112. Podcast Takeover Edition: Carol Colao on Counseling Grief with Hope

Carol: You.

Hi there counselors, and welcome back to Counselor Chat.

I'm Carol Miller and I'm your usual host.

But today I thought we'd do something a little different.

Well, I'm excited to introduce a brand new segment. It's called Podcast Takeovers, where amazing counselors and professionals from our community take over the mic to share their unique stories,

wisdom and some heart centered insight.

And kicking off our very first takeover is none other than, well, another Carol,

Carol Colao. And Carol is an incredible school counselor who works with students in grades one through five as well as young adults through the Rainbows Grief Support Program and Monmouth County.

And in this special episode, she's opening up a meaningful conversation on grief.

Not just the pain of it,

but the hope that can grow through it.

And she's also joined by leadership coach and author Julie Riga, who shares her powerful story of love,

loss and legacy through the journey of finishing her father's,

her late father's memoir.

It's a really heartfelt reminder that while grief looks different for everyone,

whether it's a child grieving,

a parent or an adult navigating a personal loss,

connection,

community and storytelling can be powerful paths toward healing.

So I'll let Carol take it from here.

I know this episode will leave you feeling seen,

supported, and maybe even a little more hopeful.

You're listening to the Counselor Chat podcast, a show for school counselors looking for easy to implement strategies, how to tips, collaboration, and a little spark of joy.

I'm Carol Miller, your host. I'm a full time school counselor and the face behind counseling essentials. I'm all about creating simplified systems, data driven practices, and using creative approaches to engage students.

If you're looking for a little inspiration to help you make a big impact on student growth and success, you're in the right place because we're better together.

Ready to chat? Let's dive in.

Carol C: Welcome everyone to Counselor Chat. I'm so glad you're here. Hi, my name is Carol Colao and I'm taking over this podcast episode today for Carol.

So yes, another Carol.

Today's topic is on grief.

We are serving students in grades one through five, but I also work with adults up to age 21 in a Rainbows group, a grief support group in Monmouth County.

So today's episode really is about grief, but the hope behind it and how we can really go through this journey without necessarily accepting all the death and accepting that loss,

but at the same time coming out of it with that positivity and those memories of your lost loved one.

So when we work with our children,

we often forget as counselors that these sad attacks happen. They happen very intermittently.

We never know when it's going to strike.

Very different from adults, when we go through grief, when it's consistent, it's a continuum we just go through with these, these stages.

We, we go. We go through them. We go back and forth through the stages, but at the end, we're accepting it. Children really are very different.

They are seen. And those struggles that they're having may not be very apparent to teachers.

So often there are some signs that you could be looking for, and we as counselors could help them figure out those signs.

If they lost someone, it's not necessarily just of a death.

It could be a divorce, it could be a separation,

it could be deployment.

It also could be that their family, loved one, or a family member is incarcerated.

This is all forms of loss,

and that grief goes along with it.

So when you have a student who may have that, you have that familiar background that's happening to them,

oftentimes we have to take back, take a step back and let our teachers monitor that. Because, to be honest with you, they're there for most of their day with those students.

So we have to guide them as counselors. How can we help them find those signs?

Are they missing assignments? They're coming in cluttered. Are they coming in not? Maybe forgot their snack or lunch, or maybe perhaps they're not prepared as they used to be.

It could be a lot of different things. It could be going to the nurse visits or going to the counselor visits. But they're also connected. And I think working together with seeing these signs, perhaps maybe these sad attacks will lessen because these students are never too young to miss that loss.

I love this saying that a child, if a child is old enough to love,

then that child is old enough to grieve.

And how that looks varies,

which makes our job even more tough.

They don't know how to act.

They worry about everything.

They worry about maybe another family getting ill or maybe another loss somewhere,

since they sometimes some cultures and some religions, depending on what you study or practice, should I say don't talk about grief.

So they have no idea as children what to say, what to act. How do I. What do I ask?

Julie: What.

Carol C: Who can I ask? So we again become that great point contact points person to be able to talk things out, because sometimes that's all they want. They want to be able to talk about it with someone.

Everything isn't always going to be fine.

It's not for them. Their life has significantly changed.

And understanding that as counselors, I think we have, we're really good at that.

But making our staff and our resource people around us be also educated behind this.

