Teaching Kids About Conscious Choices with Deborah Charman and Brian Wardale

In this moving conversation, Deborah Charman and Brian Wardale share their powerful personal journeys through grief, caregiving, and healing, and how those experiences inspired their work in suicide prevention and emotional education. Both survivors of deep loss and personal struggles, they now use their stories to help young people navigate grief, end-of-life challenges, and the difficult emotions that can come with living and dying.

Brian, after his father’s stroke, stepped up to care for his mother until she was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Losing his role as caregiver sent Brian into a spiral of depression, eventually leading to a life-altering suicide attempt that resulted in the amputation of his leg. Through that pain, he found a new purpose by sharing his story and helping others.

Deborah worked as a healthcare aide, caring for elderly patients who often struggled with the emotional weight of aging and dying. She used compassion and deep listening to help them find meaning in their final years. Having survived her own suicide attempt decades earlier, Deborah brings personal insight to their mission of guiding others through emotional struggles.

Together, Brian and Deborah developed an educational program for young people, focusing on conscious living, emotional resilience, and making good choices in difficult moments. Their framework teaches kids to understand their feelings, process grief, and build hope for the future. By sharing their experiences with death, dying, and healing, they help others move from despair to meaning, offering a message of hope for anyone facing life’s hardest challenges.

https://www.survivorsofhopelessness.com/

https://teensuicidepreventionsociety.com/

https://www.facebook.com/brian.wardale

https://www.instagram.com/the.iron.byron/

Transcript

Deb: [00:00:00] Prevention and intervention. There is a fine line between those two. Prevention is really what our program is. It talks about how to reframe and reorganize your perspective. 

Jill: Welcome back to Seeing Death. Clearly. I'm your host, Jill McClennen, a death doula and end of life coach. Here on my show, I have conversations with guests that explore the topics of death, dying, grief, and life itself.

My goal is to create a. Space where you can challenge the ideas you might already have about these subjects. I want to encourage you to open your mind and consider perspectives beyond what you may currently believe to be true. In this episode, Deborah Charman and Brian Wardale open up about their powerful personal journeys with caregiving.

Suicide attempts and healing and how those experiences fuel their work in suicide prevention and emotional education for young people, both survivors of suicide attempts. Debra and Brian bring deep compassion [00:01:00] and honesty to conversations around loss, mental health, and making conscious choices in difficult times.

Brian shares how losing his identity as a caregiver after his parents' death led to a life-changing moment of despair and how surviving it gave him a renewed sense of. Purpose. Debra reflects on her experience supporting elderly patients and the emotional insights that shaped her own healing. Together they've created a program that teaches kids how to understand emotions and choose hope.

Thank you for joining us for this conversation. Welcome to the podcast. Today, I actually have two guests. I have Debra and Brian with me today, and they're gonna tell you who they are and why they're on the podcast. Thank you both so much for coming on today. 

Brian: I'm Brian Wardale and I live in beautiful, sunny Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

Born and raised Calgary. I'm 47-year-old, years old. A good dancer and a lot of fun to be with. 

Jill: And then how about you, Deborah? Tell us a little bit about [00:02:00] you. 

Deb: Yes, I'm a certified healthcare aide and I worked quite a bit with the elderly. I retired in 2018, and I have a very unique perspective on death and dying because working with the elderly and having to comfort them.

During their last days, and now I'm one of them looking forward, trying to stay healthy and as active as possible in my last year. 

Jill: Wonderful. Brian, why don't you just tell us whatever you want to about your story and then how you and Deborah connected and the work that you're doing together. 

Brian: The salient points are in 2015, my father had a very bad stroke.

Which, uh, affected him so badly that he would never be able to go home. Rehabilitation wasn't able to do very much for him, so he had to go into a nursing home at the age of 76. Now, he had done a lot [00:03:00] for my mom and really helped look after her. Because she had very bad arthritis in both knees, shoulder.

She had ovarian cancer and had been through treatment a number of times. She didn't need total care, but dad did a lot. I. For her did a lot around the house when he had a very bad stroke. I ended up kind of taking over that role of, I would do the, the cooking, the laundry, the shopping, you know, anything that required a lot of moving around.

My mom would visit my dad in the nursing home every single day, maybe taking a day off here and there, but. That was her job. She couldn't get downstairs to the laundry easily, so I did that as she became more in continental laundry duty, involved [00:04:00] washing the towels every two or three days. I ended up doing a lot to take care of my mom, but it also ended up taking over my life.

