“Thanks For the Little While” with Alan Pedersen

But nevertheless, the life, um, that we've been given to live and how we do it. And how we do it every day and how we just keep breathing, keep telling our stories. So thank you for letting me share in this conversation with the two of you. I am deeply, deeply honored.

I ended up in the publishing business and publishing national trade magazines or writing any kind of writing I could get my hands on, but my first love was certainly, um, Music. I moved to Nashville in the 90's and wrote for about four years there. I used to write for Hank Williams Jr.'s publishing company. Never had got a major label cut, but you know, I was kind of swimming with the big fish learning how to write there. I moved back to Colorado where I'm from.

I have three children, my oldest Ashley, and then two boys, Rocky and Allen Jr. I moved back to Colorado and I decided I was going to get my writing fixed by doing radio. I also had a love for radio. So I worked for Westwood One radio network. I was kind of their grunt reporter out of Denver, Colorado. I covered sports for awhile, which was, there's a lot of fun covering the Broncos and the Nuggets and the Rockies and the Avalanche. And then I moved over into the news department.

I was doing some consulting for other companies and, you know, life was pretty good. The radio was kind of my fun job. And then the consulting work was the stuff that kind of paid the bills. And all that changed on August 15th, 2001, I was taking my stepson to Tucson, Arizona, where he was going to be a freshman at the University of Arizona to freshmen orientation.

And my daughter had been out with him the night before Ashley to a going away party for some of those kids as she was staying in Colorado. And I got a telephone call when I got to the city limits of Tucson telling me that Ashley had been killed in an automobile accident that day.

And so, you know, uh, we were talking earlier, before we recorded a little bit and Marshall was, you know, we talk about that first moment we hear about it, but I, I say this, that phone call is the day that life as I knew it ended. And the day, the day that life is, as I now know it began. And I think for people like us, it is the demarcation point in our lives. It seems like everything happened before that date or since that date. So when you say, where did it start?

It started there on the side of the interstate and not knowing what to do. I walked around in a circle saying. What do I do? What do I do? You know, what do we do there? A person there's no book. There's no way you can rehearse the hurt or practice the pain. We are in such shock that we don't know what to do.

And so somehow I fell on my way back to Colorado to the scene of the accident had happened just outside of Grand Junction, Colorado built a roadside Memorial, went over and.....and just frozen solid with grief. And you guys know that feeling, you see people's lips moving, but you can't tell what they're saying. You know, months later people would say, wow, that was a beautiful service you had for Ashley. We had 5, 600 people there and I go, it was, you were there?

I mean, it just in a complete funk and in a blur. So, you know, people, when I tell my story and, you know, everyone's stories different. People say, well, what was the worst day of your life? You would think that the worst day would be August 15th, 2001, but that was not the worst day of my life. The worst day of my life actually came a few months later. Because the casseroles came and the food came and that, and the people came and then they all went home.

But a few months later I woke up one morning and I looked out the window, saw the rest of the world going on with life as though Ashley had never lived. Still she hadn't died. And as though I wasn't just sinking in a pit of grief that I didn't understand that I didn't feel prepared to handle and, uh, you know, that's the day I went in the shower and let out a primal scream, the likes of which had never come out of, out of my body.

And that's the day when I knew I needed something, uh, some help support. And it's, it's the day I found in my case, a group called The Compassionate Friends. So that's where it started for me. My grief journey really didn't start until I could unfreeze just enough that I could begin to maybe wrap my head a little bit around what I was doing. And so, that's where it started. That's chapter one.

We believe she fell asleep. The car flipped, Ashley was thrown from the car. No one witnessed the accident. A truck driver came up and found her on the side of the road and she was dead at the scene of the accident and with the seatbelt, uh, there's no question they believe she would have survived probably without a scratch.

So, um, you know, those are things as we look back, we always think, well, what could we have done said to influence make a difference, but that is how she died at 18 years old and just, just getting started in life.

I go, I don't know if my, if my bladder is strong enough for that for 60 miles, no rest stop and realize, well, I guess I could make my own rest stop pulling off the side of the road, but it's funny how sometimes there's a convergence of people and I, we never met and I never, I did not know how Ashley passed or where she passed, but I've been on that road. What are the odds of that, of all the roads in the United States. I know exactly where that road is.

