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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
Grief in Everyday Life: When Child Loss Shows Up in Ordinary Moments
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Long-term grief after child loss does not only show up on birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, or the obviously hard days. Sometimes grief appears in the middle of ordinary life — in a song, a smell, a number, a place, a memory, a show, a laugh, or a moment no one else would understand.
In this episode of Down the Rabbit Hole, Melissa reflects on how child loss continues to live beside us in everyday moments. Not always as a breakdown. Sometimes as memory, connection, love, longing, nervous system activation, or an invitation to pause and notice.
This conversation is especially for grieving mothers learning how to live with long-term grief after child loss and suicide loss — the kind of grief that becomes woven into daily life even as we continue rebuilding, loving, laughing, working, parenting, creating, and carrying our children forward.
In this episode, Melissa talks about:
- why ordinary life often holds unexpected grief moments
- how long-term grief becomes woven into daily life
- why being caught off guard by grief does not mean you are going backward
- the difference between grief as activation and grief as connection
- how everyday moments can become part of continuing love and legacy
- why living forward means life grows large enough to hold grief
- how to stay with yourself when grief shows up unexpectedly
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Where does grief show up in your ordinary life? Is there a song, smell, phrase, number, food, place, time of day, or everyday moment that unexpectedly brings your child close?
You can also share what helps you stay with yourself when grief appears out of nowhere.
Your reflection may help shape a future episode.
And if this episode resonates with you, please follow the show, share it with another grieving person who may need it, and consider leaving a rating or review. It helps The Leftover Pieces reach more people who are learning how to live after loss.
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Your reflection may help shape a future episode.
Click to Send a Text or Voicemail to Melissa
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The Leftover Pieces is Support for Life After Suicide Loss. Click links below
🎙 Leave me a message: Share a question, your story, or your person’s name for a future episode → theleftoverpieces.com/voicemail
Support After Suicide Loss
If you are grieving after suicide loss, you do not have to carry this alone.
Visit The Leftover Pieces for podcast episodes, grief support, resources, and ways to connect with Melissa’s work: https://theleftoverpieces.com
or Join Melissa’s email list: https://theleftoverpieces.com/join
If you someone you love is in immediate crisis or may be in danger, please call or text 988 in the United States. You can also text HOME to 741741 to reach the Crisis Text Line