Today we’d like to introduce you to Christina Stiverson.
Hi Christina, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
For most of my life, I believed I could figure almost anything out if I worked hard enough. I grew up an eternal optimist. I liked having a plan, I loved certainty, and I was extremely stubborn when I decided I was going to do something. More than 20 years in the military probably reinforced a lot of that in me. I believed that if I prepared enough, cared enough, and refused to quit, I could find a way through almost anything.
Then my three-year-old daughter, Addie, was diagnosed with a rare pediatric liver cancer, and I couldn’t fix it.
There are a lot of ways I could tell the story of how I got from there to the person I have become today, but I think most of it comes down to learning what to do when life gives you something you can’t fix. Addie was a little girl with an enormous personality and a contagious smile who taught me more about living in 3 years and 17 days than I had learned in all the years before her… and then there was the day she died.
For a long time, I thought of that day as the worst day of my life. How could I not? After Addie died, I did what I think a lot of us do when something happens that we do not know how to process… I just kept going. I went back to my military work and I kept being a mom to Addie’s younger sister. Then, nearly a year after Addie passed away, we adopted our youngest daughter. I felt real joy in that moment, and then just continued to function. From the outside, I probably looked pretty strong.
But functioning and living are not the same thing.
At some point, I realized I had become a spectator in my own life. I could see the beautiful life happening around me. I loved my family and was so grateful for my daughters who were still here with me. And yet, I was having a hard time authentically being there for it. My body had done an incredible job of protecting me from the pain that was simply too much to process all at once, and the numbness that had protected me also kept me from fully feeling everything else.
I didn’t want to miss my life. And I especially didn’t want to miss my girls growing up!
So, I started doing the much harder work of reflecting on the past. One of the most transformational things I did was revisit the day Addie died… not once, but many times. I had spent years seeing that day almost exclusively through the lens of what I had lost. Eventually, I challenged myself to look for something deeper.
What I found truly inspired me. I saw my extraordinary courage in facing the thing I feared most in the world. I saw myself giving Addie what she needed from me even though it broke my heart at the time. And I expressed my eternal love even when that could not change the outcome.
I transformed the way I understood myself on that day. That day I had spent years wishing I could erase became the proudest moment of my life, not because of what happened, but because of who I was for my daughter when it happened. I found the courage to do something I didn’t think was possible, to help Addie die peacefully at home. That was a beautiful gift the hospice nurses gave me that I could not give to myself, and that changed something in me.
Later, I took a class about death. By that point I had spent years thinking about Addie’s death and how to build her legacy, but this class asked me to think about my own death and legacy. The class was extremely uncomfortable, but it also led to the most freedom I have ever felt.
I used to think legacy was what people said about you after you died. Now, I realize my girls and the people I love are experiencing mine in real time. My life is about family dinners, challenging myself through personal growth, and not waiting for the right time to do everything. For me, there was a strange clarity that came with accepting that I am going to die. Death is the only guarantee in life, and somehow that awareness made me want to live more!
That realization has shaped so much of what I have built since then. I wrote my book, I Carry You: From Unimaginable Loss to Rewritten Grief, Find the Life Waiting for You, to tell Addie’s story and my own story of grief. I developed my REWRITE framework and the workshops I teach now around grief and intentional living because I want to guide other people in understanding something that took me years to learn… you cannot simply wait for the pain to disappear before you start living again.
I am still Addie’s mom, and I always will be. I can still hold her close to my heart but also live an exceptional life filled with joy. Those two things are allowed to exist together, and she would want that for me.
Today, my work is less about teaching people how to “get over” loss and much more about helping them become the heroes of their own stories and figure out what really matters. I ask people the same question that I heard in a workshop that completely changed my perspective… What do I value more than my pain?
Well, I value my family more than I do a life of pain and suffering from Addie’s death. I value being present with my girls more. And I value the life I am still fortunate enough to be living, which is what changed everything for me. Addie will always be part of my life. I do not have to leave her behind in order to move forward.
And I believe that is how I got here. Not by time or chance, but by doing the hard transformational work and learning how to carry Addie’s memory with me while choosing, again and again, to participate fully in my own life.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
After Addie died, I tried to approach grief the way I had approached so many other hard things in my life. I wanted to figure it out. I wanted to do grief correctly. I wanted to know what I needed to do, follow the steps, and get from where I was to whatever “healed” meant.
It turns out grief does not care about your plan.
