Open to Hope Podcast Transcript: Saundra Neperud and The Grief App
Dr. Gloria Horsley: Welcome to the Open to Hope Show. I’m your host, Dr. Gloria Horsley, with my daughter and co-host, Dr. Heidi Horsley.
Dr. Gloria Horsley: Well, Heidi, I’m really excited about our guest today because she’s not only experienced loss, but she’s gone on to make a lot of meaning out of it by helping develop a new app called The Grief App. We’re going to talk about her life and how she got to the point where she’s involved in this technology. It’s pretty interesting and exciting, isn’t it, Heidi?
Dr. Heidi Horsley: It’s very exciting. It’s amazing what’s going on nowadays on the internet and how much support you can get. This app is certainly a way to get valuable support. And as you know, Mom, sometimes we’re grieving in the middle of the night. Sometimes nobody’s around. Sometimes we don’t have any support. But with this app, you’ve always got something to turn to in your darkest moments. And there’s a lot of amazing, valuable, evidence-based research behind this app.
Dr. Gloria Horsley: All right, Heidi, do you want to introduce our guest and let’s get started talking about her life, her journey, and what she’s come up with?
Dr. Heidi Horsley: I’d love to. As you said, Mom, we’re going to talk about online grief support today. Our guest is Saundra Neperud.
Saundra’s mother was diagnosed with stage four cancer and died just eight months later. Eleven years after that, her husband was told he might also have stage four cancer, but he died before the biopsy results even came back. Saundra struggled to find effective grief support and eventually connected with Emily Danacus, a licensed therapist specializing in grief. Together, they combined personal and professional insights to develop The Grief App.
Welcome to our podcast, Saundra.
Saundra Neperud: Thank you so much. It’s wonderful to be here.
Dr. Gloria Horsley: It’s great to have you on. Now, I’m living in a travel van.
Dr. Heidi Horsley: She’s living in a travel van because she’s traveling around doing her thing.
Dr. Gloria Horsley: Okay, so let’s get back. You were in Maine. You and your husband were running a bed and breakfast up there, right?
Saundra Neperud: Yep. We had a 30-room hotel on eight acres, right on Route One, which goes from Portland to Acadia National Park. It was called Castine Woods Lodge, and it was near Red’s Eats, the famous lobster roll place in Maine.
Dr. Gloria Horsley: Ah, so you were living your dream.
Saundra Neperud: I loved it. I truly loved running the hotel. It was a great experience. We had 50% return customers, so we had this huge clientele that would come back to us two or three times a year. We knew their lives, and they knew our lives. I truly loved what we were doing.
But after we made it through COVID, which was really difficult when you owned a hotel and the state shut down, my husband turned to me and said that he didn’t want to die in Maine. At the time, I thought he was just referring to COVID. I thought that was kind of a fear of COVID.
But I wasn’t going to fight him at that point, so we put the hotel up for sale. It took a year to sell it, and we moved to Spokane, Washington, to be closer to his family in the West.
He started to have backaches, and within a year and a half of moving to Spokane, he was dead. It happened really fast. He had five weeks from when we first knew that something might be wrong.
Four weeks after we knew something might be wrong, he was in emergency surgery. He came out of surgery, and a day later they said his kidneys had failed and that they couldn’t do dialysis because dialysis would kill him, but if they didn’t do dialysis, that would kill him.
He survived eight days after the surgery. So, it was a very sudden death.
Dr. Gloria Horsley: This is very bizarre, how quickly he died. It was colon cancer?
Saundra Neperud: Yes.
Dr. Gloria Horsley: How old was Eric when he died?
Saundra Neperud: Fifty-nine.
Dr. Gloria Horsley: Wow. That’s a really traumatic story. And how old were you at that time, being all of a sudden a widow?
Saundra Neperud: Fifty-four. I was young. I was married at 42, so I was married old and widowed young.
Dr. Gloria Horsley: Yeah. Absolutely. You hadn’t been married all that long. You’d been married about 12 years or so. That’s a really tragic story.
