When Tragedy Strikes

TRIGGER WARNING: A planned vacation turns into a life-altering emergency, and I end up recording from my son’s couch with no outline, no studio, and no easy answers. What I do have is the truth: our family was met with a sudden tragedy tied to a swatting incident, followed by a police shooting, and we are now living in the long aftermath of trauma, medical crisis, and a new reality that includes paralysis and rehab. 

I talk through what it feels like when the ground drops out from under you, and you cannot rewind the moment. There is the heartbreak and anger, but there is also the strange survival mode where your brain clings to logistics: who to call, how to travel back and forth, how to support family, how to handle medical bills, and how to keep showing up for what’s in front of you. I also sit with a question that so many of us face in different ways: what do we do when trauma is unfolding right in front of us, and we cannot stop it? 

What keeps me steady is what I witnessed firsthand: pain and joy existing in the same room. A smile. A birthday. A person still reaching for life. That pulls me back to the simplest kind of resilience and trauma recovery I know how to practice right now: live today, focus on what I can control, let go of what I cannot, and look for small moments of joy in the present. 

If you feel led, I share a transparent way to support our family financially via Venmo, and I ask for prayer. If you’ve ever felt like freedom was being stripped away, I hope you’ll hear this as a hand on your shoulder. Subscribe, share this with someone who needs it, and leave a review so more people can find these real stories of recovery.

