How We Navigate Grief with Blair

TL;DR: What is time? It is the movement we measure between moments. Does forever really exist? Yes, but not the way we think. Forever is not a number on a clock. It is the feeling that a love, a bond, or a person will always be here. That feeling is true right up until the moment it is not. In this post, I want to walk through what time is, whether forever really exists, and what I believe forever...

In 2019, I walked onto a stage in my hometown and shared my story publicly for the very first time. My mom was there. My dad was there. My Baba Leah was there. I could see them in the room while I delivered my keynote, and I will carry that image with me for the rest of my life. I am so grateful now that I spoke while he could still hear me. I had spent years keeping certain things quiet. And what...

Nineteen years ago, I packed up my Alero and left Winnipeg, sure that home was somewhere out west. And for eighteen years, British Columbia gave me mountains, ocean, lakes, a life I’m endlessly grateful for. But somewhere along the way I started to notice that the word “home” kept drifting east, back across the prairies, back to the place I thought I’d outgrown. Turns out you don’t outgrow Winnipe...

I am not a widow. My wasband is still alive yet, I feel the version of him I once loved is not. He breathes. His heart still beats. And yet I grieve him in a similar way that I’ve grieved the dead, in the good outfit, eating shiva loaf, being still, in the dark, in the small hours when the house is quiet, and my thoughts are loud. A stroke took him. Not all of him. Just the part I married. So if I...

A year ago today, the mountains held me. I remember the thin, bright air of Deer Valley, Utah, and the way an unexpected invitation can rearrange a life. My travel season was winding down, or so I thought, when Shauna’s message landed in my inbox. Come to the mountains. Take the stage with Sir Richard Branson. When the universe hands you a door like that, you don’t knock politely. You walk through...

Well, May. You had some high highs and very low lows. As I write this, I’m on my sister’s couch in Winnipeg, Manitoba. If I’m being honest, this is the post I almost didn’t write. It’s easier to show you the highlight reel. The stages, the microphones, the new friends, the good hair days. It’s harder to tell you that in the same thirty-one days, I had some of the proudest moments of my career and...

I stood in the doorway this weekend and looked at what’s left. Boxes stacked in a concrete room the size of a parking space, behind a roll-up door with a padlock I bought from the storage facility office. Fifteen years of a life together. And I’m not even done. Two more loads at least before I leave for Winnipeg in June. That’s the math nobody warns you about when a marriage ends. Not the lawyer f...

As a little girl, I turned to writing whenever I had big feelings. In my diary. For school assignments. In poetry. There was something about putting words on a page that made the inside of me feel less crowded. Writing helped me understand myself, and it gave my deepest thoughts a place to go, somewhere outside my body, where I could finally look at them. I drifted away from it for a long time, th...

For most of my life, I thought I knew what it meant to rest and feel calm. I wasn’t having panic attacks. I wasn’t falling apart in public. I was functioning. I was showing up. I was getting things done. And in the absence of visible crisis, I told myself that meant I was okay. I was not okay. I just didn’t know what okay actually felt like. This is the part nobody talks about when they talk about...

Kintsugi Healing: Learning to Feel Again After Grief Five and a half years ago, I made a quiet decision that would change everything. I was going to put my heart back together. Not to return to who I was, but to become someone who could feel again. To crack it open and let love back in. I couldn’t feel it. Not love. Not gratitude. Not joy. I was numb. If you’ve ever experienced deep grief or traum...

I’ve always been a treasure hunter. Not the kind with a map and an X marking the spot, but the kind who walks slowly along a shoreline, eyes scanning the ground like something sacred might be waiting to be found. Because it is. Give me a beach, any beach. Ocean, river, lake. Give me a forest floor scattered with stories, and I will find magic. A speckled rock that looks like it was painted by hand...

The first last breath I ever witnessed was hers. Auntie Heather. I was 20 years old, standing in a hospital room that felt too quiet, too still, as if the world had paused without asking permission. No one prepares you for that moment. No one sits you down and says, this is what it looks like when a life ends. And yet, there I was, watching, listening, trying to understand something my body someho...