Saundra Neperud: It is. And so, moving away from Maine was difficult because I was fairly new in Spokane. It was kind of the worst of everything because grief doesn’t just come from death. It comes from loss, and having to give up the hotel was really hard.
I did it because it was important to my marriage. It was important to my husband. But I went through a lot of grief from the loss of my career and my feeling of contributing. I was trying to start a career in real estate as kind of a compromise career, and that was just barely getting off the ground.
I had my first client—actually, two clients—and I had to give them up because I was afraid I would mess up somebody’s biggest purchase of their life because my brain wasn’t in it anymore.
So, I’d lost my career, barely knew anyone, and then I lost my husband. And I also lost his family. They drove away and left me to care for my husband on my own.
It was a lot of loss all at once.
Dr. Gloria Horsley: And you didn’t have your mother to even help you because she had died, what, 11 years earlier of cancer also?
Saundra Neperud: The same cancer.
Dr. Gloria Horsley: Wow. The same cancer. That’s ironic.
How did you pick yourself up?
Saundra Neperud: My sister flew out, and she was huge. I don’t know that I could have done it without her coming out. She stayed with me through the eight days of Eric’s life and then for a month afterward.
But anyone who has gone through grief kind of knows that you’re in such a brain fog. A lot of times, you just want to be alone. Your life has kind of been shattered, and you’ve got to figure out how to rebuild. What do you want your life to look like going forward?
Some of it was just taking time. Luckily, I had the financial means to be able to take time and kind of regroup and figure things out.
But I really did struggle to find emotional support. Like you said, there was no grief group that I could go to. Hospice had dropped me through a miscommunication, so there was no follow-up from hospice.
The counselor I sought out had no grief experience. I went to her three times, but it felt like she was just throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what stuck.
Dr. Gloria Horsley: My husband died almost six years ago now, and I was lucky because I got connected through Kara in Palo Alto, California, with a therapist who had not only had a spouse die, but also a child. I had experienced the same.
Oh my gosh, he was an amazing support for me during that time.
But I got into a grief group with them, and it didn’t work for me. So I would say that not everything is going to work for everyone. A group might work, or individual counseling might work, but you’ve got to find somebody who knows what they’re doing, right?
Saundra Neperud: You’ve got to find something. It’s so hard to navigate on your own.
The group I did end up finding was just a widows’ group on Facebook, and they were locally based, which was nice because we could meet up in person. I got really involved in that and started leading activities where people would come to my house.
That was huge because my sister really wanted to support me. She really did. But for me to even start talking about all the different aspects of the loss, it was too much because she didn’t have the grounding for it.
Whereas, in the grief group, everyone had been through kind of that same traumatic background. So you could start from there and move forward rather than trying to explain all the levels of loss.
Dr. Gloria Horsley: Yeah, and the financial stuff, and the mail, and settling everything. The first time you’ve got to put down your marital status on a form at the doctor’s office. The first time you get a piece of mail with your husband’s name on it.
Saundra Neperud: Yeah. The group was really nice, but as you said, I am a young widow. In some ways, many of the widows were in a different stage of life than I was as well.
There are two things that have really been kind of my saving grace. One of them is that I had never actually owned a house before I got married. I had a lot of work that was seasonal. I worked in national parks and national forests.
Dr. Gloria Horsley: You were in the Peace Corps, right?
Saundra Neperud: I was also in the Peace Corps, yes. I also went back to Thailand after the tsunami and worked again.
So, there was a lot of moving around in my life.
Settling into a house was part of that relationship. But once he was gone and I realized that was no longer a compromise I needed to make, I looked at how I wanted my life to move forward.
I waited a year, and I think that was smart. My mom, when she got divorced, said, “You’re kind of crazy your first year out from a divorce, and that’s why you shouldn’t make any decisions.”
So, I waited that year to sell the house because that is a really big decision that you can’t take back if you change your mind later.
My husband’s birthday, my birthday, and Valentine’s Day were all within 10 days of each other. He died in late October, and that first February after his death, I knew I didn’t want to be in my house alone for those three days all in a row.
