Beyond Goodbye is a podcast that explores dying, death, and grief and therefore may contain
sensitive or distressing material that could be triggering for some individuals and is
not suitable for all listeners.
Therefore, listener discretion is advised.
Hello and welcome to Beyond Goodbye, a show that empowers listeners to engage with death
and grief in a healthy and transformative way.
My name is Angela Sturm and I am your host as well as the Creatrix of Beyond Goodbye.
Our focus in this episode will be around defining grief versus grieving and what each looks
like.
But first we begin with a real life story of loss and the story we have for you today
is about four bodies dumped in a cornfield, two of which were my children and the siblings
of my guest who happens to be my son, Zachary Pettis.
This is our story in our first episode titled Bodies in a Cornfield.
I'm sure some of you may have heard or read about a SUV found by a farm hand dumped in
a cornfield in Dunn County, Wisconsin two years ago.
When the farm hand looked inside the vehicle he found four deceased people, two men and
two women.
Two of those victims were my children, Jasmine Sturm and Matthew Pettis.
The other two victims were Jasmine's longtime friend, Natasha Fluke Presley and Jasmine's
boyfriend, Lois Foreman.
All four had been shot in the head but Matt and Lois had been shot twice in the head.
They had a suspect, Antoine Suggs, who later turned himself in after fleeing to Arizona.
In 2023 Antoine was found guilty of murder and currently is serving a hundred plus year
sentence in prison.
Back in 2021 when I first learned Jasmine and Matt were missing, it was a Sunday and
I was watching football.
My Tasha's aunt had called me and asked if I knew where the girls were because Tasha
was missing.
So I knew that Jasmine had to work that evening as did Matt.
They worked at the same place on the weekends.
So I gave her workplace a call and neither of them had shown up for work which was unusual.
So I called to a couple friends and then finally called her son, my grandson and he was upset
and said that they hadn't come home.
He never called us.
So I called Tasha's aunt back and we decided to make phone calls to the police stations,
hospitals, you know just to kind of see if maybe they got on accident because you don't
ever think that someone you love or anyone, your friend, family, you don't think something
like murder happens to them.
We couldn't find them.
They weren't in any hospitals.
They weren't in any jails.
And very late in that evening, Tasha's aunt called me back again and said that a Dunn
County detective had called her and was talking to her about some vehicle they had found and
that she thought that they were all dead.
Now my head, my mind at the time was like, there's no way they're dead.
They're just, I was mad because I was thinking their phones had turned off and they were
just somewhere.
So I told her that not possible.
They're not dead.
But then after a couple of hours, it's late now.
It's we're into early Monday morning.
I decided to give Dunn County a call.
I wanted to call the coroner's office and ask if they had bodies brought in.
So I called, asked that I was put on hold for a very long time and they had transferred
me to a Dunn County detective.
It sounded like he was outside and in retrospect, it turned out he was at the crime scene.
But at the time, I didn't know that.
And as we were talking, I told him who I was and I asked him if there were deceased bodies
there and if two of them were my children.
He had told me he couldn't tell me what they had or identify anyone.
But he then asked me if I had the passwords to Matthew and Jasmine's cell phones.
And then I knew that they were dead.
After I got off the phone with them, I called my dad.
I was sitting outside in my driveway and I told him they were dead, that they had been
murdered.
I think he yelled or screamed.
I don't remember a lot of it.
I don't even remember crying.
I went back into the house and I kind of sat in the dark.
Zach was living with me at the time and he was getting up to get ready for work.
And I told him that they were found and that they were murdered and he just looked at me,
turned around and got in the shower, got dressed and he went to work.
Yeah.
So my Sunday was when they were kind of missing.
I was at the gym the morning of.
And I was reaching out to Jasmine, I had borrowed her just a couple of dollars the night before.
And I was reaching out to her saying, Hey, can you pay me back now?
Whatever.
She was a server.
So she made cash tips and she was going to pay me back the next day.
And she wasn't responding.
And I was like, you know, whatever.
She's probably sleeping.
She'll get back to me.
So I went to the gym and I'm kind of hanging out.
And then I get a call from my grandpa, your dad, obviously.