https://venmo.com/u/Jwls220

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Transcript

Welcome To A New Season

Heather 0:02

Hello friends and welcome back to The Free Advantage. I'm your host, Heather Davis, and I want to invite you into a new season of Real Stories, Real Recovery, and Real Freedom. This show has always been about self-discovery, authenticity, and recovering a life of freedom. And this year, we are taking that journey together in a deeper way. You're gonna hear raw, honest conversations with people walking this path in real time. Stories of growth, healing, purpose, and becoming whole. You'll also hear from me as I reflect on these themes that rise from the stories, answer your questions, and offer small, meaningful takeaways that you can carry back into your week. This is not just a podcast you listen to. It's a place you belong where you are part of the conversation. Hello everyone. This episode is gonna be a little different from what you're used to. Um it's a little different than what I'm used to. I am, if you can tell, I'm not in my regular environment. I am actually traveling at the moment, and this was not planned. Um I think on since the beginning, I have strived to be extremely authentic and extremely vulnerable with everybody lending to my life and sharing that here with you. And I really would, as much as there are things I don't want to share, sometimes I would be remiss if I didn't, especially in the space that I've created here. Um for the past month, yeah, about with the past month or so, a little over a month, I have been traveling a lot. Um, the previous episodes you've heard for the past like four weeks have were were prerecorded because I was out of town. Um I had scheduled a vacation. My husband and I had scheduled a vacation with our son in Arizona, and we were very excited for that trip and to go see him and spend time. But when we arrived, we uh it was as soon as we got off the airplane, we were met with a family tragedy. It was not something that was expected. It was as a lot of tragedies are, um, it was shock. It was a shock. And um on my husband's side of the family, his brother-in-law had been um, this is this and this is very difficult for me to share. Uh, the this has completely changed my life in a lot of ways and how I think and how I view things and how I feel about things. But his brother-in-law had been involved in a swatting incident. And um, for those of you who do not know what that is, I'm sure you can go Google it and look it up. But um, a swatting incident is where somebody calls in a false police call to your residence, um, basically saying that something terrible is happening, um, and it invokes a strong police force to show up. And that had happened to my son's brother-in-law, and he's very young, he's in his early 20s, and he had been basically over the course of a couple of days, had been trying to be exploited by a group who was trying to hack him and trying to basically steal his information and exploit him for various reasons that this group does. This was not a typical swatting incident where you see like kind of gamers get involved and things like that, and where you see it's like a prank gone wrong or something like that. It was a little bit different situation. And in the course of that call that had happened, um his brother-in-law ended up being ended up being shot by police. Um this was this had happened the morning that we had actually gone on the airplane to come visit my son. And when by the time that we had we had gotten here, um, he was already in the hospital in surgery, and everybody was just trying to figure out what to do and what was happening and and what had happened exactly. And it was a little bit chaos. We ended up extending our trip, what you know, what was supposed to be a vacation turned into just pure chaos and trying to grab, uh grab, grab, grab, grasp the um concept of what had just happened. It um there's a lot of moving parts um that I won't discuss here because there is an active investigation going on. So um things that I can't talk about, but this has really turned our family upside down. And it came on um, you know, obviously it came on very suddenly. Um there were a lot of other plans involved. I had at the end of April, I was actually moving my youngest son from Florida back to Texas. So I've basically, my husband and I have been since the beginning of April till now. We have been from Arizona to Texas to Florida, back to Texas, and now back to Arizona, um, doing our best to be able to be a support as best we can for the family here and um, you know, and to still trying to take care of the things that we have committed to and have obligations to elsewhere. So in the midst of all of this, I have been really, you know, grasping, I've been grappling with the idea of what to do, what to do here in this space and what to do with my podcast. And do I put it on hold? Do I stop? Do I continue? What does that look like if I do, you know, some of the ideas that I had for this year and was to continue to have on guests, which I have some guests lined up and have, but I'm have had to cancel those because I'm not in a space to be interviewing other people right now, nor do I have the right setup. I'm literally sitting on my son's couch holding this microphone in my hand. And so, but not only for myself, but for you, but with the encouragement of other others and the people in my family and my friends and and the outpouring of my clients is to continue on and doing the best that I can. And the and and the best that I can is to share my truth, is to share the nature of what is going on. And, you know, it's brought me to this place where, you know, it helps me. It helps me to work through my own, my own feelings about all the things that are happening. But it's begged this question over the past month where we've really been dealing with this, and now we're coming back to help and support because there's so many things that are going on um uh with my son's brother-in-law medically. Um, you know, he he's he's got a lot of things happening in in his body physically that we are hoping that are going to be healed and taken care of. And um he's become paralyzed. And now this is a lot of things that like we're looking into how we handle the next steps. And and I'm finding that when when these kinds of things happen, when these kinds of things strike us, like it's not just it's not just I it's made me think a lot about trauma and how we work, you know, when you think about mental and emotional trauma and then watching something like this happen and watching it literally, it's transpiring right before my eyes, watching the trauma happen, and there's nothing you can do to stop it. And you know that this is going to affect so many people for the rest of their lives, and there's nothing you can do. There's nothing you can do to take it back. You can't, you can't