How to build resilience after personal tragedy

My mother Joyce died by suicide when I was 20 months old. I have no memory of her. I have spent 40 years asking the same question, in different forms, that brought you to this page.

What does it actually look like to build a life forward after something that should have broken it?

Most pages on the first page of Google for resilience are institutional. They are accurate and well-researched. They will not help you at 2 a.m. in month 6 when you cannot sleep and you have already read every grief article on the internet, and they will not tell you how to talk to a child who lost a parent.

This page is what I have actually learned in 40 years of working the question. It leans on the clinical literature where the clinical literature is strong, and names the parts the literature mostly leaves alone. Background on who I am and how I got here.

If you are in active grief, I am sorry. I will not tell you it gets easier. I will tell you what works and what does not, and the rest is yours.

TL;DR: Resilience after major loss is the most common trajectory, not the rare one. The first 12 months are mostly about not making it worse. Three things actually rebuild people: connection, meaning-making, and the boring physical basics. Defer big decisions, know when to call a clinician, and ignore the five-stages map you grew up with. The longitudinal research does not back it up.

What resilience actually is (and what it isn’t)

Most people walk into grief carrying the wrong map. The Kubler-Ross five stages model from 1969 is the one almost everyone has heard of. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance, in that order. It is a clean story.

It is also not what the longitudinal data actually shows.

George Bonanno spent two decades at Columbia studying what actually happens to people after major loss. His findings overturn the linear-stages model. About 50 to 60 percent of bereaved adults show a resilient trajectory, meaning they grieve hard for a period and then return to something close to baseline functioning within a year. About 25 percent show a recovery trajectory, meaning a longer and rougher path that still ends in functioning. About 10 to 15 percent develop chronic grief that interferes with life for years. The American Psychological Association’s grief guidance reflects this updated science, not the five-stages story.

That matters because if you are six months out from a major loss and you do not feel like you are in a stage, you are not broken. The stages were never the right map. The actual map is messier. It oscillates. The dual-process model that came out of bereavement research in the late 1990s describes it well: people swing back and forth between loss-orientation (grief, sadness, missing the person) and restoration-orientation (paying bills, going to work, feeling okay for an afternoon). Both are doing work. Neither is wrong.

Resilience is not toxic positivity. It is not fast recovery. It is not the people who say they are fine. It is the slow, uneven capacity to rebuild a meaningful life despite what happened, not because of it. It does not mean the loss stops hurting. It means the loss stops being the only thing.

I am 48 years old. My mother has been dead for 47 of those years. I still have hard days. I also built two companies, ran for Congress, raised three kids, and am about to marry someone I love. Both of those are true. That is what the working version of resilience actually looks like.

Why the first 12 months are mostly about not making it worse

If you are reading this in the first year after a major loss, the most useful thing I can tell you is that survival is the goal. Growth is later. Try not to confuse the two.

The clinical bereavement literature is pretty consistent on the things people do in the first year that extend the harm without meaning to. Most of it is not dramatic. It is small choices made under acute grief that compound over months.

Numbing through alcohol or other substances. The most common one. A drink at the end of the day becomes three. The line moves slowly. By month 9 you are managing two problems instead of one. The bereavement research is clear that substance use that begins after a loss is one of the strongest predictors of complicated grief later. If you notice the line moving, that is the moment to talk to someone.

Isolation. The instinct to disappear is almost universal after major loss. People say the wrong things. The casserole brigade gets exhausting. Saying no to dinner the third Friday in a row feels easier than explaining why. The problem is that isolation feeds on itself. By month 4 the people who were checking in have stopped because they are not getting a response. The HHS Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory on social connection calls loneliness a public health priority for a reason. After a loss it is also a clinical risk factor.

Big life decisions made in acute grief. Selling the house. Quitting the job. Moving to a new city. Ending or starting a relationship. Almost every grief clinician will tell you the same thing: defer for at least a year if you can. Acute grief is not a stable state to make 10-year decisions from. The decisions you make in month 4 will sometimes look unrecognizable to you in month 18.

Reconnecting with toxic family for comfort. Loss puts a magnet on the original family system. People you stopped talking to for good reason will reach out, and the temptation to take the comfort is real. Sometimes it is fine. Sometimes it pulls you backward into a system that hurt you in the first place. Trust the version of you who set the limit, not the version of you in active grief.

Catastrophic Googling at 2 a.m. The brain in grief is hungry for the worst-case version of every fact. How long will this last. What if I never feel normal again. The internet at 2 a.m. will give you the worst answer to every question you ask it. Close the laptop. Drink water. Go back to bed. The data does not improve at that hour.