I had always struggled with feelings of. A low self-esteem, low self-worth, struggling to find a sense of belonging, a sense of purpose, and I really found that in looking after my mom. But then in 2019, when my mom was told that, you know, the reason she had been feeling very tired and sluggish is because her cancer had come back with a vengeance.

And there was a big tumor wrapped around the, the vena cava, which is the main blood flow between upper and lower bodies, and had just been gobbling upper hemoglobin and she was, by this point, she was so [00:05:00] weak that. They, she was considered untreatable. The tumor is inoperable two week for, for chemotherapy, and so her condition was terminal.

I didn't know who I was without looking after my mother, and so when that happened, I just, I went into this terrible, terrible tailspin that ended up with me attempting suicide. And winding up, you know, with many broken bones. My right leg had to be amputated through the knee. I'm in a wheelchair currently, but I also got a new lease on life and a new perspective.

And then shortly thereafter, met Debra and the two of us coming together. Like I found a new purpose. No, not. Doing her laundry, but taking our individual experiences and putting it towards this new [00:06:00] project to try to educate future generations to avoid the worst pitfalls of feelings of hopelessness. That we experienced.

Now I'll leave Deborah's story to Deborah. 

Deb: Thank you Brian. Yes, I met Brian in 2020 in January, age 62. I went back to college and I got my certification as an HCA and worked at that for seven years. Happily. And suddenly realized that while I was very good at protecting my back at work, 'cause there was a lot of lifting, I wasn't good at protecting my gut at work.

So I strained myself terribly and I became very sick in 2022. By 2023, I couldn't go back to work. In 2020, I had started working with Brian. I worked with a lot of elderly who were extremely distraught. [00:07:00] They would say to me, why am I living? Why am I still here? They had no quality of life. Some of them even said to, you know, when animals get like this, we're very humane and let them go to sleep.

That's where they need to be. This would just break my heart. I would take them and I would hold them and hug them, and I would say, but you know, you still have something to give. That's why you're still here. You know? And what you're doing is you're giving me your wisdom. Tell me about your life. And they would start talking about their lives and then they would feel better.

I'll be 72 in June. And my health, as I said in 2022, I had hurt myself very badly. So. I always say that the plumbing and the electrical is what goes first and it all. So that's where I am. The plumbing is giving me some challenges, but from their point of view, I can't stand in their shoes and look forward to.

From here on, it's just a matter [00:08:00] of hoping you get up to tomorrow feeling as good as you do today. I think the key is to stay positive. To have something to offer. And that's what Brian and I have done. I am actually a suicide attempt survivor as well. I tried in 1972, so that was a long time ago. And yeah, working with him now and, and having this to offer, it just does give us a whole reason for living and for myself, like Brian is still a young whipper snapper over there.

It's. Really an incredible perspective to be looking forward to your golden year. 

Jill: I talk a lot about caregiving and supporting caregivers and how caregivers need to take care of themselves, but what we don't often talk about is that sense of, this is my purpose. And when that's done, that loss, that feeling of not just the grief for the person that you loved, that's [00:09:00] now gone.

When so much of your life, 'cause caregiving does take over your life. I don't wanna say it's unfortunate because I think that's part of what we're here for, right? As humans, we're here to care for the people that we love. When you're a parent, the babies need all the care. When you're on the other end of the spectrum, the elderly need a lot of care, and that's okay.

I think that that's a good thing that we're able to provide that for our loved ones. But because we don't have good support systems, it takes over a caregiver's life, and I don't often hear people talking about that sense of loss of purpose when their person has, you know, passed away. I think that's a really good point that you made, that it can really put people into this sense of hopelessness that there's nothing left.

I'm sorry that you went through that to the point where you tried to take your own life. That's really heartbreaking. To know that somebody had to experience that, but I love that now you're using that to go out and help other people. Even with [00:10:00] you sharing that at 19, I think so many of us either attempted it kind of half-assed attempted it.

Some of us like you, Brian, attempted it and then survived it. So many people struggle with that every day of that. Maybe it would just be better if I wasn't here. And so knowing that there's people like the two of you that are out there trying to help this education is so much of what I talk about. We need to educate people on the realities of death, dying, and grief and suicide awareness is also another one of, you know, there's support out there.

There's help out there. And we briefly touched on maid. That's a whole topic that I love to talk about. Sometimes people say it as physician-assisted suicide, which is really not correct. There is a big difference between somebody that is dying anyway, but they wanna have control over when that is versus somebody that.

