Suffering and Strength

Recently, I listened to A Bit of Optimism Podcast between Simon Sinek and Melinda French Gates. You need to understand that Simon Sinek impacted my leadership mindset years ago. I am a fangirl. When he spoke at the annual conference for NAIS, I sat in the front row and made Luke Hladek and Joe Jividen sit right there with me although once he started talking, I had no idea any one else was even in the space. 

In this particular podcast, he and Gates spoke about the ways we get through suffering. When life throws you a curveball, whether it is of your own choosing or not, gather your friends. You have some control. My mom used to say, you always have a choice – even when you are thrown into a transition that you didn’t choose – she’d remind me sometimes what you can choose is to simply walk away.  When you do, walk away, Gates would recommend that you surround yourself “with good friends who remind you ‘We don’t know where you’re going but you will be ok. Yes, you are sad now, but you are going to be OK.’ These people can hold space and offer the perspective that you are going to be fine even as you sit in the uncomfortable place you find yourself. Sinek reminds us that surrounding ourselves with good people is a positive action. It is an example of the agency we have. He comments, “You put the parachute on before you jump out of the plane.” 

Tammy Augustine is my parachute. We met months before my divorce when I hired her as a personal trainer. Her gym was steps from Wheeling Country Day School. Back then, the only way I was going to take care of my health was if someone scheduled it on my work calendar. 

Liz: If you know the only way you’re going to show up for yourself is if there is an appointment on the calendar, then that’s what you need.

Tammy: Accountability. You have to. And sometimes that’s somebody to work out with.

So I charged Tammy with my fitness, but with each rep, I recognized my strength. When life started to get squirrely, I still showed up and she held space for me to achieve whatever I could that day. Tammy Augustine didn’t fix me. She brought out in me the strength and fortitude I had. In the last eight years, she has been there through all of life’s big transitions. She is a trusted fellow traveler as she has had her share of suffering through big events.

Liz: In your life, what’s the big event? 

Tammy: Without a doubt…My son having a stroke when he was six. It changed my whole perspective of life, scared me to death, someplace I can go back to immediately and feel every aspect of how I felt in that moment, and it was a lot of pain.

I had two healthy children. And in a split second, my life changed.

That was the worst moment in my entire life to date. I hope that I don’t have to experience anything that traumatic again. But It also changed my perspective on the importance of the little things in life. I can remember sitting at a ball game, and my son, obviously, he survived with some deficits, but he worked really hard to get movement back and speech back and all those things. But he wasn’t the best player on the soccer team. He just got to get in a little bit, and he was part of the team, but I would sit in the stands, with parents who are screaming at their kids because they’re not playing well enough. Maybe they missed the goal. They didn’t give it their all that night. And me… I was sitting there just so happy that my son was part of the team, that he actually could be out there. And I actually got to watch him play. 

I wanted to lean over and say, “Hey, just be so grateful that he’s got two legs that work, and he can kick a ball.” He never scored a goal or anything for most of his soccer career. And there was one game, they were playing a team that was not really good at all, and they were killing this team. And the coach is like, “Austin, come off the bench. Come on, we’re going to put you in.” And he had wonderful teammates who all supported him. That whole game that he was in, they were trying to kick the ball to him, to assist so he could get a goal.  Somebody got it in front of him. He kicked a goal, and every single one of those players out on the field ran to him and picked him up. And I remember sitting up there just like… That was the best moment. He was alive and could do that.

I’m just so happy that he could even be out there. And don’t get me wrong, you fall back into that non-appreciative life. We all do. You fall back into getting angry about the dumb things. But if you can think back on that moment…

Liz: When I asked you about the big moment in your life, I wish that instead of the stroke, I wish our brains were wired to go to that really wonderful, positive moment.

Tammy: I’ve often wondered this, why in my life.. why do we remember so clearly every aspect of the painful parts of our life? But the happy moments, the joy, you don’t remember the details like you remember it in the detail that you do for the painful ones. 

It’s strange, isn’t it? The way our minds cling to memories of struggle and hardship with vivid clarity, while the moments of pure happiness seem to slip through our fingers like sand. I’ve been thinking about this peculiar tendency we have to catalog our suffering in high definition while joy gets filed away in some dusty corner of our consciousness.