I also had to learn that everyone in my family was going to grieve differently. My husband’s grief almost never looked like mine, and my daughters had their own ways of grieving too. There is no timeline or correct way to experience grief. I could not fix or take away their grief either and that was excruciatingly hard for me.
Maybe one of the hardest things I learned was that strength was not going to mean what it used to mean. My definition of strength got much less impressive. Some days it meant getting out of bed. Other days it meant not trying to fix my husband’s grief just because it seemed opposite of mine. It also meant letting myself have a genuinely great day without apologizing to anyone for it.
That last one took time… several years, in fact. There can be this strange fearful feeling after someone you love dies that moving forward means you are forgetting them. If I laughed too much, enjoyed my life too much, or became someone new, was I somehow leaving Addie behind?
I eventually realized the opposite was true. I did not want to honor Addie by disappearing from my own life. I did not want to honor the daughter I lost by being unavailable to the daughters who were still here. I had heard that story too many times and was not going to accept that way of living for me. My family deserved someone who was fully present for their lives. And I had to believe that I deserved to experience my own life too.
That meant doing something that still does not come naturally to me… living without guarantees! Grief shattered my illusion of certainty that I loved so much. I know now, in a way I wish I did not, that tragic things can happen even when you have done everything right.
So, here is the surprising part. Accepting that has given me more peace and freedom, not less. I spent so much of my life believing certainty would make me feel safe. Now I understand that true certainty for most things was never really available to me, or to any of us.
At this point in my life, I truly feel blessed that I can say… I feel more grateful for the time that I had with Addie than for the time I did not have with her, and I do feel certain about that.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about Graduate Grief LLC?
I teach people how to live more intentionally. I use what I learned through loss, leadership, and life to help people get clear about what really matters and actually live it!
Christina Stiverson
Transformational wellness educator | military veteran | best-selling author
Is there a quality that you most attribute to your success?
If you had asked me this question years ago, I probably would have given you a very respectable answer… hard work, discipline, leadership and perseverance. Those things have absolutely mattered in my life. But today my answer is a little less polished, and sometimes hard to admit.
It’s my stubbornness.
I have always been stubborn. In fact, I have joked that my stubbornness used to look like ignorance, but now I think it looks like optimism. The times that I refused to give up have defined me and made me who I am today. Younger me sometimes believed that if I just tried hard enough, I could force life to cooperate. I could make the plan work, solve the problem, or achieve the goal.
My optimism today is not a form of toxic positivity. It’s much more stubborn. It’s the thought that when life does not give me the outcome I think I want, I still believe my life is happening for me, not to me, and I just need to figure out how.
The other quality that has become incredibly important to me is courage. I used to think courage belonged to big moments like military service, emergencies, standing up for something important, or doing something extraordinary. Now I think most courage is much quieter.
I believe courage is doing something when you do not know how it is going to turn out, when you are scared to death, and especially when you think it’s not even possible. And for someone who really, really likes certainty, that has been one of my greatest lessons.
Courage has looked wildly different in various seasons of my life. One time it was going back into the memory of the day Addie died instead of numbing it. Another time it was retiring from the military and discovering who I was without a uniform. And recently it was sharing my story in a book and being vulnerable about my struggles knowing anyone could judge them.
My definition of success has changed because of all of this. Success used to look a lot like achievement… a great family, being a good mom, serving my country, doing work I was proud of, and reaching the next goal. I still value all of those things.
However, now I think success is much more about growth and gratitude. It’s being grateful for the failures that give me another opportunity to learn. It’s growing as a wife and mother instead of expecting myself to have those roles figured out. It’s doing work that feels connected to my purpose. It’s also helping other people while still remembering to enjoy my own life. I have dreams right now that sometimes feel ridiculously bigger than me, and younger me would have needed proof that they were possible before she jumped, but now I’m learning to jump without proof and care less about what people think.
Maybe that is what stubbornness and courage look like when you put them together. I stubbornly believe there is more life to live, and I am willing to be scared while I live it.
I do not know exactly what my legacy will be someday. But I know I am creating it right now in the way I mother my girls, in the work I do, and in the way I choose to show up for a life I know is not guaranteed.
That is probably the biggest thing I hope someone takes from my story. You do not have to experience the death of someone you love to start thinking about how you are living. You do not need a tragedy, a retirement, or some other life-altering event to give you permission to change something right now.
So, you can start by asking yourself what you value more than your pain, and then what you are waiting for. Then, ask yourself what your life is teaching the people you love about what matters to you, and that will become your legacy.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.graduategrief.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christina-stiverson-9343842a0/