You know, is attempting [00:11:00] suicide because they're feeling lost and hopeless. But I'm also one of those people where sometimes I'm like, that could be just as bad as a terminal illness though, if you're really struggling that much. That's just like having a terminal illness, even though we don't view it that way.

I 

Brian: recently had a friend, we weren't terrifically close, but we had known each other and stayed largely in contact for 20 years or more recently passed away. And had medical assistance in dying because compounding medical issues left him with a lot of, uh, very poor health and they, and suffering from progressive disorders.

So he wasn't going to get any better. He was going to continue getting worse, and it was already in misery. [00:12:00] And so sought help from maid, and obviously I was heartbroken when I heard this, but I also completely understood and empathized. I can't see any purpose. For myself, it was slightly different. It wasn't a psychological distress, which may be like in my case, catastrophizing.

And did not have to be as severe as I saw it as being. In this instance, it was every medical, any every medical professional you could talk to say, yeah, you're not gonna get any better. This will kill you eventually, it just may not. Anytime soon and your quality of life is going to be nonexistent. In my instance, I couldn't see a way out, but if somebody provided me a lifeline, be like, oh yeah, okay, I'll take [00:13:00] that.

I don't want this to happen. That can be sort of a myth and a, A misunderstanding was suicide in that, oh, that person really wants to die. No, they want an escape from. Pain, either very real and physical or perceived the future pain, which I saw for myself as this miserable, lonely existence where I'm just a burden on people and they'll resent me for it.

That's what I saw, which you know, was probably inaccurate, but that's what I was trying to escape. I didn't want to die. I just. Couldn't see a better alternative. Unfortunately, with this friend of mine, there was no alternative. Uh, I'm not a very good sick person. My life is very full, 

Deb: and when I was going through all the tests to figure out how much damage I had done to myself, I.[00:14:00] 

I said to my doctor, if you're gonna come to me and say I need a colostomy bag, I said, I will not live like that. I watched my dad go through that and I watched my daughter's dad go through that and I won't do that. And I said at that point I would ask Ade, and of course she sits back because. She knows that I am a suicide survivor.

Mm-hmm. So to her it was like, okay, I had found a way to do this that is legal. She and I had a nice long talk about that, and I said, with the work I'm doing and everything that I've put together, that decision would not come lightly. I would have to really get my affairs in order. But I said, by the same token, I will not live like that.

And so things worked out that that drastic measure did not have to be taken. It wasn't nearly as serious as it was presenting itself to be at the time. And you know, the plumbing still gives me some [00:15:00] trouble every now and then, but it's not threatening to change my lifestyle at all at this point. So. My mom, she lived to 75 and she died because she stopped taking her cholesterol medication.

So she died of hardening the arteries. Took three months for it to happen, but that's what took her. And my dad died of colon cancer. He was in remission for two and a half years. He was only 65, so it broke my heart 'cause he worked very hard his whole life and he never had a chance to enjoy. The fortune that he had created in the States and we're in Canada.

Brian and I are both in Canada, so we have this healthcare program, which I don't know, it sounds like they might be messing around and changing, but it's very expensive. And so my dad's fortune went to paying for his medical expenses because he didn't have [00:16:00] insurance. He never bought insurance when he went into business for himself.

Very sad for him, you know? 

Brian: And that was in the us. 

Jill: Yeah. And a lot of people do go bankrupt over medical debt in the United States. I don't see it getting better anytime soon. I was hopeful for a while there that we were gonna follow in Canada's footsteps and a lot of other places around the world that provide much better healthcare support for people.

We're here in the United States. My husband and I are both pretty healthy. We are very aware of the fact that we're one health crisis away from being bankrupt. We would not be able to afford it, and that's really scary. That scares me more than dying. 

Deb: Sure, 

Jill: right. That's a really, I. Weird place to be at, to be like, maybe I would be better off if I just died than going through treatments that will use up all of our savings [00:17:00] and then he'll be left with nothing and I'll still be dead anyway in the end.

Yeah, because a lot of people go through these treatments and still die. It's not like it saves them, they just live a little bit longer. So I, and again, hopefully not gonna have to worry about it anytime soon, but we never know. We don't know what life has in store for us. 

Deb: Right, and this is a very interesting perspective for Brian and I to step into where we are looking at an appropriate application for taking your own life.