Pain etches itself into our neural pathways with remarkable precision. I can still feel the exact moment my heart shattered after my fiance and I broke up. I recall the specific shade of beige on the hospital walls when I heard Nicolas had no heartbeat. I remember the distinct emptiness in my stomach driving to a lawyer’s office to give back a baby we had adopted 11 days earlier when the birth mom changed her mind. These memories don’t fade – they crystallize.

Perhaps it’s evolutionary. Our brains developed to catalog threats and hardships as a survival mechanism. Remember the berry that made you sick, the path where you encountered danger, the time you almost didn’t make it – these memories kept our ancestors alive. Joy, pleasant as it is, didn’t confer the same survival advantage.

Or maybe it’s because pain demands our full attention. When we suffer, we’re completely present – every nerve ending firing, every sense heightened. Joy can be experienced peripherally, sometimes even unconsciously, while pain commands our entire being.

Most ironic of all is how we gloss over the joy that emerges from our struggles. The relief of making it through a difficult time, the profound appreciation that follows deprivation, the deep connections forged during shared hardship – these precious afterglows of pain often fade fastest of all, though they represent some of life’s most authentic moments of happiness. 

Until we develop a new practice – to give joyful moments the same attention and reverence we automatically give to painful ones. To notice joy fully when it occurs, to reflect on it deliberately afterward, to tell the stories as completely as we recount our struggles. Like sitting at a soccer game when your son scores his first goal.

Tammy: Although it was the worst time in my life, I walked away with what was positive, that he survived.

While Tammy and Austin’s dad desperately waited for doctors to determine the reason for their son’s blood curdling screams that came out of nowhere, a nurse showed kindness.

Tammy: She has a little angel pin on the lapel of her shirt, and she takes it off. And she said, I want you to have this. Somebody gave it to me in a time when I had some things happening in my life. You’re going to need this. And she put it on my shirt. And next thing, we had to drive in the middle of the night in pouring rain to get to the next hospital – we had no idea where we were going.

There are always angels if we look for them – people who surround us when we need them.

After four days sitting with her son in a medically induced coma with doctors watching for brain swelling, Tammy was told

 Tammy: This isn’t good. We don’t know if he had another stroke. He’s not coming out of it. We’re going to take him down and do another CAT scan. And of course, we’re, again, in shock. There’s four people around him pushing the bed, and they tell us to come with them. And this is a moment that I’ve lived in my head many times. We’re following the bed down a hallway, and it’s lined with chairs, and people are sitting in the chairs waiting for appointments or whatever, and they’re bagging him. I’m a mess. I can barely walk. John is holding me up, and I’m falling. And all I can picture in my head is we’re the car behind the hearse. This is what is going to happen, and I don’t want to be here anymore. If he goes, I want to go. I can’t imagine him being in a big world that I don’t know of by himself. I have to go. They sat us in a room by ourselves for 15 minutes, but it felt like five hours. And the hospitalist comes in. She goes, “He’s fine. No changes. Can you go buy him a pair of high tops?

He’s getting dropped foot, and we don’t want him to get dropped foot.” And I went, What? You don’t know whether to cry, laugh. It was so nonchalant. Like, Oh, he’s fine. I just had the worst moment in my life, but he’s good.

And he was good.

Tammy: I sat in bed with him on day two of being in the upstairs wing. He had just learned how to read his colors in kindergarten… red, yellow, the primary ones, I wrote all of them down on a piece of paper in pencil, and I pointed to red, and I had crayons of the colors. And I said, Find this crayon. He could read the colors and pick the right crayon. When the doctor came in, I said, “He’s going to be fine. He knows. He didn’t lose anything cognitively. He knows.” And the doctor looked at me and he’s like, “He knows, I think you’re right. I think you’re right.”

The kindergarten teacher who taught Austin to read the colors turned out to be another angel – part of the Augustine support system. Just months out of college, managing her first classroom, her life was changed as well. She wrote in a newspaper piece, “ Suddenly the lesson plans and petty worries of everyday life didn’t seem so important anymore. Here was this bright-eyed little boy paralyzed on one side of his body with bleeding in his brain.”

Tammy: She’s 20-some years old. Oh, my gosh. She was devastated by it all. I mean, it impacted her a lot. She was a fantastic teacher. Again, so blessed and lucky that we had her as his teacher. She came to the hospital. When we got back home, she herself volunteered to stop twice a week after school and tutor him when she was done with her day, she would stop. And on good days, she could work with him. When he had bad days, there’s a lot of bad days that he was either too tired… or he’d have fits of crying, not being able to talk. So he didn’t know how to handle his new world, and we didn’t either. I mean, we were all learning.