She would gladly give people the shirt off of my back. You know, you couldn't pass a, you know, a little donation packet, you didn't have anything. So, uh, I always said whenever I went anywhere with Ashley, if I came home with $5 in my wallet left I had earned $5 that day. But she, yeah, she was an amazing soul. She was turning out to be an incredible writer. When I worked for Westwood One radio, I was the grunt reporter. And when I was doing news on Sunday nights, my job would be to go in.

And write the headlines over the weekend, kind of wrapped the weekend up and then people subscribed to that service. So we had 450 radio stations around the country. They would come in on know on Monday morning. And if there had been a big story in Denver, No, I'd write the story and put some sound, right? That was, she was so good and so talented. That job has taken me about three to four hours she could go into the studio with me on Sunday nights. It was just us there.

And she could write so well that we could do it in about an hour and a half to two hours and her stuff would pass muster with my editors and Houston, and they were tough. So, really blossoming as a writer, really into philosophy. She played soccer, world's worst soccer player by far I've ever seen. She, uh, she could play a uniform on a muddy field and have the cleanest uniform at the end of the game you've ever seen.

Couldn't sing a note, but loved all kinds of music and her, and I would listen, uh, play games where I, you know, I grew up in gospel music and, and country music. And, uh, but then of course I got into rock, but we'd listened to everything from rap music to, uh, classical music and everything in between. She had just such a love and appreciation for it. So thank you for that question. I always love when I can say a little bit about her life.

She was, she was my biggest fan in music, but my harshest critic. So what better combination could you ask for? Well, thanks for sharing her with us. So she, she did get to hear you play your music?

My, uh, my two boys were there too. But he came over and sat down for about 20, 30 minutes and just chatted things up with her. And, um, I was like the highlight of her life and she, you know, she tried to tell her friends and, but did tell you what, what a great guy Garth Brooks is and I, and I've hung out with him a few other times, but he is such a great guy. But no one had a pen or a pencil there and, and he knew she wanted an autograph.

And so he gets up from the table, just walks up to the hostess stand, asked for paper, and a pencil and walks back down and sits and writes an autograph for her, which was one of her treasured possession. So yes, she was definitely a big fan of my song writing from the time she was just a little girl. I wrote her whole life so....

But as somebody who's done 1600 concert events now in the last, whatever years you try and Chris cross his country and never use I70, it's not too feasible, but, uh, I was very fortunate and I call myself a fortunate griever because two things intersected. I found the compassionate friends. I knew nothing about this organization. I walked in there the first night and I, and I met a Steve. His name was Gene about the same kind of thing I walked in.

I met this Denver a police department, captain whose only son had died in kind of a freak accident. And here this tough police officer hugs me, tells me I don't have to walk this journey by myself that I'm in the right place. And um, you know, I didn't know if I was in the right place, but it was the Jefferson County, Colorado Chapter of the Compassionate Friends.

And if you look out the window where we meet, you literally can see the hillside where the first shots were fired at Columbine High School. I lived in that neighborhood and covered that story and radio.

You know, when I said, Hey, I want to go be with Ashley. Well, if you say that, You know, to somebody outside of this little world to go, Oh my gosh, we got to get you help now. But they help you to understand that those are normal feelings. Now making a plan and you're going on, you know, that you, that you want to harm yourself, you need additional support. But they normalize me, they met me, say my story and say her name again and again and again.

So I was very fortunate for that and then about that same time, a couple months later, I found a group that was created a grief support group, a different thing, grief share, but it was created by a man named dD. Alan Wolfelt out of Fort Collins, Colorado. And it was a 10 week grief program. And that's really where I learned about grief. It's where I could sit down now that I had this support.

And then I could learn that, you know, I was in trauma, acute grief that this was going to hit me emotionally, physically, mentally, and spiritually, and, and things that I could do. You know, we talk about the pain and grief and all of these things that it does to us, but what can we actually do? And this program helped me to understand what I could do.

So by the time I got through my first year, And I was so new in grief, I had at least began to form a plan in my head that all that was going to matter. And all that was going to make a difference is what I could go do with my life. If Ashley's voice was going to be heard. I had to be the one saying for, I had to be her voice. I had to be her hands and I had to be her feet. And I thought, well, how am I going to do that?