And he had said, this is about, I don't know, hour, hour and a half into my workout.
He had said that, Hey, like, you know, your brother and sister are missing.
You should, you should go home and be with your mom.
Just kind of comfort her in that time.
So I was like, okay, I went home and then didn't really wrap my head around it.
There was nothing.
I didn't really think anything of it at the time.
I didn't believe it at the time.
So I was kind of thinking, it's not what it is.
And then that Monday morning when it was confirmed, we had all been, I mean, after, after so long,
I think that Sunday evening, actually, junior had a football game and his mom never came
home and that's totally unlike her to make him miss a sporting event or some type of
a school event or anything.
So when we all, me and my mom showed up at the field for a football game and junior wasn't
there.
That's when we called him and was like, you know, where's your mom?
And he was saying that she never came home and whatever.
So yeah, then that Monday, I just didn't believe it.
I was in disbelief.
So I don't know really what was going through my head, but I know you had told me that and
I drove, it was about a 30, 40 minute drive to work.
And when I got to work was when I finally started balling, crying, I couldn't control
it.
So I went into my manager and I told him, I said, Hey man, my brother and sister were
just murdered and I'd like to go home.
I don't, I don't know if I can do it today.
And he looked at me almost like as if I was joking.
And then he saw that I was uncontrollably crying.
And then he was like super consoling and was like, yeah, go take as much time as you need.
Well, I only took that day and then went back the next day.
But yeah, that was, that was my Monday.
So yeah, all of it was just really unbelievable.
Like surreal still is to me, although less intense now, which brings me to our topic about
grief and grieving.
Do you differentiate grief from grieving?
I suppose I never really had to look at it until this event in my life.
A grief I suppose now I've looked at as grief is something you can look back on and you
can still feel those emotions in your, you can just feel that, that sorrow kind of despair
lost feeling.
And you don't really know how to describe it.
To me, that's grief.
It's like you're just kind of lost in limbo.
Grieving is when you come to grips with it and you're, you're kind of trying to get past
that, but you're still hurting, obviously.
And so that's grieving to me is understanding what it is you're not lost anymore, although
it is still hard in a dark road that you're going on.
But that's kind of my idea.
I'm impressed because according to Dr. Mary Frances O'Connor, an associate professor
of clinical psychology and psychiatry at the University of Arizona, grief and grieving
are two distinct experiences.
Dr. O'Connor, who has spent most of her career studying grief and its effects on our brain,
also has a book called The Grieving Brain, The Surprising Science of How We Learn from
Love and Loss, and did a podcast called Speaking of Psychology.
She defines grief as an intense feeling that completely overwhelms you while grieving, which
will never go away, is still the feeling of loss, but it is now a familiar feeling.
And we've learned how to comfort ourselves.
Dr. O'Connor also clarified that even though the feelings haven't changed, our relationship
to those feelings have changed.
So you kind of hit it like, you're not a doctor.
And that that's exactly how she defines it.
I found her explanation of grief versus grieving to make a lot of sense after thinking about
it a bit.
If I were to compare how I manage my feelings today to how I managed them two years ago,
huge difference.
Two years ago, I had to pull over when I was driving because I was crying so hard.
And I felt it in my body too.
Like my whole body just felt different.
And I said in the trailer to this podcast that these intense emotions that were brought
to my front step were emotions I couldn't put words to.
And that's grief versus the grieving.
Now I if I have my moments, obviously, but I will call somebody like when I called you
last week, or I'll call a friend, I journal, I'll listen to music, I meditate, I allow
myself to feel those feelings.
Do you notice a difference in like how you were, how you managed it two years ago or
a year ago even compared to how you do that now?
Yeah, so I just don't think I had the mental strength to deal with it a few years ago.
I, you know, obviously just lost your mom, my grandmother, my dad, and then my brother
and sister all within three months of each other, three, four months.
So that was a big hit to me for me.
I always was the type to bottle my emotions in, but that is something that you really
can't bottle in.
So for my, I was drinking a lot and doing a lot of just harmful things to myself.
And it doesn't quite pay.
I mean, you can go throughout the entire day.
I mean, I went throughout the entire day at work.
