Elevate Within with Sandy Davis
Elevate Within is a transformational podcast for women navigating burnout, identity shifts, grief, healing, reinvention, entrepreneurship, and personal growth.
Hosted by Sandy Davis, Elevate Within creates honest, unfiltered conversations around the “messy middle” the part of the journey rarely discussed publicly. Through vulnerable storytelling and powerful conversations with women from diverse backgrounds, this podcast explores what it truly means to rebuild yourself personally, professionally, emotionally, and spiritually.
From corporate burnout and high-functioning anxiety to self-worth, relationships, trauma, purpose, and rediscovering your voice, Elevate Within is a space for women seeking deeper healing, confidence, connection, and self-discovery.
Each episode is designed to remind women that they are not broken, not behind, and not alone in their journey.
This is more than a podcast.
It’s a community for women learning how to rise, rebuild, and elevate from within.
Elevate Within with Sandy Davis
What Grief Really Feels Like After Losing Your Parents | Elevate Within Preview
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In this deeply personal preview from my conversation on The Raw Onion Podcast, I share what happened after losing both of my parents within 37 days of each other and the survival mode that followed.
We talk about grief, identity loss, burnout, autopilot, and what it feels like when life keeps moving while your entire world stops.
This conversation is for anyone navigating loss, rebuilding themselves, or trying to understand who they are after life changes them.
🎙️ Full conversation available on Elevate Within.
And then she stopped texting me for four days in a row. So I was like, man, let me do a wellness check. And I had my mom's youngest, and I purposely say it like that, her youngest daughter, like, hey, you need to go check up on Ma to see what's happening. I haven't heard from her. Call the police, Yonkers police. It takes them four, 45 minutes just to break down our door, and they find our body. And I'm on the phone as they say, you know, we're sorry for your loss. At that point, I remember sitting in my kitchen, and everything just left me. Like I felt like my soul left me. I felt like I just didn't know who I was. And I ended up becoming this white void, this nothing, and having to go.
SPEAKER_00It's a very interesting way you put it there, Sandy. It's because I mean we can that's a whole other sort of uh branch to go off into. We won't do it now, but this white void, respectfully, for the the listeners here, because this is something that's so it's why we're talking about this and why I'm so appreciative of your vulnerability here is because this is life. And this is not sugarcoating the reality. And how you mention this too is the world keeps going, the world moves forward, it keeps spinning. And so when we tr when we have this shock, this grief, this is profound, right? Um everything is sort of cut off, but you have to tether on to something. So you've got this sort of human worldly responsibility when everything has just imploded. Um what are you talking about when you how what does this feel like now viscerally in your body? What is this moment? And and how are you even really uh cognizant of okay, now I've got to actually keep moving here. I've still got my place in the world, I've still got to keep on trucking. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Do you end up well for me? I went an autopilot. It was as if I'm in this white space. It's almost like an echo, it reminds me of 9-11, you know, when the towers fell. Yep. Um being up there at that time. It's just my survival kicked in. And I knew I was there, but I wasn't. It was just this white void. There's nothing. It's blank, it's hollow. And so it's the survival, and I've always been in survival majority of my life. And that's it was kind of like that little girl in me, that young woman in me just dissipated. And it was just, okay, autopilot, survival, go get her will. And it was very structured. It was so structured of like having to just check the boxes, do what you have to do, do the right thing. And I remember getting my mom's will and having to figure out, like, okay, I need to stop a bank account, I need to book a flight. And at the same time, and at the same token, the the police department is like, all right, well, what funeral home do you want us to send it to? And I'm I'm not even thinking about all of this. I'm like, funeral home, like why don't you hold on to where, like, isn't there autopsy or something? And it was like, no, you need to pick a funeral home. And I haven't been in Yonkers in a few decades. So I was like, well, I don't know which one to go to or whatever have you, but there happened to be one that was local that ended up being really nice. And now I'm doing like the obituary, the announcement. And I'm just, I I remember my mom loved Frank Sinatra. So I'm trying to play that in the background. I'm on autopilot. And I'm really on some, hey, let me just write. You know, I'm asking my uncle for help. He even forgot my mom's middle name. So I'm autopilot, I'm booking my flight, I'm making sure, you know, there's somebody that will take care of my dog where I go to New York, calling my friends, because now I have to pack up my mom's place for because she's lived in for close to 40 years. And I go there, I'm packing up, and I'm having like an altercation with my younger sister. So I couldn't even do a funeral for her in New York. My friends was like, we have to pack up. You have to get your mom's, you know, ashes, and you need to hurry up and go back to California. So everything was on autopilot. Everything was survival mode. And by the time I got back to California, you know, then having to go back to work and just realizing I don't know who I am anymore. I lost myself. I lost my parents. Who am I? Like, what am I doing here?