So, I flew out to Florida, met up with a friend of mine, and we rented a van like this. We traveled around Florida together in the van for 10 days.
That was when I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to buy a van and give myself that freedom to roam again.
Dr. Gloria Horsley: Wow.
Saundra Neperud: I used his life insurance policy, and I kind of make a face about that because I could never talk Eric into buying a motorhome. I had wanted one since I was 18, but I couldn’t talk him into it.
Once he was gone, that was no longer a compromise we needed to make. So, I bought myself the motorhome.
I stayed close by that first year and did week-long trips, but kept going back home. That really helped emotionally because I was able to explore and have new experiences, and I wasn’t constantly surrounded by memories of him.
You could go somewhere different.
Dr. Gloria Horsley: But you worked with national parks, so you knew about driving around in remote areas and where you could camp and where you could take your mobile home and the whole thing, right?
Saundra Neperud: Yeah. And there was a great app, iOverlander, that gives you all the resources, too. There are so many apps nowadays.
The second thing that really helped was developing the app.
Dr. Gloria Horsley: I’m going to stop you for a minute, Saundra, before we go into the app, because Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor, who you may know, has written a lot of research and a book on the grieving brain. She talks about how we need to create new memories, and that’s what you did. You created new memories in places where your husband hadn’t been.
Saundra Neperud: Yeah. It was also something to look forward to. There was always something exciting you could go do.
Those little things helped because then you had the expectation of something coming up rather than just looking back into the past.
Dr. Gloria Horsley: Right. So tell us how you got the app idea.
Saundra Neperud: I came upon the app idea by accident. A year after his death, somebody was showing me an app that they had used to help stop drinking. I was looking at that app and the functions that it had.
I started thinking, if you tweak some of these things, they could actually be useful for someone going through grief.
So then I started to think, does this exist? Has somebody else invented this, and I just missed it in my own searching for something?
I did a lot of research, and there really wasn’t what I was looking for.
I started to think about what an app is good at and how what an app is good at could be helpful to someone in grief.
A lot of the research I did into apps themselves said that apps are about action. They’re for something in the moment.
Whereas websites might be more about background information or long-term learning, apps are about right now. What do you need in this moment?
So, I started to look at what had gotten me through Eric’s loss and what I had turned to when I couldn’t find other resources.
One of the things early on that everyone I talked to said was that you have to feel your emotions. You have to allow those emotions to come in, and you have to feel them.
So, very specifically in the early days, when a grief wave would hit me, I would stop whatever I was doing and just allow myself to feel it and breathe through it.
That was something I did very early on.
What we did for The Grief App is create something called the Grief Wave. It’s essentially a very pretty timer. The minimum amount is one minute, based on the idea that anyone can do anything for one minute.
For people who are trying not to feel their emotions, we ask them to try to sit with them for just one minute.
It goes up to 10 minutes. If you have a hard time leaving your grief, we suggest setting it for 10 minutes and then giving yourself permission to try to move on to a different headspace at that point.
The whole idea is that every time it hits, sit with it, breathe through it, and feel whatever it is.
There are so many emotions in grief, and that was a big one that pretty much everyone I talked to said we needed to make sure was part of the app.
Dr. Gloria Horsley: You know, it’s interesting that you say that because Heidi and I wrote a book called Real Men Do Cry with Erik Hipple, who was a quarterback for the Detroit Lions. He goes down in his basement and sets a timer in the evening to grieve his son, Jeff.
Saundra Neperud: That totally makes sense.
Another thing that I did a lot was when memories of Eric would come up. They were bittersweet, but I wanted to share them. I wanted to say, “This is my husband. This is his life. These are my memories that I had with him.”
So, I was putting posts on Facebook, but my friends on Facebook would take that as a call for help.
Then they would react in a way I wasn’t really looking for. I wasn’t looking for, “Oh, poor you.” I was looking for, “Hey, this is my husband. Look at what a neat person he was. Look at all these neat things we did together.”
That was what inspired me to create the Memory Book because I wanted there to be a place to do exactly that—to gather those pictures, tell those stories, and get that person’s life down on paper.
