Existing vs. Living: A Mother's Journey Back to the World

About this episode

Dianette Wells shares her journey of navigating grief after the loss of her son and finding a way to live again.

There is a version of grief that nobody warns you about. It is not the loud kind. It is the quiet kind, the one that creeps in slowly until one day you are walking your dogs on a trail you love and you realize you no longer feel connected to the ground beneath your feet. That moment, as small and ordinary as it sounds, was the one that changed everything for Dianette Wells. Dianette has lived her life reaching toward something higher. She grew up in flat Southern California, looking at snow-capped mountains from her backyard and knowing, in the way some people just know, that she was meant for something beyond what she had been handed. That instinct led her to Mount Whitney, to Kilimanjaro, to all seven summits, and eventually to ultramarathons across the world. Movement was not just her passion. It was her language, her therapy, her way of sorting through whatever life threw at her. And then her son Johnny died. He was 23. He was a wingsuit pilot and a base jumper and the kind of person who had climbed the seven summits before he was legally allowed to do most of the things he loved. His death stripped the sparkle from the world for a long time. And Dianette had to find her way…

People in this episode

Host: Matt Gilhooly

Guest: Dianette Wells

Topics covered

• grief
• loss
• adventure
• personal journey
• motherhood
• resilience

Keywords

• grief
• loss of a child
• adventure
• Mount Whitney
• ultramarathons
• resilience
• mother's journey

Mentioned in this episode

Places: Southern California, Mount Whitney, Kilimanjaro

More episodes of The Life Shift | Conversations About Life Before and After

• Start Here: What Is The Life Shift? · June 12, 2026 · 1 min
• Resilience After Amputation: Rebuilding Life From the Ground Up · June 10, 2026 · 1h 1m
• Lemon-Sized Brain Tumor: The Life That Grew After Surgery · June 7, 2026 · 1h 2m
• How Misha Brown Got Sober and Learned to Be His Own Best Friend · June 3, 2026 · 1h 6m
• Under the Surface: The Shark Attack That Taught Tim Thomas to Trust · May 31, 2026 · 1h 6m
• What Happened to You: Breaking the Cycle Sixty Years in the Making · May 27, 2026 · 56 min