I said, this is a real other side of the coin for us because our program is geared towards peer prevention. There's no intervention involved in our program. It's pure prevention. It teaches students starting at age eight. To understand and make good decisions and good choices. It gives a framework for that for students to use so that when they're having certain feelings, they can go to that framework and say, okay, [00:18:00] these feelings, where does that fit into this framework?

Where am I at on this scale? And so it helps them to look towards. Solutions and good decisions rather than catastrophizing, like Brian uses that word, the situation like, oh my God, this is the end of my world. And students and youngsters, I. Their world is a lot shallower. They can't see two, three years ahead of them.

I mean, how can they, they don't have that kind of experience. They're just coming into it. Brian and I thought, we'll take our experience and share it with easy. I wish I'd known that when I was eight or nine years old. Let's give that to the kids of today. You're facing so much more than what we faced in high school.

Brian A. Little bit more than me. He had some real bully situations in high school, 

Brian: and that's something that Deborah and I mentioned too, is that yes, I was bullied, talked down to slandered, maligned, and even physically assaulted. [00:19:00] I was like a year or two outta high school when Columbine happened. 

Jill: Hmm. 

Brian: 96 or 97.

Jill: I can't, uh, actually I think it was 98 because I was a year out of high school when it happened. So I think that was 98. 

Brian: There was a college shooting in Canada back in the 1980s. Uh, a man went in and shot a bunch of students in the province of Quebec. Mm-hmm. That was horrible. We didn't hear about school shootings except for that.

I'm sure they happened, but Columbine was the first major school shooting national news. And you know, not long after that it seemed like there was more, and now they're happening constantly. I was born too late for the atomic bomb, you know, ducking cover underneath your desk in the case of a nuclear strike, and [00:20:00] too early to have these school shooter drills.

Deb: Mm-hmm. 

Brian: Man, I couldn't have dealt with that stress. I had enough stress, you know, is somebody gonna hassle me and people are gonna laugh at me. I mean, with my psyche, that was pretty awful already. But you know, having to worry about one of these guys bringing a gun and shooting up the place. 

Jill: No, I know. And my kids are 11 and 13.

I just heard sirens in town and immediately my brain goes to, oh my God, I hope it's not going to the school. But that is where. My head goes, and every month or so we get an email from the school. We just did the drill that we have to do. Just letting you know. The kids don't even mention it now, except for the one time last year when the alarm went off because something failed in it.

The teachers of course didn't know, and my son came home and was [00:21:00] like, that was the only, like, I was actually scared because you could see on the teacher's faces that this isn't fake. And like that hurts me so much to know that, like you said, I got bullied when I was in sixth grade. Only time I ever really considered taking my own life 'cause I was being bullied so badly that I can't imagine if I was dealing with that and then going to school and having to worry about.

The people doing things like that or just going through those drills regularly, it's so sad that our kids have to experience that. I love the work that you're doing and that you're starting so young, because I think there's probably a lot of people that go, well, eight year olds don't really need this. I was 12 the first time.

I was like, I really would rather die than continue to go to school every day and experience what I, and you're right, it's physical assaults. Verbal assaults every single day. I was tormented. [00:22:00] Deborah mentioned you don't see outside of a year or two. So it's like you're in it and you're thinking, is this gonna be the rest of my life?

I don't want this. If this is the rest of my life and it's not the rest of my life. That experience made me more kind and compassionate to other people. So when I did see people getting bullied, even when I was in high school, by the time I was in high school. I wasn't getting bullied anymore, but I was seeing other people that were, and so I'd always go out of my way to be friendly and make them know somebody cared.

So I wouldn't change that experience now because I know that's part of what made me who I am today. But I can still remember that feeling of coming home every day from school and thinking. I don't wanna go to school tomorrow. I didn't have a phone. I didn't have the access that people have now. Can't even escape it now.

I would just lock myself in my house, but now you can't escape it. It's terrible. So I love that you do this and do you go into schools? How does your program actually work? [00:23:00] How do you work with the kids? How's that whole thing happen? 

Deb: We have absolutely been in the schools. The one I really remember is the Nelson Mandela High School.

They had a mental health day and Brian and I presented our program. At that point, we didn't have the video yet. We were just using the PowerPoint, talking through the program on our main website, which we cannot use in advertising because the title is Let's Render Suicide Extinct. You can't use the word suicide in advertising.

