure of to not have emotions, to not feel whatever. So I'm just curious how your how your boys are, you know, how they've handled it, how are they currently handling it, and then like what's the support system that you have in place for them as you as you all kind of feel and and move on.

SPEAKER_00 15:51

So something that I've been humbled by and I've learned about parenting is that

Guiding Surviving Siblings on Their Own Time

SPEAKER_00 15:58

they're their own people, right? And as much as I wanted to believe that my actions led for them to do something, you know, re I read to them a lot. They were all three early readers. You know, I was like, okay, we're winning at this. We got we've got this. They're their own people. The Max and Dewey are both in grad school in different states. One's in New York and one is in Illinois. I try to be as I want to be the mom that they want to come to and that they want to visit. So I'm really aware of not trying to push them into things. There are lots of support groups, and neither one of them have gone to any of them, which kills me. But that's their choice. And they do know that we love them and that we're here for them. I think that they've gotten a lot of healing from when their brothers, we had their brothers' memorial. It was a little bit longer than most people do. We had it in December, and Nicholas had or in November, and Nicholas had died in September. So we waited a little while, and both of them wrote their own reflections and spoke at the memorial and talked about his addiction. And there were so many of our family friends there. I was kind of amazed at how many people just wanted to love on my boys. And they were there for it. They were 100% there for it. Like they stood outside the church and got the hugs, and I watched them figure out and navigate how they wanted to go through this grief. Hopefully, I've told them a billion times so they won't forget that I'm here and whatever they need, I want to support them. And they're kind of figuring it out on their own. My middle son, Max, is a lot more emotional. Like he'll talk to me about stuff a little bit more. Although my younger son, Joey, will tell me cute things too. But it's definitely on their time schedule and the way they need to do it. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:15

Yeah. I appreciate you sharing that look inside your life and how how you all are kind of navigating through it all. Is it and this just popped up in my head because my firstborn to me is there's something special about a firstborn. Is it does that make it even obviously it's it's already incredibly difficult, but does that make

Re-framing Guilt and the Real "Ultimate Goal"

SPEAKER_01 18:38

it even more difficult knowing that it's your firstborn and it was kind of your first like experience as a parent and you know, all those memories and the firstborn sure holds a special place, doesn't that?

SPEAKER_00 18:56

Yeah, I know I don't I don't think I did. Yeah, I don't think I did. I Nicholas was my buddy. I mean, he and I had a lot of alone time, but the other two have a pretty special place too. And you know, some well-intended people have said, well, would it have been easier if it would have been? And I'm like, no, it would not have been easier if it would have been either one of the other two. I don't know. Nicholas was very needy with his addiction. We at the end, you know, he was calling all the time and checking in and like, hey, what do you think about this? Because his brain just, I know he was like, things are not going well. I need help. So he's very needy. So it's been hard in that I was used to talking to him a lot on the phone and seeing a lot of him. I don't know. I'm really grateful for my other two. I feel like I don't know, I feel like the four of us that are left really miss Nicholas. Like when we're together, you can just almost feel like this ghost of him because it's like tangible that he should be here with us. I'm really grateful that they loved him as much as I did. And I don't know, this love thing, it's complicated, and the closest I'm ever gonna be to Nicholas anymore is through his brothers.

SPEAKER_01 20:37

Yeah, I appreciate you sharing that. And it's yeah, it's an incredibly emotional episode. This is I just feel for you, and you know, being local as well. I don't know for some reason it just kind of hits harder, like it's it hits home more. So because I don't know, because I guess I can't see you in person and you're not this person across the globe that I do sometimes talk to. So I yeah, I mean, hopefully we can we can connect and you know, I can do what I can to support your family. But it sounds like you have such just such a beautiful family, and the the four of you can just continue to support each other, and that sounds like honestly the key is, you know, I just had a guest on yesterday and we talked about the ultimate goal was to have you know, I

What Really Matters: Love, Trust, and Broken TVs

SPEAKER_01 21:30

love baseball as you can see, but to go to a baseball game with your kids when they're older and they want to be around you, and so it could be whatever preferred activity that is, but just that's the ultimate goal, right? It's like just your kids want to hang out with you, their kids want to come to you for their issues and stuff like that. So that to me, that sounds like maybe is that kind of the key takeaway you have for having your kids kind of dealing with kind of whatever comes up in your kids' life, because like you said, you don't want to correct everything. Can't probably correct everything, right? But is it is that kind of just the main takeaway?

SPEAKER_00 22:06

Yeah. And that maybe not believe what society tells you that you should be ashamed of or that you need to believe about yourself. And that I remember telling Nicholas at the end when he was in the hospital that I loved him and I wasn't ashamed of his addiction. And I wish I would have said that earlier. So yeah, I hope the key takeaway is love your kids and trust their decisions. And when they don't turn out right, maybe instead of thinking like, oh, I'm the parent, I I should have fixed this, that know that bad things happen and that we we all need to lift each other up. And when you see somebody at the gym who's a little sad, that it's okay to give them a hug. And the connections are important. And I've told every single one of our workout instructor instructors that Nicholas passed, and I sent them his them his obituary, and all of them like are closer to me now. And all of them, I don't, they didn't shun me. They brought me into their community a little bit

Outro & Creative Pipelines

SPEAKER_00 23:25

tighter. So hold on to people.

SPEAKER_01 23:28

Yeah, that's beautiful. Katie, where can people buy your book and find you on the internet?

SPEAKER_00 23:35

You're so sweet. So I have a website, it's katyrizzo.com, all one word. And I'm also on Instagram, so Katie Rizzo 007. And my book, The Trimesters of Greece, is available for pre-order on June 12th, anywhere books are sold. And then my book of poems, none of them are you, is available anywhere books are sold. And that is coming out on November 1st.

SPEAKER_01 24:03

Wow. So a lot of projects in the pipeline. That's awesome. That's that's amazing. I think this episode will probably come out around June 12th. So that's great timing, right? Before we can get some good emotion going for that. And honestly, this seems like exactly the playbook parents need if they're going through grief or they've been through this, or even if they have a a teen addiction, perhaps, right? Just to kind of learn. Yeah. Learn from you, learn from this. There's so much to learn. Like there's so many nuggets, and I haven't even been through this myself. And I feel like I can take this, I can apply this to my own kids and just have a little bit more love, a little bit more understanding, a little bit. You know, they my kid broke my TV this weekend. I broke my heart. But hearing this, it's like, oh my God, who cares? You know what I mean? Like it just it just puts everything into perspective of like I could take care less. You know what I mean? But it's just like, yeah, sometimes our priorities are so in the wrong place. Right. And bad things happen.

SPEAKER_00 25:06

Yeah, bad things happen. Especially and it doesn't have to be, oh my gosh, how are we gonna teach her how to never break a TV? It's gonna be a bad thing happened. This is a bummer.

SPEAKER_01 25:19

It is a bummer. I still love it. But I think it's yeah, I think it's the way you you handle it. And I'll be honest, I didn't handle it well, but I think that hearing stories like this, it's like kind of makes me reassess my approach and like what really matters? You know what I mean? Like, are my kids happy? Yeah, my kids healthy, are my kids safe? Do they do they know that they can do something wrong and dad's not gonna flip out, right? Like, yeah, they that last part, they don't know that. So daddy needs to fix that, and and I need to work on myself, but that's what this podcast is doing for me. It's like, um these stories I can relate in some way to my own life, and I'm like, wow, I need to check myself, you know what I mean? And it's almost like this intervention, if you will, on my parenting and and kind of this checkpoint of like, hey, I need to kind of get myself together.