Again,

it's a heavy topic, but it's definitely a topic that I think all of us, if we have a heart centered approach,

we can really help along the ways.

So I thought this podcast,

yeah, it's about grief, but it's also about hope.

So I as a guest to Carol, I have a guest and her name is Julie Riga.

She's a leadership coach,

an author who turned her grief of losing her father into the driving force behind her book. Stay on course.

And she's here to share her own personal loss that shaped her purpose and how the lessons she learned are helping others around us lead with clarity and resilience.

So here we go. Julie,

please, I would love to see your take on this subject.

Julie: Thank you, Carol. Thank you so much for having me as a guest and a guest.

Yeah. An amazing, amazing day.

And I love this topic because none of us are immune to grief.

None of us are ever going to be immune to it. We are all going to experience it.

And I love the, the examples that you gave in the beginning because grief shows up in so many different ways.

You know, as we're children, as we're growing, and especially as we're aging and we have aging parents and.

But look,

death can come at any point in our life. We, we just don't know how do we use that experience to provide us with strength?

I think there's a lot of different circumstances. My circumstance was very different maybe than many others,

but my father,

what happened was, is he was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer. Gave, and the doctors gave him like two years to live.

So he had a little bit of a Runway of a time period to really think about what was gonna happen to him and how he wanted to prepare us.

So my father really did take some time to prepare us,

but nothing could prepare me for this one specific day that happened. Carol, do you want me to tell you what happened?

Carol C: Well, of course, because that's part of the healing. That's part healing through that hurt. So I think it'd be great for our audience to hear your perspective.

Julie: Yeah, well, I'll just tell you the story behind the story and then we'll, we'll, we'll go and please stop me, ask me any questions during this time. Okay. Stop me, but.

Okay, so what happens is, is like four months before my father dies,

I get a book Emailed to me. Well, as a Word document. And it was like a hundred pages, 20 point font. And it was this thing that said Ennio's book.

And my dad calls me up and he goes, julie, did you get my email?

I go, dad, I got your email.

What the heck do you want me to do with this? He goes, I don't know. You will figure it out. My father's off the boat from Italy. I don't know.

You'll figure it out, Julie.

And I was like, oh, my God, I have this thing.

My father just emailed me his memoir, like his biography. And. And in his mind he's thinking, my daughter will figure out how to. What to do with this. And I was kind of mad at him.

I'm like, dad, like,

when people die,

they get inheritance, like money. They don't get left a book to finish.

And. And that made me very upset.

I just ignored it. And I knew it was there, but I ignored it. You know that feeling when you know something's there and you have to. You just ignore it anyway.

So I.

Carol C: It's avoid. It's what we call avoidance in counseling world.

Julie: I was avoiding this thing like a plank. I was really doing until the day he passed away.

The day he passed away, I felt a heaviness and I felt that,

oh my gosh, I have this thing. I can't ignore it anymore.

So I quickly put a GoFundMe page up. I got some money from people that would have given my dad flowers. And I said, listen, this is my dad's last wish is to get this biography written of his life story.

And can you help me? I need money to help me finish it because I knew if I had money, I could finish the book.

Carol C: What made you want to finish it? What was the. What was the drive behind the grief there?

Julie: Well, what made me want to finish it was that when somebody sacrifices their life for you,

when somebody like loves you so deeply that they sacrifice their life for you, right? They know that they could have been doing other things for themselves, but instead they provided a life for you.

They set you up for success.

You can't ignore that person because they've now just died. You just can't.

Carol C: He gave me that request.

Julie: He gave me the request. He put it on me.

He, like, didn't even ask me if I wanted it.

He didn't say, Julie. It wasn't like that. It was like, no,

Julie is the only one.

And if I give it to her, she'll figure it out.

That's in his mind. He was saying, seeing this, because, listen, at the end of the day, he didn't want to die without leaving something behind.

Like, we all want to leave our mark on the world.

And my father has six grandchildren,

and he wanted to make sure they knew who he was and that the generations to come would know who he was.

He wrote down his life.

He wrote down his life, and that's the answer. I felt burdened.

I felt unfinished.

I felt if I didn't do this,

I wouldn't be okay. Like, it. It was just going to be something I avoided.

Carol C: But it was also part of your grief process, too. It was. It became part embedded in so.

Julie: So healing. So healing.

Because as I had to go through the process of reading this man's life story,

and maybe he knew this.

