A Personal Update

On grief, healing, writing, and the slow reconstruction of a life.

Hello all,

I wanted to give you a personal update on what’s been happening in my life. Many of you follow my writing and the podcast. Many of you have supported me through this last year. Many of you are navigating your own grief, your own loss, your own reconstruction.

I just returned last night from a writing retreat in the mountains with Susan Piver through The Open Heart Project. Susan is a Buddhist and a New York Times bestselling author, and for months I had felt drawn toward the idea of disappearing into the mountains for a few days to sit inside writing with people who understood that it is not simply craft. Sometimes writing is survival. Sometimes it is witness. Sometimes it is the only way the body knows how to metabolize what has happened to it.

I also accidentally missed the first entire day of the retreat.

I arrived Thursday.

It started Wednesday.

Which, honestly, feels almost too on the nose for the life I am currently living.

One of the things I am still having to accept is that grief changes your brain. Trauma changes your cognition. My capacity is not what it once was. I lose words sometimes. Dates. Time. My nervous system still burns enormous amounts of energy simply trying to convince my body that I survived.

When Patrick was murdered, one of the very first declarations I made was: I am taking a year off. I am going to figure out what my life looks like now.

The generosity of the GoFundMe made that possible. And somehow we are almost at a year.

Truthfully, it has only been in the last few weeks that I have stopped waking up with panic over what I am going to “do” next. Not because I suddenly figured my life out, but because I finally started building a structure capable of holding me.

Not discipline.

Structure.

There is a difference.

For a long time I kept trying to force myself back into old systems. Alarm clocks. Early training sessions. Productivity. High output. Achievement. I was treating myself like a machine that simply needed to restart.

But trauma does not respond to punishment.

One morning I caught myself setting an alarm to rush to the gym and literally thought: What the fuck are you doing? You have a gym in your home. You do not need more discipline. Your nervous system needs safety. And tons of sleep.

So now I sleep until my body wakes naturally.

Some nights I sleep relatively well and wake around six or seven. Other nights the dreams come and I wake repeatedly and cannot fully return to sleep. On those mornings it might be closer to eight.

The first thing I do every morning is make coffee.

I do not care what health influencers say about waiting ninety minutes for caffeine or eating breakfast first. Coffee is the first order of my day. Caffeine is a hell of a drug.

I sit in an oversized chair beside a huge window overlooking the trees in the backyard. Usually the window is open. I listen to birdsong while I slowly drink my coffee for thirty or forty five minutes. Sometimes deer wander through. Sometimes hummingbirds come to the feeder. Sometimes I pray. Sometimes I meditate. Sometimes I read. Sometimes I simply stare outside and let my nervous system realize no one is coming through the door.

That has become one of the deepest forms of healing I have found.

And I often think: Why is this not how everyone begins their day?

Why do we immediately launch ourselves into obligation? Into urgency? Into someone else’s demand? Why do we start our mornings already inside fight or flight?

If you are reading this thinking, that must be nice, I understand. I do. But I also want to gently remind you what it cost for me to arrive here.

These rituals were not built from leisure.

They were built from devastation.

Around nine I make breakfast. Consistently two eggs over easy, four slices of turkey bacon, Ezekiel toast with an unreasonable amount of butter and honey, salt on everything. Protein. Fat. Carbohydrates. Nourishment. I spent years coaching people on health, and there is something profoundly different about feeding your body after trauma. You cannot eat to control your body. You must eat to reassure it. You are teaching the nervous system there are resources available. That life is still happening. That scarcity is no longer the environment. After survival mode, nourishment itself becomes part of the healing.

After that, the day opens.

Mondays and Tuesdays I usually try to write until eleven or noon. Sometimes I work on podcast notes. Sometimes I hike with Rae. Sometimes I lift with girlfriends. If I train alone it tends to happen later in the afternoon now.

I have also become deeply domestic.

I like laundry.

I like clean counters.

I like an orderly home.

I think when your world has been violently blown apart, continuity becomes sacred.

I no longer run a business, so now I run my household. There is something deeply regulating about tending to ordinary life. Folding towels. Watering plants. Vacuum lines across the carpet. Repetition has become a form of safety for me.

Lunch is almost always the same. Arugula with blueberries, goat cheese, pine nuts, homemade balsamic, salmon or rotisserie chicken. Recently I’ve started adding blackberries and cucumbers because spring has arrived here and everything in Colorado feels alive again.

And the mountains. God, the mountains.

The wild roses are blooming now. White and delicate. Lilacs so fragrant you smell them before you see them. Honeysuckle. Tiny bluebells. Everything opening after winter.

I need that beauty desperately.

