Episode 201 | The Grief Series
There is a specific kind of grief that nobody prepares you for. Not the grief of a sudden loss, not the grief of a long illness you could see coming from years away, but the grief of watching your parent disappear over six weeks while your newborn is strapped to your chest && your inbox is still full && the world outside the hospital doors keeps moving like nothing is happening.
That’s where Cait Howard’s story starts. And it doesn’t get easier from there. It gets more complicated, more layered, && ultimately more human than almost anything I’ve heard in this entire series.
Two Parents. Five Years Apart. One Day Before the Anniversary.
Cait lost her father-in-law to pancreatic cancer in the first year of her marriage. Six weeks from diagnosis to gone.
Then on Thanksgiving evening, with a six-week-old daughter strapped to her chest, she got the call. Her dad had fallen. They’d found a tumor. By January, he was gone too. Glioblastoma, inoperable, in the center of his brain. Six weeks again.
She had three more daughters. She built a business. She kept going.
And then at the end of 2024, her mom started seeing double. Vision issues, vertigo, a trip to the ER that revealed a tumor at the base of her brain stem && primary lung cancer that had already spread. Cait became her primary caregiver while raising three little girls && running a business with her husband. Her mom passed in January 2025, one day before the five-year anniversary of her dad’s death.
She told me she jokes that at least they coordinated it so she could get all the grief out at once. That’s the kind of humor you develop when the alternative is falling apart.
The Thing About Keeping It All Moving
I asked Cait what it was actually like to keep showing up for her business && her kids while she was inside all of this. And she said something I haven’t stopped thinking about.
She described leaving the hospital && walking into a grocery store. Normal people doing normal things. And the absolute surreal quality of existing in both worlds at the same time. The world where your dad is in the ICU && the world where someone needs milk.
She also told me that when her dad was sick, she came out to her car one day && found it had been broken into. Purse stolen. Right there in the hospital parking lot.
Really? she thought. Really.
That’s grief. Not just the loss itself, but every ordinary demand that refuses to pause for it.
What she said saved her was the nature of her business model. She’s built deeply personal relationships with her clients, which meant she could be honest. She could say: this is happening, I may be slower, I’m so sorry. And her clients showed up for her. That transparency, she said, was one of the greatest gifts of entrepreneurship in that season && also the thing that made it impossible to fully step away.
What She Did Differently the Second Time
Here’s what I found most powerful in this conversation. Between losing her dad && losing her mom, Cait did some work.
Not traditional therapy, though she’d done that. Subconscious work. A six-session framework built around identifying && releasing stuck emotions using time techniques, EFT, && hypnotherapy. She went in initially because her business had hit a ceiling && she couldn’t figure out why. She had everything she needed to move forward. She just wasn’t moving.
What she found underneath was a whole lot she hadn’t processed.
She did that work the summer before her mom got sick. And when her mom’s diagnosis came, she noticed something different in herself. Fear wasn’t running the show the way it had before. She was more present. She could be there with her mom from a place of awareness rather than panic. She started using the tools she’d learned instinctively, without even planning to.
She told me she handled her mom’s death && the season around it in a fundamentally different way than her dad’s. More capacity. More groundedness. Not because it hurt less, but because she had built something inside herself that could hold it.
That’s not a small thing. That’s the whole argument for doing the work before you think you need it.
Big G Grief && Little G Grief
Cait said something in this conversation that I want to make sure lands for you, because it’s something I believe deeply && don’t think we talk about enough.
She talked about Big G grief && little G grief.
Big G is the obvious stuff. The death, the diagnosis, the loss you can name && point to. Little G is everything else. The things that shift or disappear or change shape without anyone calling it grief. The relationship that drifted. The version of yourself you left behind in a season. The way your mom stopped being who she used to be years before she died.
Cait noted that Big G grief tends to have predictable triggers. For her, it’s November through January, every year. Her body relives it. She’s learned to plan for that window now, to protect herself during it, to get out of her normal environment && give herself more space.
Little G grief hits without warning. It shows up in a song or a photo or a moment you didn’t see coming, && it knocks you flat in the middle of a Tuesday. Both deserve to be processed. Both are grief. && both are allowed.
The Six-Week-Old Baby && the Caregiver Guilt
I want to spend a moment here because I think this particular experience is more common than anyone admits.
Cait was on maternity leave from her corporate job when her dad got sick. She was able to be at the hospital, all day, every day, for those weeks when he was still coherent && communicative, with her newborn strapped to her when her daughter was just an infant she could carry anywhere. She described that timing as a gift, knowing that a few months later she would have been locked out of the hospital entirely.
But with her mom, five years later, she had three little girls who needed her. And the guilt of that pull in both directions, her mom needs me, they need me, she described it as something only grace could hold. Being where she was. Fully there with her mom when she was there, fully there with her girls when she was with them. Minute by minute.
She also talked about what it was like to watch her daughters meet their grandmother during those final months. Six months before the diagnosis, her mom had started showing up once a week to cook dinner. Out of nowhere. No explanation. Just: I’ll come over, I’ll bring the ingredients, I’ll cook.
For a woman who had never been a particularly warm or involved grandmother, who had pulled away after Cait’s dad died && never fully come back, this was a shift. && it became the thing that let Cait’s girls actually know her. That gave her mom && her daughters real time together. That quietly mended a relationship that had grown distant.
Cait looked back on it && said: I think it happened on purpose.
I believe her.
Running a Business With Your Husband Through All of It
There’s one more layer to this story that I think ambitious women need to hear, because it’s the layer most of us don’t talk about.
Cait’s husband Philip has a background in audio engineering && creative production. He joined her business to support her. It’s her business, her vision, her clients. He shows up for all of it because he chose to && because it supports their family. But it’s not his dream. He’d be working on crime podcasts if he could choose.
Cait knows this. They talk about it. They’re building toward a version of the business that eventually creates space for him to explore what he actually wants. But in the meantime, during the season of her mom’s illness, he was already giving everything to her in the business && then being asked to give more of himself at home && in holding her through the grief.
He told her, after it was over: that was really hard. That was a lot.
She said: the only thing that kept it from breaking them was a commitment to keeping business separate from marriage when they could, && staying in honest communication when they couldn’t.
That’s not a clean answer. It’s just the real one.
“Grief doesn’t have an endpoint. It has seasons. Allow it to look like yours.”
If you are in a season of parental loss right now, or caregiving, or watching someone you love get a diagnosis you weren’t ready for, this episode is for you. You don’t have to have it processed. You don’t have to be okay. You just have to keep being where you are.
Find Cait on Instagram at @heycaithoward && at amplifyboutique.com. If you’re a podcaster or thinking about starting a podcast, she is the person.
This is The Grief Series. Listen now!
xx, Ash 🖤
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