Maybe he knew that when he left this to me, this was what I was gonna do,

and that this would be the catapult of me grieving his death.

Because as I would read the stories, my father was still here.

As I would talk about him to other people,

we kept his memory alive.

And through this process of telling his stories and interviewing people who knew him, I got to know my father in a way that I didn't know him before. I didn't get the other aspects of my father.

I knew my father as father, daddy, dad.

I didn't know my father as husband,

as friend,

as co worker, as boss. I didn't know my father in those ways.

But I had to interview those people that had those relationships with my father.

And then when I would interview them, I would begin to learn about the relationships he had with other people and what he gave them and how he made an impact on their life.

Carol C: That was amazing. I'm sure that was amazing to, like,

encounter. Because you're right. Your perspective is you as a daughter versus all those other people who have also had insight that you didn't see before.

Julie: I didn't see it.

No. I didn't see it. And, And. And how could I see it? I was busy with my own life. He was busy involved in work. My father was like a workaholic.

And there were certain things that he would say to me as we were growing up. Like, I raised many children, Julie, have no idea. And I didn't understand what that meant.

I'm like, dad, I'm your daughter. What do you mean? You raise other children than me. Like, clearly you have two children here.

But that's not what he meant. He raised people up in his profession.

Carol C: He.

So whatever father figure they didn't have in their life, he became that for them.

I began to learn all this stuff about my father, which was me. Amazing. So the thing that I learned, the real deep lesson, right, the deep. The lesson of grief,

was that when somebody dies,

we can keep them alive as long as we keep them in our heart and we remember them.

So although my father's not here, he's still here because I honor his life still.

I have a podcast that I created. I have this book, and I talk about him. I use his stories.

I keep him alive by telling the stories,

and it's amazing that I can do that. And then, you know, the other piece is that I get to cry whenever I want to cry about it, Right. I just cry if I need to spontaneously cry.

Because that was another thing that I learned.

I learned this concept. I call it authentic grieving.

I created this.

I created this concept while my father was leaving, right?

It was, I'm just gonna spontaneously cry when I feel I need to,

and I'm gonna grieve the way I decide to grieve. I'm not gonna grieve the way anyone tells me to grieve.

One day, right after he died, I'm like, I'm gonna go food shopping.

And my father loved food shopping. So I went food shopping. And I had a breakdown at the cash registers.

So I had a breakdown at the cash register because I just did something my father loved to do. This was right after he died. This happened. So, like,

raw.

Carol C: Very raw at that raw moment.

Julie: Yeah. I think it was the first time I went food shopping after he died. But it did take me a while to snap out of it.

Carol C: And I think those steps,

guiding not just adults, but our children.

It is that there is no perfect plan of how to go through grief. There is no,

you'll feel better in three months. You'll feel better in six months. No, there is no timeline. And I think that's often forgotten,

especially when we work with students and children in a. In a very isolated way. But even as adults,

we're going through that.

Julie: You know what it is? It's the firsts, Carol.

Carol C: Yes.

Julie: The first. The first.

The first Father's Day without him, the first Christmas without him. That first year is really hard because you're so used to having this person with you for the holidays. Yes.

And I. I'll. I'll tell you this story. It was Father's Day.

My father died in February. Father's Day's in June.

Okay, so that's a few months after.

And I tell my husband that I can't go out to dinner with them.

I'm not going to be able to go out to dinner on Father's Day with his father. I just couldn't do it.

And I was just like, you know what I'm going to do instead? I'm going to honor my father by myself, and I'm going to cook a sauce and I'm going to drink some wine and I'm going to put on Italian music.

That's how I'm going to celebrate Father's Day this year.

Carol C: And that's one way that we always say, like setting those realistic, realistic expectations for yourself through that. Through that grief process,

especially during a holiday. The first. The first of a holiday. In this case, it was Father's Day, right?

Julie: Yeah.

Yeah.

And what was so funny is that I said to myself, dad, if you're here with me right now,

Volare will play next on the radio, on the music I was playing.

And Valari came on next. Wow.

I just danced around the house as if my father was with me.

And I cried and I laughed and I was happy because I was celebrating my dad and I was remembering him and recognizing all that he had given to me and all that I had been blessed with because of his life.

Carol C: And you didn't avoid or cancel that.

I'm happy to do that because sometimes it's often what people tend to do because they want to protect their.