And at one year I was not ready, but over the course of the next year, I took what I was learning. My compassionate friends became my lifeline, my absolute lifeline. So when people out there would say ridiculously stupid things to me and, or have expectations and benchmarks that I should be meeting in my grief, my compassionate friends would say they don't know what they're talking about. So they got me through. And in my second year I decided that I was going to mess around with music.

I started out. Late at night, I would, I'm not a real public prior, but late at night I would get my guitar out. And I would, uh, when everybody was in bed and I'd play songs that I used to play for Ashley that she loved like Brown Eyed GIrl not all songs I'd written and man I could just cry. And then one night I started hearing this, you know, like the writers do lyric and this and that. And before long I'm writing songs and I just wrote them for me.

And what's interesting I like to tell people this, if you're not a songwriter, it might not mean that much to you, but when you're living in Nashville, you're always trying to write a song for somebody else. I never fancy being a recording artist. That was never, but I always wanted to write songs for somebody else. You're always telling somebody else's story. So for the first time, in my professional life, as a songwriter, I said, I don't care if one person likes this music, I could care less.

I'm going to write what I feel because I don't hear a lot of music that really tells what this story is like. So I wrote a collection of songs and I played a couple of them for some people in my, um, in my group, which, uh, I always tell people that was the greatest thing I ever did or the biggest mistake I ever made. But they said, Oh, you gotta go in the studio and record them.

And there's a great story and I don't, we don't have time for all of them, but God's hand was at work in my life, even when I was so mad, I, I could spit at God God's hand was at work because the people that came into my life that helped me produce that first record called Ashley's Songbook were amazing. The connections they had back to Ashley.

But, at about the two year mark, I came out with a CD of music called Ashley's Songbooks and I went to the National Conference of the Compassionate Friends, and I just took it 200 of them and put them in their bookstore. And I believe they sold out in less than a day. And I got home and the phone started ringing from groups all over the country saying, would you come and would you play and speak? And you know, most of them, like we don't have any money, but we'll do our best to get you here.

And that begins something called the Angels Across the USA tour that I started really in 2004. So we're 16 years and I've traveled, like I said, to over 1600 cities all across the country playing and speaking. And, uh, and at first I just played the songs cause I didn't know anything about grief that I later went and became certified, uh, and became a grief services provider through the American Grief Academy. And so that was the next step in my grief.

I just kept learning and learning and meeting tens of thousands of people, uh, shaking their hands, hugging their necks, hearing their stories like, uh, Matt and Jordan. And then eventually I started doing workshops and those became quite popular. So that's what my life is today. And that was a real quick speed through there. But, uh, but that's kind of where grief took me and it gave me something I could do.

I believe that I am on this earth to be Ashley's dad for as long as I live, not for as long as she lived, the way that I can best do that is to take all of what I believeD she stood for and to put that out in the world in honor of her. And I know that it makes a difference and in that difference, it helps me to heal. And it helps me to feel like she's just working with me every day of my life

They were in school and obviously since then we realize school's not necessarily the same place that we thought it was when we were growing up. Society's changed and the bubble of protectiveness that I know I had for my children. As you go old, you realize there's chips in that thought process as it's an illusion or delusion thinking, Oh, I can guarantee my children's safety. And you always think you can, until you can't.

And the three of us have lost children and obviously we'd have done anything humanly possible to prevent them from passing as many other people would, but it's not in our power to do that. And I think what you're saying about living your life, which is what I'm trying to do also is attribute to Ashley is what I'm trying to do with Matt. And it just, again, it just shows you we're all here a short time. You gotta make it the best time possible.

And you know, one of the things you mentioned, like, I people ask me, we didn't even know how to answer this, but now I know how to answer this. You know? So many times you see somebody that was asking you, well, what do you do for a living? Lawyer for 40 years, I've said that many, many times the next thing is, do you have children? And I, Deb and I talk, what do we say? We've lost a child. And we say, I said, I, I have two sons not, I had two sons. I have two sons in the present.

