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The Leftover Pieces: Suicide Loss Conversations
Suicide loss changes everything. The Leftover Pieces® Podcast explores life after suicide through honest conversations with survivors, experts, and grieving parents learning to live forward after unimaginable loss. Parents, partners, siblings, and friends share what it means to keep living when the world has been forever changed.
Hosted by Melissa Bottorff-Arey, whose 21-year-old son Alex died by suicide in 2016, the show blends intimate conversations with survivors, healers, and mental health professionals with short solo reflections you can actually use. Together we explore child loss, trauma and nervous-system care, anniversaries and seasons, stigma, faith and meaning, legacy, and the everyday practices that help make life livable again.
At its heart, this podcast is about learning to live forward after loss. We never move on from the people we love, but we can learn to carry the grief differently. This road can feel incredibly lonely—but you are not alone here.
For supporters, educators, and professionals, these conversations also offer insight into the realities of suicide grief and what genuine, non-fixing support can look like.
If you’d like to share your story or expertise, you can request to be a guest through Melissa’s website.
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Content Note
This podcast speaks candidly about grief and suicide loss and may feel activating for some listeners. We avoid graphic descriptions and discussion of suicide methods. Please care for yourself as needed. Melissa is not a doctor or licensed therapist, and nothing shared here should be considered medical or mental-health advice.
The Leftover Pieces: Suicide Loss Conversations
Still Here: A New Year’s Eve Reflection
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A daily December series offering tender, truthful support for surviving the holidays after suicide loss — with grief, grace, & gentle company.
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This is December 31 — Welcome, Fellow Griever
New Year’s Eve can be heavy for grievers — a reminder that time keeps moving, even when your heart resists.
Today’s I offer a quiet companionship with a longer reflection & an original New Year’s Eve poem, honoring survival and the love you carry forward as a year closes
Still Here — A Daily Journal Prompt
“As this year ends, what have I carried — what does that say about my love, my strength, or my becoming?”
Still Here — A New Year’s Eve Reflection (Poem)
This year did not end all at once.
Rather, it released us reluctantly —
sigh by ragged, echoing sigh,
through endless hours that asked more than we could sustain.
Tonight is not just a counting down.
It is the act of carrying on —
of bringing forward what love refuses to leave behind:
the moments, the names, the memories,
all that we survived,
and all that we still hold close.
Midnight does not soothe a bone-deep ache.
January does not undo what we desperately wish could be undone.
A calendar turning will never ready us —
it announces another year to walk in the after.
Let it arrive — tenderly,
without forcing your heart to keep pace
in this invisible, impossible race
of another year without them.
Love does not thin with the tendrils of time.
It does not fray or fade at the edges.
It deepens at its very roots,
learns new shapes,
finds new ways to grow inside us.
We are not leaving them in the before.
We are carrying them forward —
through our living, through our loving,
through our persistent, tender intention to keep going.
In our soul’s quiet recognition of theirs.
Somewhere between the old year and the new,
held in remembering, buoyed by hoping,
lives a quiet place —
not empty, not resolved — just opening.
And in this space,
we stand exactly as we are.
May this year meet you there.
Here.
Still here.
Broken, bruised, or mending —
maybe everything all at once, or somewhere in between —
trust that you are becoming.
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💜 The Leftover Pieces is support central for grieving hearts.
🔗 Stay connected: Join my free email community for weekly check-ins, resources, and encouragement.
🌟 For moms: Explore the $9 Lighthouse Community — safe connection, tools, and hope.
🛠 Resources for all grievers: Start here.
🤝 One-on-one grief coaching for moms after child loss to suicide: Learn more here.
📞 Need help now? If you or someone you love is struggling with suicidal thoughts, dial 988 in the U.S. & Canada, or text HOME to 741741.