Protect themselves in some way. But it is okay to.

To not to avoid sometimes. Sure. But in this case, you allowed yourself to, like. No, I'm not doing that. I'm going to do it my way,

how I want, but I'm not avoiding it.

So I'm hoping that you allowed yourself that.

Julie: Yeah, I avoided the dinner with my husband.

Carol C: That's different. Well, again, I said some things you avoid, but this time you still. You set a realistic expectation for yourself in that moment, for that period.

Julie: And I did not avoid the feeling or the thing that I needed to do to honor my father. And I just kind of had those moments. And I think the gift was the book.

I mean, I think somehow maybe my father knew that I needed that book to grieve because it took me about two years to write this book.

And. And I'm not saying that I worked on it a little bit. I. It took me two years to work on this book with a child,

with going to work,

being a single. Ish mom. I got remarried during this time that my Father died. My father did not make my wedding.

Like we had planned a wedding and my father was going to be like there and he wasn't.

So there were a lot of things that I didn't have this time around.

But it was okay.

It was all okay because this was the path that I needed to take. And now I have his book.

And the book can be bought by anyone who wants to read the story. I talk about authentic grieving in the book as well.

And it is truly a celebration of life.

And I think that that's where we want to be. Right? And I think there's different kinds of things. And I mind you, I'm an adult when I lose my dad.

I'm not a child.

Okay? So it's different.

It is, it's. It's just a whole different thing when you're an adult and you lose your parent. I mean, I was 44 years old or 42 years old when I lost him.

And I was an adult.

I had a life.

I wasn't living with my father different.

I didn't need him as much as I didn't needed him before, but I. Yet I still relied on him. He really, truly was one of my best friends, my dad.

I had a better relationship with my dad than I have with my mom.

And it was a huge loss. My father was my coach. He was my hero.

After he had retired, he became very interested in my life and I felt like I could talk to him. He was one of the people that I could talk to.

So in essence, there was a big loss for me,

but I turned the loss into a celebration of life.

Carol C: And we often as counselors try to convey that to our students who have lost their loved one. But oftentimes they are,

they are going through those grieving process a little different. Like you said earlier, it's, it's. They're not ready for that.

And until they're ready, you really are just a listening ear. As a school based counselor, you really are. You're just listening to what they want to share. If it's a memory or if it's something like, or if it's something that came up in conversation or through a chapter book.

That's how triggers, those are triggers that happen just so intermittently.

But you're right. As an adult,

you're right. Your, your experience is definitely different, but there's still the processes,

is, the process of, the steps of it is the same.

Julie: Yeah,

but like as a child,

it's so important to make sure that there is community support. Like it Takes a village.

So especially if it's a parent,

I would hope that there would be a community or somebody or just a support system.

Because you do need a support system. You, you need people to be around you. You cannot isolate,

you cannot isolate people.

Carol C: Who love and support you. Could be that, maybe it could be that school nurse, that person you kind of went to before anything happened, or it could be that coach like you said.

Like maybe not your dad was your coach, but it could be a coach, like an athletic coach or a sports coach. Or it could be that person. It could be if they're,

if they're in their really practicing their religion. It could be even their, their priest or the rabbi. It could be a lot of dis. Support people. I think sometimes as kids, we, the kids forget that, that there are people out there in that moment because they're so.

They're dealing with all of it and they don't know how,

they don't know.

Julie: How well, and they don't know how to build the support system either.

Carol C: Right, right.

Julie: You know,

when I went through my divorce,

that was another time that I had to go through grief.

And there was a big loss for me there because although I didn't lose a parent in that moment, I lost my support system.

And my parents were in Florida. I truly was alone. What I realized very fast was that I needed to replace my support system. Cuz my support system was my husband and his family and our friends.

I lost them all.

So when you talk about grief like that was harder than losing my father because that was another experience with grief that I had. When my daughter was nine months old, my marriage was ending and so I had to be a single parent and I had to, to be in that situation,

that was hard.

And so what I realized very quickly is that it is, it is the village and the support system you develop.

So I had to meet all new friends and those women that I became friends with became my tribe.

Like we met a lot of these single moms and we all rallied together to help each other.

Carol C: That's awesome to hear because I think sometimes when you're in so much grief, sometimes that ability to kind of put yourself out there becomes a little nerv. You get worried, nervous, oh my goodness, how am I gonna.