Pete, you would have never guessed that I had just been a victim of my brother's and
sister's homicide because I would still kind of be a happy go lucky kind of outgoing guy.
And then when I get home, I mean, I couldn't even get in my car for five minutes without
breaking down crying.
You get home and you just want to drown those feelings out.
Now I'm still not the greatest at talking, but I do have some help.
And so I'm a little bit better at exploring my feelings, but it's still like, yeah, I'm
not, I'm not experienced or well versed in that mental field just yet.
I'm still learning.
So it's still hard for me, but I do notice a difference.
Yeah.
And I don't think grief managing it has anything to do with your mental strength because I
think you're a very strong person.
I just, it's just, it's new.
It's not anything we've ever been exposed to before.
The other thing that Dr O'Connor also said, and it really resonated with me as she talked
about depression and grief, and she said they're not the same thing.
So to her, depression is global, which means that it, everything depresses that person.
They might have guilt feelings about maybe not finishing college or feel like they should
be further along in their life than they are or a relationship ended and they feel it's
all their fault and they can't get past the past.
Whereas grief is just the sadness and the emotions for that lost loved one.
And I bring this up because not so long ago, few, few months, I was talking to somebody
called somebody cause I was feeling awful and I started sharing my feelings with him and
I asked him, do you think I'm depressed?
I reached out to him because I know that he has suffered from depression his entire life.
I've never suffered from depression.
So I didn't know what it felt like.
And so as I'm describing these feelings, he's like, Oh yeah, you're depressed, but I didn't
agree.
I mean, I was like, I'm just sad.
I miss my mom.
I miss my kids.
I don't think that's depressed.
I think I am sad.
What are your thoughts on that?
Yeah, actually, after this whole instance, you know, Matt had battled depression a little
bit.
Jasmine ever so slightly.
I had no understanding of depression before this event.
I had no empathy towards it even sometimes and I've kind of kicked myself for that after
this event because it's real.
It's real and it can be detrimental.
I now know very well what depression is.
Depression is sometimes you wake up and you feel like you had just ran a marathon when
you got 10 hours of sleep at night.
Sometimes you get off work and you had a great day and you immediately start bawling crying
and you don't know what it is.
I mean, depression is like just a cloud over you that can start raining at any given moment
and you live with it.
And I had no understanding of that before and I do now.
So I do, yeah, I mean, I battle with it ever so slightly.
I did think the same way that I thought, I'm just sad.
It's just in emotion, it'll pass and life goes on, but depression doesn't really work
like that.
It stays.
Yeah.
Well, for me, defining grief versus grieving and depression, that helped me because now
I don't need to feel like I'm grieving wrong if I'm not having these intense day stopping
emotions still.
Some of our listeners might feel like that or feel like their grieving is wrong or feel
guilty because you're having more good days than you are bad, but there is no right way
to grieve.
But maybe by separating grief from grieving, we can take another step towards healing and
by healing, I mean being kind to ourselves.
Yeah, I totally agree with that.
Being kind to yourself should not be underestimated.
It mentally, physically, emotionally, all of those things.
You have to take a big look at yourself and give yourself a break sometimes.
You have to give yourself that time to just cry, just feel those emotions.
Then you have to give yourself that strength to know that you're going to keep going and
you, you know, whatever it may be, friends, family, loved ones, kids, it doesn't matter,
you've got to find that thing that keeps you going that you need to be strong for.
It's hard.
It's not easy, but you can do it.
Right.
Well, that is all there is time for today.
Thank you so much for joining us as we dove a little bit deeper into the subject of grieving.
We hope that our discussion provided our listeners with support as you journey through this grief
and that you've gotten some insight from this next week.
We will talk about supporting those who are dealing with loss.
Sometimes those supporters don't really know what to say and we want to help with that.
You can find all our source material in show notes and I will include a link to Dr. O'Connor's
book for those interested in purchasing it.
I do not get any residuals.
Should you decide to buy anything?
I just really like her work and believe many of you might benefit from her book.
Also, if you are struggling with grief and need additional support, we encourage you
to reach out to a licensed therapist or counselor.
We have included some local links to resources in our show notes.
Please be sure to hit subscribe and like and we look forward to meeting next week.