You just want to do that. There’s this need to commemorate and to process. That’s where that one came from—the need to tell a story.
Dr. Gloria Horsley: I love what you just said—that if you put it on Facebook, people see it as a call for help, not just honoring someone. That’s interesting.
Saundra Neperud: Yeah.
The “Give Me a Break” section came from my experience with a lot of the widows in the widows’ group. They would really have a hard time allowing themselves to take a break from grief.
There was this feeling of guilt if you felt good or if you weren’t constantly feeling bad.
I really wanted to give people the ability to distract their minds and give themselves a break.
I remember saying to my therapist, “I’m feeling too good today. I’m not sure if that’s okay.”
Dr. Gloria Horsley: You feel really guilty. You do.
Saundra Neperud: Yeah. That’s also where the whole Good Moment feature came from.
On the way to my husband’s burial, my sister was accompanying me to Oregon. Eric died in Spokane, but we buried him in Oregon next to his father. I had his ashes with me, and my sister had never seen the area.
So, we did touristy things because she was in Oregon for the first time.
I remember being out on Cannon Beach, and my sister and I took a picture of ourselves in front of Haystack Rock.
Dr. Gloria Horsley: I love Cannon Beach. It’s beautiful because Eric and I honeymooned very close to there.
Saundra Neperud: But you feel guilty. You feel like it’s wrong. You feel like it’s an indication that you didn’t love the person.
So, we’re really trying to normalize the fact that grief and joy can coexist. It is perfectly fine and healthy to have those moments of joy because the grief will come back to you.
The grief needs to be processed. It’ll find you again. You don’t have to stay in it.
Dr. Gloria Horsley: Oh, I like what you said. It needs to be processed.
Dr. Heidi Horsley: And like you said, Saundra, it’s all connected to evidence-based research because the Dual Process Model shows that you can only stay in grief for so long. You’re going back and forth between grief and restoration, or grief and joy, like you’re saying.
These two things can exist together, which I love because people don’t realize it, even though they’re living it.
Saundra Neperud: Exactly.
The final thing was really something Emily, the grief therapist on our team, wanted—the journaling feature.
We made it a verbal journal because we’re really trying to bear in mind that people have grief brain. I used to call it widow’s brain. You’ve got brain fog, you’re exhausted, and you can’t think clearly.
Everything on the app, we tried to make as simple as possible, knowing that you can’t really problem-solve very well when you’re in the middle of grief.
We went with the audio journal because we knew people were going to have a hard time necessarily writing. We wanted them to be able to simply turn something on and talk—just talk through whatever it is they’re experiencing in the moment.
You can talk for up to 15 minutes for one recording, and it transcribes it so that you have it in writing in case you want to go back and look at it.
You can also tag things.
This gets back to what we were talking about earlier. So many therapists don’t necessarily have a grief background, and sometimes who you get for your therapist depends on who your insurance is.
We’ve really tried to make the app usable as a tool for therapists, including therapists who don’t have a grief background.
Part of that is tagging. If you’ve had a moment where you’ve had a revelation or you’ve got a problem you can’t solve, you can tag it. Then, when you go to see your therapist and you’re still in grief brain, you can pull up your tags and say, “Okay, this is the thing that happened that I really want to talk about.”
The same thing applies to the workbook exercises. You can tag them so that when you’re with your therapist, you can talk through whatever you’ve learned.
Dr. Gloria Horsley: Will it repeat it verbally, or do they read it?
Saundra Neperud: You can do either. You can press the button and play the audio, or you can read the transcription.
Dr. Gloria Horsley: I like that.
Dr. Heidi Horsley: Yeah, that’s lovely.
Saundra Neperud: The final thing is the workbooks, and I touched on those a little bit.
We really don’t talk about grief in America, as you both know.
My mother and my mother-in-law were both widowed. In fact, my mother was widowed at the same age I was widowed, which I realized when I went to see her headstone. Her husband also died at the same age that Eric died.
I was an adult when all of this happened, and I know so little about what my mother went through and what my mother-in-law went through.