pretend like it isn't happening. What do we do in these moments? What do we do in these moments? Not only when we are the ones that are like it's happening to us, but what do we do as we're the bystanders and how do we handle those kinds of situations? I I'm in my own space and looking at it and going, here's what's just what I know to do. These are the logistics of what's happened, who to call, how to take care of things, where we look for the funds to be even even to be able to take care of what is going on, the medical bills, the the living arrangements, the all of the different things, the traveling, the everything that is going on, how do you do that? You know, it's logistics in my mind. That's what I take care of. Take care of all the things that I do know how to do. And and I, you know, I don't, I may be rambling a little, but it's just kind of where I'm at, right? Because my mind is racing with all the thoughts that are going on. But but how do we, how do we move forward when we're struck with such tragedy that it literally stops everything in our lives? And the ripple effect that it was going to have on the rest of our lives. And I've been sitting with that thought for weeks, for weeks now. I literally just got back from visiting him in his rehabilitation center. And as I sat there with him tonight, watching him deal with the pain that he's under, watching him still smile, watching him prepare to celebrate his birthday tomorrow, um, you know, the sadness that overwhelms me, the grief that overcomes me. But watching how, in spite of the tragic parts of life, how we still move forward. And seeing him still smile, seeing him still have little parts of joy where he can find it, him still reaching for life. And he's a couple of hours away from where we're at here, and staying with my son, and like we're making that drive back and forth. I had a lot of time to reflect on that before I came on here tonight. And what is that low for what does that look like for all of us? Because we can't we can't negate everything that happens. We can't negate everything bad, we can't negate everything that that is a big risk in our lives. We can't negate the the tragic moments that are happening to us, the things that come against us. We can't negate everything. And, you know, I talk a lot about the uncertainty of life here and how we have to continue on, right? We have to, you know, life is a risky path that we're on. It is risky. And sometimes it's risks that we take, and there's risks that we we don't take, right? Sometimes things just happen and there's nothing we can do about it. But watching him tonight still grasping for life, grabbing a hold of what he can, it inspired me to even in the lack of understanding that I have of the situation, the um the anger that I feel, the betrayal that I feel, the trust that I feel like I have lost for certain for certain things, is that that life is still so important and to focus on that, to focus on on living today. And tomorrow may be hard. Tomorrow may not come. But today, right now, in this moment, I have the choice to live. Whether I am struck with pain, whether I have been struck by tragedy, whether I know what tomorrow holds, or whether I know what the next moment may hold, is that I focus on what I can control. I let go of what I can't, and I find as much joy in the moment that I can. And I live. And if that's just being an extra body to go grab food, to offer support, to offer a hug, to offer to help clean up, to offer to do whatever it is that would just take the load off of someone else while they're trying to navigate that's what I want to do. Um this is for me another thing that I want to do, I want to offer, and if anybody feels led to, do. If you're not, don't by any means. But I will put up my Venmo. Um, and this is a full transparency thing. So if you want to donate um to this family who is in dire need of funds for multiple things, like the road is long and it will require millions to be able to continue to well, for him to just continue to live his life um then I'm gonna put up my Venmo and you can Venmo me a dollar, you can Venmo me anything you want, or you can Venmo nothing. And if anything, please be praying. Please be praying. Um I chose to do Venmo instead of GoFundMe. Um, there are so many options out there I know, but because of the amount of money that these companies take from you, I want every penny that can absolutely go to them to go to them. So um, and I can give you a full ledger of what is sent and what is where it is um given and who I've given it to. Um but either way, if you feel led, you do. If you don't, you don't. And if you do, I appreciate it more than anything in this world. Um because that's what we're here for. You know, to be a community and to unite to help one another. And you know I I feel strange because this is not a typical podcast for me. This is not a typical, like I don't know. There's you know, I had no plan on what to say or what to do. There's no outline to follow. And sometimes life's just that way. And everything looks unclear and unsteady, and and um I just keep looking forward and putting my hands to what's in front of me to do, and that's what I'm doing. I hope that you all stick with me through this. Um as I continue on, I will be here for a while. My husband and I are um kind of here stationed in an air mattress in my son's office um until the foreseeable future, until we know that there's nothing more we can do or we're not needed anymore in that in this time. But there will be more to come. I'll be able to share more about what's happened and um what you could do to help. And uh thank you. Thank you for letting me get on here. Thank you for listening, and thank you for letting me just kind of share where I'm at and what's going on. And um, I look forward to one day getting back to, you know, my regularly scheduled programming or not. You know, I don't know. Everything happens for a reason, and in in the ripple effect of things that do occur may be leading us down a different and better road in the future. So thank you. And I I just want you all to know that I know I'm not the only one. I know our family isn't the only one who is going through things like this, who are struggling with tragedy, who are struck with something terrible that's happening to them and and not knowing how to navigate it and how to continue moving forward. And I want you to know that you're not alone. We're out here. We're all out here struggling together. And I'm praying for you all. And I hope you'll do the same for me. And in this moment and in this time, I want you all to remember that freedom is the advantage we already own. Even when we feel like it's being stripped away from us. It is ours to grab a hold of. And in those moments when all you can do is breathe and look for the joy in the small moments you have right now and continue to live. I'll see you guys next week.