Matt is still with me, not physically on this earth, but he's still with me and he's always going to be my son. My parents passed away. They're still my parents Matt still my son. And I think as you get older and more philosophical. Not that it gives you an answer, but it does give you some solace or contentment realizing that, you know, grief is part of the human experience for better, for worse. Either we're going to die, people are gonna grieve us or we're going to live.

And people we love are going to pay us and we're going to grieve them. And he sounds like Ashley and Matt were very kindred souls. And I think that knowing them the way we did for me, I always try to look at it as a honor that I had the opportunity to be his father for 32 years. And what I'd like to see them grow up and experience life, absolutely.

But there wasn't in the cards and it doesn't make me appreciate what he did when he was here any less cause he did the most with the time that he had, which is all, any of us could do.

But if I don't have gratitude for those 18 years. And we all get to there in our own time and in our own way. And we may have, yeah, the people here listening who are very new in their greif, so don't because you don't feel that today. When I say something like that, it's just to say that, you know what I was where you are, where I couldn't see gratitude for the 18 years, but I have learned that within those 18 years by Ashley living, I got to love at a level I never thought humanly possible.

When she died, I heard at a level I never thought humanly imaginable. And then the journey of trying to find life again. And that's really what the word bereaved means. Living with loss, living the rest of our lives. And that journey is a life journey. I've learned more in the journey. Of trying to find life without ashes than I ever could have gotten from all the education in the world. I've learned, uh, things about compassion and about not judging people so harshly.

So there are many gifts Ashley left for me. It takes time for us, but if we stay open and if we continue to live, because if we don't continue to live in two lives were lost that day.

So that's the news that, that I want people to know that when you're ready to begin to let go of some of the pain. You can let go of some of the pain without having to release one ounce of the love. And that's what keeps people stuck in grief often is they don't, they, they, they equate the pain with having to let go of the love, but you will know when you're ready.

And when you get to that place, we can let go of a little of the pain and it actually opens us up more to have space to grab on and hold on to the love. And that's really what our journey is all about.

Well, you know, you think my Pat answer would be, well, you know, I have my boys and I have Ashley or, you know, sometimes I'll say I have two boys, you know, AJ and my daughter died in an automobile accident when she was 18. And sometimes frankly, I don't tell people not everybody's entitled to know that I'm a bereaved parent because maybe I don't think they can handle it. So it's a very personal choice how we do it.

But as I, uh, and again, I had such great grief information early on that it helped me to help myself and now to help others. But if people would ask me to an event and especially in those early years, I'd say, you know, they invite me. And I said, look, I don't know whether or not I'm going to be able to make it to that first, whatever Thanksgiving dinner or the second one. But I always said to people do not invite me any event, friends, family, whoever.

Do not invite m if Ashley is not invited. And what I meant by that was simply, I'm not going to show up in an Ashley tshirt and Ashley hat, nationally balloons, and expect the whole conversation to be about this or pitiful, grieving dad whose daughter died. But I'll be damned, excuse me, language if I'm going to show up and pretend tha I am not Ashley's dad. And so what I ask people is I say, you know, I just want to be able to talk about her and to not shy away from her name.

And I let people know how important it is for us to hear the name, say the name, see the name. So I want to be free to talk about Ashley just as free as I am anybody else. And I promise I won't be Debbie downer at your party, but if I feel like telling stories and if you're not comfortable, I understand completely, but don't invite me because I won't show up and suffer in silence because others are uncomfortable with my loss. And that keeps her alive. That keeps her right then and there.

And when we'd tell people I have a child. I have a daughter, Ashley, I have a son, Matt. I have a son Jordan. When we say that it changes the demeanor of people as well. Now, some people will just, there's an old saying when, when someone asks, how many children you have, and, and I say, I have two sons and my daughter, Ashley died. If their next question is about your living children. They can't handle the grief.

If their next question is about your child that died, they're probably a safe person with you to talk to about it.

And a lot of these people it'd be i'm holding my arms they were crying and I realized they never met Matt. They didn't know who he was, and they're not really crying for Matt. They're probably crying for their own grief that they've experienced or fear of grief that they will experience. And then which made me sort of think about the first group that thought maybe this was contagious. And I joke about it now and I say it is contagious.