So we have a landing page that says. Survivors of hopelessness, and we chose hopelessness because that's the last domino to fall before someone raises their own hand to their own life. Once you feel hopeless, if you see no other way, and that's what Brian was feeling that morning, he saw no other option.

He purposely did not make eye contact with people as he [00:24:00] walked to the bridge where he was going to and his line. Mm-hmm. Once a person decides, they're determined. What's happening is the Columbine on up is suicide with the homicide side dish. Like they're taking people with them. They're expressing their pain and frustration with others with a gun.

And I was 12 the first time I attempted and failed, and I was 19 the second time, and I almost succeeded at that time. Had a really good doctor, which is the only reason I went forward. Yeah. When we talk about pure prevention, a lot of parents, I'm finding a surprising reaction where they say, I don't wanna talk about suicide with my kids.

It reminds me, you have to realize sex education came into my school when I was in junior high school. This was a big uproar. I was born and raised in Pennsylvania. Yeah, this was a huge [00:25:00] uproar that schools were gonna start talking about this, and the parents are all freaked out and. Now I say to these people, I don't wanna talk about suicide.

My question is, who would you rather I. Your children find out about suicide because don't, they're not going to hear about it because you're not talking about it. I know about sex. By the time I was in junior high school, I didn't hear it from my parents either. It surprises me that we come this far and yet people still keep going around the same circles and reacting the same ways.

It's actually a little bit more than an hour. If you watch the music video at the end. Of instruction and a hard copy workbook. It opens up to an 11 by 17 sheet of paper, so there's lots of room for notes and for students to even draw pictures if they want to. In the video, we say at the top of one of the pages, this is the question we put in, but you can cross that out and write done [00:26:00] what you want.

And the first thing I have them do is number the pages, because that makes it theirs. I didn't know that the page is in the workbook on purpose. So they numbered the page. It's first thing and then it's theirs. They put the numbers in, they put their name in it, and I want them to handle it to handle the 

Brian: information.

Tangibly. What our instructional program is, is trying to give perspective of life and framework for making better decisions, a roadmap of. Where they're gonna face challenges, where they're likely to find success, and the fact that nothing is as constant as change, right? Mm-hmm. Our program is the five stages of intellectual development.

You go from being a newborn baby where you don't know and you don't know that you don't know. You have no concept of what information you're lacking or how to go about finding [00:27:00] that information. Then in stage two, the toddler asking, but why? But why? Why is that? Why is this? Why is that they're seeking information?

I mean, sometimes it gets tiresome, but they're seeking information. They realize there's information they don't have. We don't mean to pick on the teenagers, but that's kind of the age of stage three, where you don't know, but you think you do. You gain a surface level understanding and you think that's.

Pretty much all there is to know because you're underestimating their complexity. You don't have that sense of nuance. Stage four, now you're getting it, but you're understanding isn't clear, but you're succeeding. Mm-hmm. Maybe. Maybe you're succeeding on pure talent. Maybe it's wrote memorization, but you're getting it.

And then stage five, you got it figured out. You know it backwards and forwards. The thing about life is that when you get your first job, your [00:28:00] first relationship, new stage of life, your first child, you rate back at stage one. You don't know and you don't know that you don't know. You have no idea what information you're lacking or how to go about getting it.

You first step onto the job and your boss says, okay. Do you have any experience? No. Do you have any questions? I. Tell me everything because I wouldn't even know what information I need. And then you go through that cycle again and again. But the good thing is that if you keep at it, if you don't give up, you will make progress.

So if you're facing those challenges, like, ah, I thought I had this all figured out, but I. You know, I just realized how clueless I am about the whole thing. That's very frustrating. And if you keep going, you will get to stage four and stage five as long as you apply yourself. So having that information, we were talking before about the, the [00:29:00] young children, you know, my life is ruined.

There's no, there's no hope. I can't live like this. If we can give them that bigger picture view. We want to show them that yes, you are here and you're facing the worst challenges in your life, but if you keep applying yourself, you will get to here. You know, you will continue making progress. You'll get past this if you keep pushing.

If the house is on fire, don't sit there and hope the fire goes away or say, that's it. House is on fire. I'm doomed. Get out. Keep going. Don't stop. 

Jill: That sounds like a really great program. And is it. A nonprofit that you're running or for profit 

Deb: we're. We are partnered with a nonprofit in Florida, gene Suicide Prevention Incorporated, and they've been around as long as we have.