On March 7th, something remarkable happened in New York City. Not just a book launch. Not just a billboard in Times Square. It was a celebration of human resilience. At 31 minutes past the hour, every hour for 24 hours , the cover of RESILIENT A.F. Stories of Resilience Volume 3 appeared on a Times Square billboard. That means the message of resilience showed up 24 times in one of the busiest plac...

Five books.200+ stories of resilience. Three billboards. Conversations across Ghana, Costa Rica, Mexico, Canada, the USA, Australia, Bali, the Maldives, and online rooms filled with humans who simply wanted to feel less alone. A clothing line. Podcasts. Strategic partnerships. Live events. Creative projects, my sister Alana and I are quietly building behind the scenes. And it all started with some...

For most of my life, I thought when people said, “Close your eyes and picture a red apple,” they were being poetic. Apparently… they weren’t. Some people can literally see images in their mind like a movie screen. They can rotate objects, picture faces, and imagine landscapes. I see nothing. Just darkness. This condition is called aphantasia, which simply means the absence of a voluntary “mind’s e...

I went to Puerto Vallarta for Grief Week from February 16 to 24. This week is to honour our mom and dad and their death anniversaries. Dead Dad Day is February 18th, and Dead Mom Day is February 23rd. It was intentional. Sacred. A container for reflection. The kind of trip where you think, This is where I’ll exhale. Instead, the day before Dead Mom Day, there was a cartel flare-up. Shelter in plac...

Does time have wings? Because how has it been five years since my mom, Sharon, suddenly died? One moment she was fine. The next, we were told she had two weeks left to live. Three days later, she was gone. Make it make sense. How does a life end that quickly and yet grief stretch on forever? How can five years feel like five minutes and five lifetimes at the same time? Today, February 23, is Dead...

Up above the world so high, like a diamond in the sky…. or something like that. It still gets me every time I think about it. The sheer, staggering privilege of it. I walk onto a metal tube. I sit. I wait. And then… I’m elsewhere. Another continent unfolds beneath the wing. The science of it is a miracle. The access to it is a gift I try never to take for granted. As I type this, I’m suspended bet...

Medication can make the world go round. Medication will keep me here. Medication can be the thin, unglamorous thread holding the fabric of my existence together. I’m not being poetic for effect. I’m being literal. There are pills in my life that help my brain fire properly, my hormones stay somewhat cooperative, my nervous system calm the hell down, and my body do what it needs to do so I can wake...

I have always loved to travel. New people. New places. New conversations. New versions of myself. For most of my life, I thought that made me adventurous. What I did not realize until much later was that I was also very good at not being home. Home was where the hard stuff lived. Abandonment. Anger. Anxiety. The quiet grief of a family that broke apart long before anyone explained why. Before I wa...

Grief does not always arrive with death. Sometimes it arrives through absence, inconsistency, or a moment that quietly marks an ending you are too young to name. I was seven years old when my parents divorced. At that age, you do not understand adult decisions, addiction, or emotional distance. You understand one thing. Someone you love is suddenly gone. All I wanted was my dad. His addiction took...

For most of my life, effort was my coping mechanism. If something hurt, I worked harder. If something scared me, I stayed busy. If something broke my heart, I built something beautiful on top of it and called that healing. And for a long time, that strategy worked. Or at least, it worked well enough to fool me. I built companies. I launched projects. I showed up for everyone. I checked every box t...

Resilience after loss does not look like bouncing back. It does not look like “being strong.”It does not look like getting over it, moving on, or tying your pain up in a pretty bow so other people feel more comfortable around you. And if one more person tells you how “well you’re handling it,” you have my full permission to scream internally. Or externally. I’m not here to police your coping. Here...

When I first learned what a nervous system was, I realized my nervous system was so dysregulated that I couldn’t actually comprehend what the person was explaining. It sounded like gibberish. But I did know that I was not in a good place with my mental health, and something needed to change. Someone was calmly explaining regulation, safety, and the difference between survival and rest, and my body...

For most of my career, I believed leadership meant endurance. Hold more. Carry more. Push harder. Expand capacity at all costs. Work long hours. Make more money. Then grief showed up and took that belief out back for a very humbling conversation. Grief did not arrive quietly. It arrived as loss stacked on loss. It was a shitstorm of pain. With a calendar full of meetings and deadlines, my body wan...