Dinner is simple too. Sweet potatoes I meal prep once a week. Ground bison with kitchari seasoning. Broccolini. Salmon. Sometimes steak if I am treating myself. I also eat two Skinny Dipped peanut butter cups after lunch and dinner like clockwork because grief has taken enough from me already.

Sunday nights are always spent at “The Mountain House” with my blood and soul family, Rae and the Rodgers, usually with a movie to follow.

I have coffee and “sweat” dates with friends, walks, long phone calls while I clean the house, little rituals of movement and connection that make life feel inhabited again. Pretty much everything social in my life now revolves around coffee or movement. I do jiu jitsu once or twice a week, and I started learning ASL (American Sign Language). I’m almost finished with level one and recently had my first real interaction using it at the gym, which ended up being one of the most exciting introductions I’ve ever had.

All of this probably sounds incredibly ordinary.

That’s because healing is incredibly ordinary.

It is not one breakthrough moment.

It is not a quote on Instagram.

It is not becoming “better.”

It’s waking up every day and slowly convincing your body to remain here.

I still cry every day.

Sometimes I fully weep on whichever floor I’ve collapsed onto.

I miss Patrick constantly.

He would have loved Colorado. He would have loved this house. The mountains. The quiet mornings. The wildlife. The coffee by the window.

Teddy remains my little talisman through all of it. He is almost never far from me. He loves every adventure we go on, though he still seems personally offended that he cannot freely rule every room the way he did at the gym. He is technically a service dog with a “do not pet” patch that he fully disagrees with.

He has lived this loss too.

And I truly cannot imagine surviving this year without him.

Rae is also doing incredibly well. I am so proud of her. She is in massage therapy school training to become a licensed neuromuscular therapist and graduates in December. She already passed her first round of finals and is licensed in Swedish massage. The Rodgers and I volunteer as a “body” whenever we can, which means we get to receive her work while also watching her become more skilled almost every week.

There is something beautiful about watching people rebuild themselves in real time.

And somewhere inside all of this, quietly but persistently, something else has continued surfacing:

I want to be a writer.

I think I have wanted it for much longer than I allowed myself to admit.

I kept dismissing it because it wasn’t practical enough. Or lucrative enough. Or official enough. But I was published last month in a collection of poetry with other authors, so perhaps the truth is I have already crossed the threshold I kept waiting for permission to enter.

And now I want more.

I want to write books.

I know what the first one is about already. Grief. Trauma. The nervous system. Losing identity. Rebuilding it. Spirituality and spiritual bypassing. The body after violence. Love after devastation. The absurdity of healing. Poetry. Storytelling. Survival.

I want to tell the truth about what this experience actually is.

Not the polished version.

Not the inspirational version.

The real one.

So for now, writing is going to become the primary thing I focus on. The podcast will continue. I still want your questions. I still want connection and conversation. But I think you may see me become quieter online in certain ways because I am trying to build something larger now. Something with weight.

Of course, underneath all of this, there is still the fact of what happened.

The trial is currently set for September 21st, though dates can always change. Rae and I will both have to testify. I still do not know how much of the trial I will attend outside of what is mandatory. I have never been through anything like this before.

What I continue to realize is this:

The trial is not actually for Patrick.

It is not for me.

It is the State versus Mordicai Black.

That language feels so sterile compared to the reality of what was lost.

But I am trying very hard to care for my own heart through this process. The outcome will not return Patrick to me. The man who entered our home expected to spend his life in prison when he made the choices he made. None of this changes the absence sitting at my table every day.

And still, despite all of it, I realized something earlier this year:

I am not done loving.

My knuckle tattoos say MAKE LOVE.

And over and over again, when I ask myself what I am supposed to do next without my partner, without my great love, without the future we were building, I hear Patrick’s voice answering me:

Do what you love.

So that is what I am trying to discover now.

What remains after everything is taken?

What survives?

What is left to make from the pieces still in your hands?

If you would like to support me and this work, this future book, this strange and sacred rebuilding of a life, you can become a subscriber here or simply buy me a cup of coffee while I write.

I know this work will eventually find the people it is meant for.

Because one day someone devastated will sit across from me needing another human being who understands that some losses do not get fixed. They get carried.

And perhaps my work is simply to help hold that weight beside them for a while.

Thank you for being here through all of this.

Truly.

There were many moments this year I did not know what my life was going to become. Many moments I did not know what version of me would survive this. Writing here, being witnessed here, feeling people stay beside me while I tried to understand what happened to my life has mattered more than I can fully articulate.

I do not take your presence lightly.

Thank you for reading.
Thank you for listening.
Thank you for allowing me to tell the truth.

Sarah Lady Heringer