They started in 2020 as well. I did not want to create another nonprofit. We have so many. Rather [00:30:00] than me being another one, I would rather partner with one and be one their main source than a fundraising. That's ideally what I was hoping to do with this program and what we do is donate up to 85% of the proceeds to the nonprofits that are supporting prevention and intervention.

There. It's a fine line between those two. It's difficult to have one without the other. Prevention is really what our program is. It talks about how to reframe and reorganize your perspective, and if you have a 13 and an 11-year-old, I would like to offer the program to you. I'll mail you the hard copies of the books.

Oh, 

Jill: thank you. 

Deb: And the links so that you can show your students and then let me know what they thought. But yeah, we call it intellectual development so that we're not. Muddying the waters with [00:31:00] spiritual or emotional or physical development. We're really talking about the mind. We want to help decision making because ultimately.

Suicide is a decision, and when Brian made his decision, he was pretty determined and so was I. When I woke up in the hospital, I was so angry and I said to myself, I'm gonna get outta here and go do it. He knew that was my attitude and they kept me for 10 days and I worked with a psychiatrist and he was wonderful.

He helped me to understand and appreciate that, uh, the phrase he used was. Some people should never have been. Parent parents were so harsh and cruel. He saw that first thing when he invited them in and my mother wouldn't even come. The psychiatrist saw through that. My dad was just playing games.

Somebody said what they're doing isn't right. That's all it took. By that time, I was 19 and I had been thinking about suicide since I was 12. Had [00:32:00] all that time creating neuro pathways in my brain every time I was challenged. Every time I felt sad or I saw myself failing at something, I wanted to die. I wanted to commit suicide, and that was my escape.

So now I have to fight it. It put me on the other side of it. From 19 to 61, I went to periodic therapy sessions to put a bandaid on the issue and go a couple more months, a couple more years, until finally I had the EMDR therapy, and that's what brought me healing. At 62, I started a whole new life, changed careers and started a whole new life, you know, and put my program together.

Jill: That's so beautiful. I'm so happy that you did. And you mentioned how some parents get stressed, like, I don't wanna talk about this with my kids. It's like they feel like planting that seed. It's frustrating because. I mean, obviously people don't like talk [00:33:00] about death, right? So I come against this kind of mentality all the time of, I don't wanna talk about it, it's too early to talk about it.

But the children are gonna find out about it anyway, and we can talk to them in ways that are age appropriate. And my boss died by suicide, and 

Deb: my 

Jill: children both asked, oh, well how did he die? And I said, well, it was sudden my son very inquisitive, and at the time he was 11. He was like, well, how did he die?

My initial instinct was to lie and to be like, oh, I don't really know, you know, because that is kind of your, I wanna protect my children. But then I thought, no, I need to be honest. And I said, well, he died by suicide. He took his own life and asked how. I said, we're not gonna talk about that. That is not appropriate.

He doesn't need to know the how, but I didn't want him to not know. The truth about it, because again, at that age, I'm sure he knew that suicide was a [00:34:00] thing. It's not like I'm giving him that idea. And then we did have a little bit of a conversation about how it was a surprise to everybody. He was one of those people happy.

Everybody loved him, he loved everybody. So it was shocking to so many people. But yet inside he was. Tormented by his own demons. And I knew him well enough to know some of those, so I wasn't as shocked as other people, but I was still heartbroken of like, why didn't he come to me? Why didn't he come to somebody and just say, I'm really struggling, but we're not gonna get there if we can't allow people to feel safe.

To say I'm having these thoughts, to not have the shames and not have the judgment, to not have all these things that typically come with suicide, so people hold it all in. Where if he would've maybe felt more comfortable stepping out of the manly role, like it's not manly [00:35:00] if you need help, it's so frustrating and I still miss him like every day, and I still wish that he would've made a different decision, but also.

It was his decision and I can't be mad at him and I can't judge him for it. He made the decision that he thought was best at that time. 

Deb: I wanted to make a comment about when Brian was talking about stage four. Mm-hmm. You don't realize that you're doing things possibly out of pure talent. A lot of people in high school that are extremely successful in that arena, the jaw, the brain, they establish themselves to be looked up to by their peers.

They will suffer what's called imposter syndrome. Because when they go out into the world, quite often, especially sports people, they get pushed into it by their coaches and their parents. Everyone's pushing them on and they're doing great, but they don't know [00:36:00] how they're doing. Great is everything around them.

