About this episode

Stephen Panus shares his journey of grief and survival after the loss of his son, exploring the complexities of mourning and forgiveness.

There is a particular kind of grief that does not announce itself. It arrives in the middle of an ordinary drive, through a phone ringing on a Sunday afternoon, in the voice of a stranger delivering news your brain simply refuses to hold. If you have ever felt the world keep moving while you were standing completely still, this episode will find you. Stephen Panus lost his 16-year-old son Jake in August 2020, on a weekend trip that started with a peace sign from the driveway and ended in a parking lot, screaming to the sky. What followed was not a clean journey through stages. It was survival. One hour, then one day. The weight of holding a family together when you could barely hold yourself. The rage that comes when someone else’s carelessness takes everything. And the strange, hard-won realization that forgiveness was not about letting anyone off the hook. It was about releasing himself. In this conversation, Stephen talks about what grief actually does to a body, a marriage, a family. How his wife and son experienced the same loss and walked entirely different paths through it. How the Jake Panus Walk On Scholarship grew from a house full of flowers into something that keeps…

People in this episode

Host: Matt Gilhooly

Guest: Stephen Panus

Topics covered

• grief
• loss
• forgiveness
• family
• survival
• scholarship

Keywords

• grief
• loss of a child
• forgiveness
• family dynamics
• survival
• scholarship
• emotional pain

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