If you're a human being, you're going to catch grief, you will catch it. So it is contagious because you're human and Lord knows the pandemic has turned the world of grief upside down and people that never thought about grief are just change their life differently. No, I saw this on the news was yesterday. There was a young man who's volunteering for the vaccine trials, which could be dangerous. You don't know if it's a placebo or it's something that's going to help him hurt him.

And as a young man, they asked him, why are you doing this? And he said, he lost seven family members to the coronavirus. It's grief, but for grief, do you think this young person would have any interest in being a Guinea pig for this vaccine? And it just shows you how I think all three of us and so many other people that have lost loved ones can make the world a so much better place at attributing to our lost, loved ones. You know, this young man's efforts to help with the vaccine.

It could lead to a cure who knows, but at least he's trying. And that to me is I know you are so far ahead of where I am. I'm two years out. You're 19 years out and I know this is such a lifelong journey that as I'm on, I just come up with more questions than answers. But the one thing to keep on thinking about is, you know, there's a Jewish saying that which somebody, you mentioned, somebody passed down, you say may their memory be a blessing.

And that's what I want because I know Matt was a blessing and I want his memory to be forever a blessing because of all the things that he did, he was here and all the things that I'm going to try to do to tribute to him while I'm here. So that was really interesting when you mentioned about the powdery, because I can see how people react and it just is different because we're different.

You know, I there's a lot, I could say about it, but doing this podcast that you're doing, telling your story and just doing what you can at your own pace to remember Matt, and to remember, and honor Jordan that in itself, running a grief share program. Those are the things that pay big dividends. This is a lifelong journey. I liked the way you just said that it's not, it doesn't have to be a life sentence. It is a lifelong journey.

It can feel like a life sentence at time and we act to acknowledge that that no matter how much we do and how many people we might make an impact on it still hurts. And we still have those raw difficult times and to give ourselves permission to have those and feel those and lay in that heavy, hard grief. But there is also. Hope and healing when we do the next thing. And when we move forward and when we reach out, there was no question that there is post traumatic growth in this grief.

There's transformational healing power, and I've seen thousands of people doing things today. They never would have done. Maybe the two of you thought, would you have ever thought you'd be doing a podcast? All right, so yeah, this is kind of my message and I was going to try to, you know, I know you wanted more stories today, but one of the things in my message that I tell people at any, wherever they are in grief is grief is going to take you somewhere. You're not going to be the same.

And, and, and, and we know, and, and if you think, think how scary grief is in a sense because when we have the loss, the life that we knew, we instinctively know that life is gone. Okay. It doesn't mean life ends, but that life is gone. But then we walked through this valley and who we are going to become in this grief that is not yet formed. And that is a scary place to be walking between those two things. Are we going to carry the loss with us the rest of our lives?

Of course, because the love is never going to go away. So I think when we, you know, the one thing that if people can just take where you are right now in your grief and realize the view is not going to always be the same, how you feel today. And that's why we can help others and why this podcast can. But grief's gonna to take you somewhere. And it's like a big wave. You can run head on into that wave, boom! It'll knock you on your rear end everyday.

You can walk and get up every morning and run or at some point you can get up on top of the wave and say, you know what? I don't know where this is going to take me, but ride that wave. And it is amazing the things I've been able to do and see, and people that I've met and the life that I've been able to have. Simply because I said, I don't know where it's taking me. I'll write the songs. I'll show up. I'll trust God that the finances will be there.

And like I said, here's two guys, uh, that I, you know, I know I would never think you'd be doing a podcast, but God bless you. Here you are and here I am with you. If you hadn't done what you did, I wouldn't be here with you today day. And somebody whose life will be touched today. And that's the great healing circle that we that's the circle of healing, the circle of hope that grief offers. It offers the opportunity for ordinary people to accomplish extraordinary things.

And that's why I love being a part of something like this today. I'm excited for the possibilities of where all this will take all of us. But especially you guys.

So I had to go call mine the Angels Across the USA, and they used to tell people drill interesting at some of our events, you know, some young, young man would show up, uh, thinking, uh, getting the name wrong. And boy were they sadly disappointed when they saw the only person wearing underwear was me So it started out where, I mean, I'll just get real raw with you. I, um, I was back from my song writing experience.