The first year is about getting through to a place where you can think. The bigger work comes after.

The three things that actually rebuild people

Once you are out of the acute phase, the question becomes what actually rebuilds a life. The bereavement literature converges on three answers. They sound almost too simple. They are not.

Connection. Single most reliable lever in the entire grief literature. Not a thousand acquaintances. A handful of people who can hold the weight without flinching. The APA resilience framework puts social connection at the top of every list, and the longitudinal research backs it up. The form matters less than the consistency. A weekly call with a sibling. A standing dinner with two friends. A peer support group through AFSP if the loss was suicide. A therapist if you can find a good one. The point is not to talk about the loss every time. The point is to be a person to people who know what happened and stay anyway.

Meaning-making. Viktor Frankl wrote that we cannot avoid suffering, only choose how we respond to it and find meaning in it. That sentence has been quoted to death, but the underlying research holds up. Narrative therapy work, post-traumatic growth research, and the broader bereavement literature all point to the same finding: people who can place the loss inside a larger story they tell about themselves do better over time than people who treat it as a single uncontextualized event. That story does not have to be religious. It does not have to be heroic. It does not have to make sense to anyone but you. It just has to be yours, and it has to keep evolving.

Embodiment. Grief lives in the body. Sleep collapses. Appetite goes weird. The chest tightens. The basics that you took for granted before now require active work. Sleep, movement, sunlight, hydration, food that is not entirely beige. The behavioral activation literature in clinical psychology is clear that you cannot think your way out of grief through cognition alone. You have to do the small physical things that the grief is telling you not to do. Walk. Lift something. Sit outside for ten minutes. The body remembers how to be a person before the brain catches up.

Three levers. Connection, meaning, embodiment. If you are stuck and cannot figure out where to start, pick the one you have been ignoring the longest, and do it for two weeks.

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How to talk to someone you love who is in it

If you are reading this for someone else, this is the section for you.

The hardest part of supporting someone in grief is not the first week. It is month 3. By then the funeral is over, the cards have stopped, the rest of the world has gone back to normal, and the person you love is still inside it. The single most useful thing you can do is stay present in month 3, 4, 5, and 6, when almost nobody else is.

Five things to retire from your supporting-someone vocabulary:

• “I know exactly how you feel.” You do not. Even if you have lost someone, this loss is not yours. Sit with not-knowing.
• “Everything happens for a reason.” The grief literature is unanimous that this phrase causes more harm than it intends. There is no reason a parent dies young. There is no reason a child dies. Do not assign meaning to the loss for someone else.
• “At least they are not suffering anymore.” A statement that puts the bereaved in the position of having to be grateful. Stop.
• “You should be over this by now.” Said anywhere from week 6 to year 5. There is no schedule. Do not impose one.
• “Let me know if you need anything.” Offered once and never followed up. The phrase puts the labor on the bereaved person. Better: tell them what you are bringing on which day.

What works instead is unglamorous and specific. A text on a random Tuesday at month 4 that says “thinking of you, no need to reply.” A meal dropped on the porch with no expectation of a thank-you note. Showing up to the anniversary every year, not just the first one. Saying the dead person’s name out loud. Letting the bereaved set the pace on whether they want to talk about the loss in any given conversation.

If you are an employer or a manager, the same rules apply, scaled. Most workplace bereavement policies give three days off for an immediate family member. Three days. The bereaved person comes back to work in week two with the loss still raw, and the workplace expects normal performance. If you have authority, give more time. Quietly reduce the load for 60 to 90 days. Do not make them ask. People remember which managers protected them in grief for the rest of their working life.

When grief becomes something else (and how to know)

Most grief, even severe grief, is a normal response to loss. It is hard, but it is not pathology. The clinical literature now distinguishes between normative bereavement and what the DSM-5-TR calls prolonged grief disorder, formerly known as persistent complex bereavement disorder.

The threshold the literature uses is roughly this. After 12 months for an adult (six months for a child), if you are still experiencing intense, persistent yearning for the person, severe identity disruption (you do not know who you are without them), sustained inability to accept the death, marked emotional numbness, avoidance of reminders that interferes with daily life, or active suicidal ideation, that is the signal to talk to a clinician. Not because you have failed at grief. Because the grief has shifted into something that responds well to clinical care.

The other clear signal is suicidal ideation at any point, in any quantity, no matter how recent the loss. If you are having thoughts of ending your life, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is a free, 24/7, confidential first stop. Call or text 988. They will not tell you to be more grateful. They will listen.