All these thoughts, intrusive thoughts go in your head. So I'm happy to hear that you worked through that. As much as. I'm sure it was difficult, but you worked through it.

Julie: Yeah.

Carol C: Drawing comfort from others or doing for others oftentimes helps people that are Going through grief helps help others. When you're hurting, help others. And I think that's why this topic has always been so touched.

It touched my, it touches my heart all the time. When I see, obviously kids go through it, it breaks my heart. But when I see adults and everything, I can understand it a little bit more, I think.

And I'm able to at least give those tips when they're ready for it because again, it's all about when you're ready for it, when you're ready to hear it, when you're ready to heal that through that hurt and also restoring that hope.

Like that's, that's key. And I'm happy to hear that your,

your, the book that your dad inherited gave you is something that empowered you to give you that hope and continue.

Amazing.

Julie: Yeah, it was definitely the right move.

Carol C: He knew who to leave that to for sure.

Julie: I know I, I just was mad at him. But in retrospect,

I have the podcast, I have the book,

and I talk about him, I tell his stories, and people love the story.

When I can tell that story,

it immediately connects to audiences because every person has experienced some level of grief.

Carol C: And also,

and also knowing that if you do need help, there are people out there,

you know, whether it's a close friend. And I'm happy that you were able to establish that. Maybe an outside resource, a therapist or someone, it may not be the school based counselor, but the school based counselor can provide all those resources for family and students and even adults.

Even when the adults, like I talk to my parents, my parents also ask for that and able to provide for them too.

So it's creating that support system as we talked about earlier, but in a different way.

So in a different way.

But I love hearing how this is. You're taking care of yourself throughout this process, obviously. And I love hearing that too. And all those tips that you did for those firsts are always something that I always kind of give to the students and families that are going through that loss ahead of time so they have something to think about.

Maybe they're not listening to me in that moment, but when it comes to that, they're like, oh, I know what you meant now. Like, and it's, and it's fine because I like to be, I like to give that proactive like,

that proactive like tips before so that we can set things up in motion. And again, in a school based building, it's, it's all your teachers, your staff and everything, but outside the world like we live in, it's it's our friends, our.

Our family members,

things that you meet or who you meet and those in those kind of type support groups type things.

Julie: And the part that I want to leave everybody with is that it is not fun to lose somebody. We don't want to lose somebody, but it is inevitable that we will lose somebody.

Yes,

but there's a gift in the celebration of a life.

No matter what time point this happens,

we still had this person for a time.

And how do we celebrate their life so that we don't forget them?

They keep the. We keep their memory alive as we go through life and that we don't stay stuck.

Carol C: Absolutely.

Absolutely. I love the celebration of life. I love that idea.

I often do support that with our students that I work with too, when they do they want to create something or we. We do as counselors, try to do that without necessarily.

There's a line, also a boundary in our, in our.

In our role in the school building that we can't cross. But that celebration of life, it never, never ceases to come out of my mouth and say that, like, what can we.

What. What good memory can you give me? What good memory can you remember? What could. Something that they give me? And even if it's a little bit when they're ready, I just.

We just kind of like gravitate towards that and kind of let it grow so.

Well, thanks again for joining me today, Julie. I really do appreciate. This topic is so, so close to my heart, but at the same time, it's so close to yours.

And I think us working together on this,

onto this today is.

Was amazing.

So thank you so much for sharing your hope behind the healing of the hurt that you went through.

And hopefully we'll be able to have other special episodes like this about this topic and maybe we can come together again.

Julie: Thank you so much for having me.

Carol C: Have a great day, guys.

Carol: Wow.

What a powerful conversation.

I want to give a huge thanks to Carol and Julia for sharing their hearts, their stories, and their insights on navigating grief with hope and honesty.

This episode is such a beautiful example of why I started the podcast Takeovers to spotlight voices in our school counseling community who are doing meaningful work and reminding us that we're really never alone in what we're going through.

If today's episode resonated with you,

I'd love to hear your thoughts. You can send me a message on Instagram or Facebook.

@Counselingessentials.

And if you're interested in hosting a future podcast Takeover,

let's chat until next time, my friends. Take care of yourself,

support one another and remember your work matters and so do you.

Bye for now.

Thanks for listening to today's episode of Counselor Chat.

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Bye for now.