That's a tough bit since living in Nashville, is it, you know, everybody knows it's, it's tough. Uh, and I was tired of the music business, but as I did this first CD, and then there started to be this demand for it. I thought, well, okay, these people are asking me to come here. So I planned a single road trip and I lived in Denver area at the time. And I started out a woman invtied me to a big event back in New Hampshire.

In Manchester, New Hampshire was a butterfly garden dedication, and she was going to have 500 people at it. She said, come we'll raise the money. So, and then, you know, you'll, you'll sell CDs and blah, blah, blah. So I thought, well, okay, well she thought I was going to fly there. I'm not gonna , Ashley and I are, we're going to take a road trip. So I left Colorado in that I played in that in a city called St. Francis, Kansas.

And then the next night it played somewhere in Nebraska then another place in Nebraska, then I went up and I ended up going into Cleveland and then finally back to New Hampshire kind of played my way. I don't even know if it was a 10 events and it's been so long ago and I sat down. like I normally would. And, and I, and I kinda liked, I took an Excel spreadsheet and thought hmmm, this is really going to be expensive.

And I, at that time, I just said, people, you can pay whatever you can afford to pay because part of this ministry and it is to this day, the same thing is that I wanted it to be ministry based. I wanted it to be available to all, but I had no reference point of how that would happen. So I had the money, obviously I just set it aside. I thought, you know, if nobody buys a CD and people donate a little, whatever I'm going to do this is just a me and Ashley road trip.

So I went into this little town of St. Francis, Kansas. It's right on the Colorado border. There's not the hotel I stayed in, had fans in the window. There wasn't a restaurant there, there was a gas station and there I'm at this little church and I'm like, okay, there's a little bit the Compassionate Friends group there, but some of the town people showed up. Anyway, I played my first event and, uh, the, you know, they had dessert and stuff afterwards.

I dunno about 50 people showed up, 60 people showed up. I got done at the end of the night and I had looked and people had bought almost $500 worth of CDs. And I'm like . There's no way because in the songwriting world, you know, if you play for a group of 50 people, you probably are going to sell five, 10 CDs. I'm like. What on earth happened?

And then I also had these little wristbands that said angels across, uh, our angels are forever, but anyway, I just made my way on across the country and I came back back and I thought, you know what, I paid all my expenses and I got enough here that I can go do another trip. And so I just did another trip. I just put it out to groups and then, yeah, just got to be where I'm, you know, I would just go, go, go. And then, then a few years after doing it.

I began to realize it was an expensive proposition so i bought a van and I put a, uh, a wrap on it. It said Angels across the USA. And I tell people, look, I want to play for any group, anywhere, any size, regardless if they have a dime to pay me and, you know, some groups do, they can afford to cover your expenses of whatever, four or $500 in event. But anyway, people started sponsoring butterfly decals, but the names and hometowns for a hundred dollars of their children on it.

And our children and grandchildren, brothers, sisters, some people would sponsor their parents and that kind of became the thing. And I'm in my third iteration of that. I believe Jordan's riding with me now. Uh, Steve, and thanks for that, but that is, uh, how I was able to do what I do so just year after year, the most I did 119 cities, which is, which was, is tough and you know, by yourself, drive in, I didn't have a road crew.

But it just grew and it grew and it grew and it grew and I just tried to limit two groups of the compassionate friends or people helping families who'd lost children. I expand out sometimes and I do other types of groups as well. So it's been a blessing. I can't, I didn't ever think I wanted to live my life on the road again, but basically in the spring I leave in February and I'm not done till, um, Memorial day.

And in the fall I leave right after labor day and I finished right before Thanksgiving. And then in my off times, when I'm down, I go fly to a few events, but what a great way to meet tens of thousands of people and present these workshops and present these concerts and you just learn your pips, where'd you learn all that about grief? Well, you hear enough stories, hug enough necks, shake enough hands you learn what works for people.

You learn what doesn't work for people and you just kind of put it all in there and put it back out in your own words. But, but it's been a real blessing doing Angels across the USA tour.

Thank you for joining us on Hope Thru Grief with your cohost Marshall Adler and Steve Smelski.