When suddenly you’re in grief, you don’t know what’s normal. You have all of these emotions, and they seem crazy to you.
I was really mad at my husband for several reasons. How can I be mad at the person I loved who passed away? He didn’t get medical help soon enough. He never got a colonoscopy.
So, I really wanted to provide some basic background so that people could understand what a grief wave is and how to go through it. We talk about all the different emotions and normalize them.
It’s okay. These are common things that people experience.
And once you’re ready to start rebuilding your life, here are some tools and things to consider as you think about what you want your life to look like going forward.
We created these workbook activities, and by the time people see this, they should all be available. They’re interactive.
Instead of simply being given a prompt and being asked to write after it, every workbook gives you a little bit of background—very short, because again, people are in grief brain—and then it asks you to look at your own life in comparison to whatever the topic is.
For example, how you respond to your current loss can be affected by your previous losses.
We have people list previous losses: death, the loss of a relationship because you’ve moved away, the loss of a relationship because you’re estranged from someone, or the loss of a career.
We have them list their losses, and then for each one, we ask how they grieved that loss, or whether they grieved it at all.
At the end, we have them look at the whole picture and ask, “Okay, what does this mean for me right now?”
Every part of it is interactive. It’s not just background information. It’s about asking, “How does this apply to me personally?”
Dr. Gloria Horsley: I like that, Saundra. I’m wondering, in your own story, did the death of your mom change in any way how you reacted to the death of your husband?
Saundra Neperud: I felt guilty because they died of the same cancer. Why didn’t I pick up on the fact that my husband had cancer sooner?
While losing my husband so quickly was hard, I did get a chance to say goodbye to him.
My mother suffered for eight months knowing that she was going to die. So, in some ways, I was thankful that my husband didn’t go through those eight months of pain.
But no, I can’t say that I did a good job of grieving my mother’s loss.
We were just about to move, and I was newly married because she was diagnosed two weeks after we got engaged.
We ended up eloping because there was no wedding that could really be had. She was already in so much pain that it just wasn’t going to work out.
It was a weird situation because do you wait for her to die and then have a wedding celebration? Or do you have a wedding that she might not be able to attend because it would be such a difficult day for her?
We eloped, and then we got new jobs and moved to Montana.
I did what a lot of people do—I busied myself.
It’s a simple way not to feel your emotions because there’s so much going on in your life.
So, I can say that I don’t think I did a good job at all of processing her death. I’ve had a lot more thoughts and reflections about it after the loss of my husband than I did at the time.
Dr. Gloria Horsley: So, if you had one piece of advice for somebody who has had a recent loss, what would it be?
Saundra Neperud: Again, I think—well, I tell people there are three things—but the number one thing is just to feel your emotions.
Just let yourself feel them.
Whatever you are feeling, it is okay.
Don’t judge yourself for it. Just feel it.
Dr. Gloria Horsley: I love it. Do you have a website that people can go to?
Saundra Neperud: We have a website. It is thegriefapp.com.
Dr. Gloria Horsley: All right. Well, Saundra, thank you so much for being on the show today and for all the good work that you’ve done. It’s pretty amazing. It’s impressive.
Saundra Neperud: Thank you so much.
Dr. Heidi Horsley: Yes, thank you so much, Saundra. And thank you for giving people hope through The Grief App.
Please, everybody, go out and get The Grief App because it sounds like a phenomenal resource to use after a loss.
Saundra Neperud: Thank you. Thank you so much.
Dr. Gloria Horsley: Heidi and I want to thank you all for joining us on our show today. And we want to remind you always that if you’ve lost hope, please lean on ours until you find your own.
And God bless.
Dr. Heidi Horsley: I’m Dr. Heidi Horsley. You have been listening to Open to Hope, the podcast.
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Dr. Gloria Horsley: I’m Dr. Gloria Horsley. Join us again next week for another Open to Hope conversation, where we invite you to lean on our hope until you find your own.
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- Am I Grieving Wrong?
- Unlocking Grief Intensive
- I sold my home to build The Grief App: Here is why
- Why I Cried in the Lunchable Aisle: Understanding Grief Waves