If the loss was a suicide, AFSP runs peer support groups specifically for suicide loss survivors. Suicide loss has a different shape than other bereavement. The grief is layered with questions that have no answers, with stigma that other deaths do not carry, and with the specific terror that you missed something. The peer groups exist because suicide loss survivors find each other in a way that nobody else can replicate. If your person died by suicide, that is a resource I would put at the top of your list.

I am not a clinician. I will not diagnose you. What I can tell you is that the bridge from “this is hard” to “this needs clinical help” is not a personal failing. It is a medical reality. The CDC tracks suicide as the cause of about 60 percent of US firearm deaths. The number of people walking around carrying suicide-loss grief is much larger than most of us know. You are not alone in needing the help.

When the loss was a parent you do not remember

This is my specific lane. I think of it as the absence-shaped loss.

I was 20 months old when my mother died. I have no memory of her face moving. I have photos. I have stories from people who knew her. I have a birth certificate, a death certificate, and the grave I visit when I am in town. I do not have her. I never will.

The grief for a parent you remember is shaped like a missing person. The grief for a parent you do not remember is shaped like a missing space. You cannot mourn what you never had access to. What you can do is build a relationship with the person from the outside in, using whatever evidence you can collect.

For me that has meant photos kept visible, not packed away. It has meant interviewing the people who knew her while they are still alive: her sister, her mother, her friends. It has meant writing some of those interviews down so my own kids will have them when I am gone. It has meant naming the loss out loud in conversations where most people would not, because silence becomes the second loss.

It has also meant advocacy work on firearm suicide prevention. Not because the advocacy fixes the loss. The advocacy does not fix anything. It puts the loss to work. It makes the missing space into something other people can also see and use. A father’s fight is the long version of why.

If you lost a parent before you could form memories of them, your work is not the same work as someone whose parent died last year. You are not behind. You are doing different work. The work is building a relationship to a person from secondary sources, and tolerating the fact that the relationship will always be incomplete. It is harder than it sounds. It is also possible.

For children currently in this position, the most important thing the surrounding adults can do is keep the dead parent visible. Photos. Stories. The dead parent’s name in casual conversation, not just on the anniversary. Letting the child set the pace on questions, but answering the questions when they come. Marking the anniversary every year, including in the years the child does not seem to want to. The loss does not go away because you did not name it. Naming it gives the child something to work with.

When the loss is a career, a marriage, or a public failure

Resilience after a death is the foundational case. The same architecture covers most of the other endings life will hand you.

I lost a Congressional race in 2016. I built a roofing company from $1.5M to $15M and walked away from it in 2011. I helped scale Roofed Right America to $35M and 180 employees over 11 years and exited in late 2025. I resigned from a Regional General Manager role in April 2026 after four months because the role was not the role I had been promised. None of those are the same as losing my mother. All of them required the same machinery to get through.

The architecture is not topic-specific. It is human-specific.

Connection holds. The people who showed up after the campaign loss are mostly the same people who show up after a career exit. If you have built that bench before the loss, you have a head start. If you have not, the loss is the moment to start building it.

Meaning-making is the work. Public failures look different from inside than they do from outside. The story you tell yourself about what happened, why, and what it is now for, is the most important thing you write in the year after. That story will change. Let it.

Embodiment is non-negotiable. The body keeps the score on losses that are not deaths, too. After the 2016 loss I started running again, badly and slowly, and kept at it. It did more for my head than the political postmortems did. The basics work the same whether the loss is a parent, a marriage, a job, or a campaign.

The working version of resilience at scale is somebody who has done this 4 or 5 times, in different shapes, and learned to recognize what is happening before the next ending arrives. The leadership-applied version of the same architecture is a separate page (resilient leadership). The personal version is this one. They share more than they differ.

How I speak about this on stage

I deliver keynotes on resilience to corporate audiences, association events, conferences, and advocacy groups. The keynote is not a memoir. It is a working playbook calibrated to the audience in front of me, built on the same architecture this page is built on.

For HR and leadership audiences, the talk is mostly about how managers can support employees in active grief without making it weird, and how leaders build organizations that survive endings. For advocacy audiences, it is about turning loss into work, with my mother’s death by suicide as the lived case. For association events, the talk is about what 40 years of building forward from that loss has actually taught me about the working machinery of getting through.

Almost all of my speaking has been direct invitations from organizations. I am not currently bureau-listed. If you are evaluating me for a keynote, you are talking to me, not a layer of representation. Book Khary direct, or take a look at the speaking topics page first.

If you are in a crisis right now
The 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7. Call or text 988. If you have lost someone to suicide, AFSP’s Loss Survivor support groups are free and run by people who have lived it.

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