And when that goes away, when you graduate from high school, all that goes away. Now you're on your own and you're either going to university or going to work, or both. In a lot of cases. There's so much new and there's no one there to push you into it. They panic. That's why a lot of young people will resort to that because they're just, they.

They don't wanna disappoint other people. If they find out who I really am, it's not gonna be good. These are the things we talk about. In this program, 

Jill: we are coming up on the end of our time. That went by really fast. Oh, so I do wanna take the last few minutes though, share any last few bits of information that you want, but also give me any links that you want your website.

I'll put it all in the show notes so people could easily find it. But if somebody wants to use your program, work with you or donate to your cause, what's the best way for people to find you and work [00:37:00] with you? 

Deb: Well, our landing page survivors of hopelessness. It's all right there. We're just working on getting our sister company, teen Suicide Prevention Inc.

From Florida on our landing page so that if someone wants to donate for a tax receipt, they can do that through them. Okay. They can donate to Teen Suicide Prevention Society, and further down on that page, you can purchase a bundle, which is the. Actual training video or the instructional video, and you get three PDF workbooks for $50.

That is the whole program. You can go through it at your own pace. You there's musical interludes to, to give you a break in the information that's available on survivors on hopelessness.com. Click on a button to email us directly. 

Brian: Yeah. [00:38:00] And with your child or student or whomever, if you think that an hour and 15 minutes is too much, maybe you as the parent can't take that much time out.

What in one sitting, you can do stage one and stage two come back. Is it still $50 Canadian, Deb? Yes. It's. Even less than that. If you are paying in US dollars and it converts for you, 

Deb: don't 

Jill: take 

Deb: a letter number when you check out. 

Jill: Would it be good for a teacher? Is it good for parents to maybe just do with their kids?

It's kind of like a broad use that you could use a variety of different ways with an adult and children doing the work themselves. 

Deb: Yes, we have parent teacher workbooks and student workbooks. When I sent out the package, you get one parent teacher workbook and two student workbooks. Okay? I would be sending you those three hard copies in the mail for you to use.

[00:39:00] When you download the PDFs, they print off onto an eight and a half by 11 sheet of paper, so you would have a stack and you'd have to put them side by side. It's easy to see which ones. Go next to each other when you print it off on an eight and a half by 11. Or you can order board copy workbooks on our website.

Jill: Then if somebody wanted to do a Zoom with the two of you, that's an option as well. If I'm a teacher and I'm like, Hey, I wanna actually have Brian and Deborah present to my students, that's an option. Yeah. At the bottom you can click reach out, 

Deb: that's the button, and you click on there. You can email us directly.

Brian: I can be found on Facebook and Twitter. Brian Wardell. I am the i Byron on Instagram. There's the option to email through the website. Please contact me. 

Jill: I'll put links in there. People can just like go on to the show notes, [00:40:00] click the links. Easy to find you. Thank you so much Brian and Deborah. This has been wonderful.

I really appreciate the work that you're doing because it is needed and I'm sure there's gonna be so many people that you're gonna change their life and you might not ever know it, but I guarantee it is happening. 

Brian: Thank you, Jill, for having us. 

Jill: In my next episode, healer and Death Priestess, Kris Beth Ingold shares her journey into death work, blending spiritual insight with practical support for the dying and their loved ones.

Drawing from her background in energy medicine, astrology, ancestral healing, and Hawaiian Lomi Lomi massage. Krista Beth explains how she supports people through transitions with compassion and ceremony. She opens up about the deep connection between grief, forgiveness, and physical health, and how unprocessed pain can become illness if left unhealed.

Krista Beth also shares how she's reclaiming ancient death practices, breaking down cultural [00:41:00] systems that disconnect us from dying, guiding souls as they crossover, working with ancestral and past life. Patterns and encouraging us all to live and die with more intention. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend or family member who might find it interesting.

Your support in spreading the podcast is greatly appreciated. Please consider subscribing on your favorite podcast platform and leaving a five star review. Your positive feedback helps recommend the podcast to others. The podcast also offers a paid subscription feature that allows you to financially support the show.

Your contribution will help keep. The podcast advertisement free. Whether your donation is large or small, every amount is valuable. I sincerely appreciate all of you for listening to the show and supporting me in any way you can. You can find a link in the show notes to subscribe to the paid monthly subscription, as well as a link to my Venmo if you prefer to make a one-time contribution.

Thank you and I look forward to seeing you in next week's episode of Seeing Death. [00:42:00] Clearly.