Liz: Did he ever go back to kindergarten? 

Tammy: He did. Yeah. In her class. Surprisingly, he went back. I’m going to… I think it was like two months later.

Kalin Freisen, the kindergarten teacher who showed up on good days and bad held space for Austin and his parents. She couldn’t fix it, but she could be there in support and prepare his classmates to do the same. In that same article she also wrote, “I see such love and compassion shown in my classroom. The children have learned one of the greatest lessons of life: to show compassion toward others.”

Austin’s stroke had a positive ripple effect on so many lives… his classmates, his teacher, his caregivers, his therapists, his sisters and his mother.

Once Austin was back in school, however, Tammy had to find activities to help her move through her suffering. The caregiver requires as much recovery as the boy. For Tammy a great deal of it involved dedicating herself to her passion for wellness and fitness, but there were simpler actions as well like the comfort found in a swing or a rocking chair. When we rock or swing, the repetitive movement activates our “rest and digest” mode, which naturally counters the “fight or flight” response triggered by anxiety. At WCDS we bought rocking chairs to comfort children for that very reason. We adults used them much more often. For Tammy, she now has a porch swing for relief when worry sets in.

Liz: Your nervous system doesn’t forget. Even as your brain starts to… Your conscious brain starts to move past, your nervous system doesn’t forget. And I wonder if swinging isn’t our taking care of that earlier version of ourselves that is still really hurting.

Tammy: Right. Do you ever… I’ve caught myself at the grocery store standing in line, rocking back and forth. Do you ever do that?

Liz: Like you’re holding a baby. You know, I always assume that I’m going to sway the rest of my life because I am still swaying Nicolas.

Tammy: But hey, I’m also one that sees an empty aisle in Walmart or Kroger, and wants to lunge all the way down it.

Liz: Yeah, I don’t have that impulse.

Tammy: I want to do walking lunges down that aisle.

Liz: That’s good for you. You do those for me while you’re there. Everything in moderation.

Another one of my mom’s pearls of wisdom. Everything in moderation. That was her answer for diets, workouts, travel… we don’t have to go full throttle all the time. Sometimes we need to let up on the gas and just walk.

Tammy: Let’s just walk.

I guess that is why I started walking last fall. I was surrounding myself with good people. I was taking positive action. It was a reminder that I had agency. I was following the advice of Melinda French Gates before I had ever heard it.

Liz: I do go back and wish that when suffering came, I could more easily hit the pause button and see this too shall pass. And something good is probably coming from this.

Tammy: I’m going to ask you the question. Don’t you feel like you’re better at that now, though? 

Liz: I feel like I’m a ton better at it. 

Tammy :It’s saying to yourself, Why are you getting upset over this?

Liz: Right. But for me, It’s “Good Lord, you just went through this big thing seven years ago, and you let this take you to your knees?” You have to give yourself grace. 

Tammy: Agreed. Right. 

Liz: I am definitely better at it.

There’s an art to showing up when someone’s world is falling apart. When I’m drowning in grief, anxiety, or just the overwhelming weight of existence, I’ve learned to gather my people, but I have also learned to be selective about who gets to witness my undoing. The people who earn this privilege are rare and precious.

They don’t try to fix me. They understand that some pain can’t be solved, only witnessed. They sit with me in the darkness without frantically searching for a light switch. Their presence says, “I see you, and I’m not going anywhere.”

These space-holders don’t fill silence with empty platitudes or toxic positivity. They know that “everything happens for a reason” is the last thing a suffering heart needs to hear. Instead, they offer a gentle “this is really hard” – acknowledgment without minimization. They show up authentically. I’m not always good at that. I think I insert humor when I don’t always need to… but at the same time that is me being authentic.

The most valuable people in my darkest hours are those who remember to check in again next week, who drop off wine or coffee without expecting conversation, who text “no need to respond” and mean it. They understand that suffering isn’t linear, and healing doesn’t follow a tidy schedule.

I’ve learned that these rare souls often have their own intimate relationship with pain. They’ve been to the depths and back. They don’t fear your darkness because they’ve navigated their own. Their compassion isn’t theoretical – it’s been forged in fire.

The people who can truly hold space are the ones who understand that sometimes, the most powerful thing they can offer is simply to stay.

Tammy Augustine is one of those people. Tammy stays. She gives me strength… theoretically and literally. 

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