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EPISODE — SUZANNE FALTER
[INTRODUCTION]
[0:00:18.3] LC: Welcome to this week’s episode of The Art of Authenticity. I’m Laura Coe, your
host, and thank you so much for tuning in. Guys, we’ve done a lot of shows here about people
who’ve had success, have found a purpose in their life and that is really the main topic of the
show. Today, we’re going way, way over to the extreme. This is a story of somebody who had a
ton of success but found herself in one of those life crisis moments that we all deeply fear. After
losing a relationship that she had been in for years, recognizing her sexuality. She thought she
was in a straight relationship and she recognized she was gay. She changed her career.
If all of that wasn’t enough for a single person to handle, our guest, Suzanne Falter also
suffered the loss of her daughter, Teal, in 2012. Although this sounds like a conversation that will
be sad and overwhelming, this is really a story of inspiration and joy. Suzanne goes there in this
interview; she takes us to the day her daughter died, she goes through the whole story, but with
so much recognition of what she has and she took this difficult moment and turned it into a lifechanging event. When I say “life-changing”, she completely turned her life in a different
direction. Her beliefs and her connection with her daughter. I don’t know what your belief
systems are, how spiritually organized you are religiously, but for Suzanne, this became a
deeply spiritual moment connecting with her daughter.
So tune in, stay open, I hope you enjoy today’s episode. Very, very interesting, very inspiring,
and someone who I deeply respect and I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity to have
heard her story. If you want to hear more about Suzanne Falter, you can find her on her site,
suzannefalter.com. She has written in Moore Fitness, New York Times, Women’s Day, Wall
Street Journal, Self-Help, I mean a hundred TV and radio programs, articles, and columns, have
been everywhere.
Her work has been published to more than 1.5 million people and have been touched by her
writing. She has 200,000 who have read her work on Facebook. This is a woman who has
gotten her work out there. She’s written a few books. She writes a blog. If you’re interested in
learning more about her, again, suzannefalter.com.
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Thank you so much for tuning in and I hope you like today’s show.
[INTERVIEW]
[0:02:54.0] LC: Welcome to this week’s episode of The Art of Authenticity. I’m Laura Coe, our
host. Today, we have Suzanne Falter joining us. Hey, Suzanne. How are you?
[0:03:03.0] SF: Hi Laura. I’m happy to be here, that’s how I am.
[0:03:06.0] LC: I’m so happy to have you. For those of you who haven’t checked out the Before
the Afterlife podcast that Suzanne hosts it, and I had the privilege of coming on her show. You
can listen in. I don’t know if it’s posted yet. Is it? If not, it will be up soon.
[0:03:22.3] SF: Coming shortly.
[0:03:23.2] LC: Coming shortly. Okay. It was so much fun that we decided to reverse, have her
come on The Art of Authenticity. Her story is so compelling and you’ll hear why as we go
through this.
Suzanne, obviously, for anybody who’s checked on her work, seen anything, she was a parent
of two children, one of which was a 22-year-old daughter, and she lost her daughter in a sudden
moment and has now just committed her life to helping people who suffer with trauma to help
find fulfillment again, and we’re going to talk about that in your story.
Before we do, could you take us back before this crisis happened in your life? From what I
understood in our quick chat, you were working hard, pulling lots of hours, kind of doing that
classic workaholic thing.
[0:04:09.3] SF: Yeah. Okay. Happy to share. The fact to the matter was I was one of those
loathsome internet marketers and I was highly successful. I worked all the time. I knew how to
charge and get a lot of money from my work, and I knew how to work with the internet in such a
way that I could create courses easily.
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They were helpful. I mean, I did have a genuine, honest-to-God, advertising agency marketing
background. Long before that, I had actually been an author, and I had written books about joy
and happiness. One of which was actually quite a successful book in the 90’s and into 2000,
called How Much Joy Can You Stand? That faded away as all these people jumped onto my
community and I got carried away by the idea of teaching marketing. This was in the early-ish
days of internet marketing, say 2003 to 2012.
By the end of my run with marketing, I was in California working. Like I said, I was coaching
people eight hours a day and I was doing work that was helpful and useful to people, but it was
branding and platform building and I knew it wasn’t my real work. My gut feeling was “you’re a
writer, you’re a speaker, you’re here to help people at a much more holistic and healthy way
than marketing. This is not the heart-based work you were put here to do”.
[0:05:48.3] LC: When you say it was a gut-based feeling I’m so fascinated by this, of course,
because I love authenticity. But was it gut-based like a quiet whisper?
[0:05:58.9] SF: I’d say it was quite drone. It was like, “You are doing the wrong thing,” just kind
of all the time. I could block it out and as the paychecks, you know, I was doing events with
hundreds of people and I was selling extremely high priced coaching programs. As it got bigger
and bigger and bigger, the drone got a little louder and I kept it ignoring it more and more
fervently.
Shortly before Teal, my daughter’s death, she died in August of 2012, and in May of 2012, three
things happened. My business partner and I decided the pace we were going at was
unsustainable and that in fact we didn’t want to keep doing this particular business we were
doing. So that started to fall away. The relationship I was in, I had come to California to start my life over a year and a half earlier
as a lesbian. I had left my 25-year marriage and I’d set out to start all over again. That, I got into
a relationship that was not a healthy relationship. I gave up my apartment and moved in with a
person who then broke up with me almost immediately. So I had just lost my apartment and my
relationship and the business fell away. Then, Teal suddenly died.
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It was a really intense, intense experience. I was already kind of crawling along from the loss of
the business, and the relationship, and the apartment. Even though I knew I was going towards
something better and that it was the right thing, I was really just consumed by uncertainty. For
the first time since I had come to California, I began to be scared and uncertain.
I had been very cocky when I arrived, like, “Hey! I’m going to roll this internet marketing
business and I’m going to be awesome, and I’m San Francisco, and let’s go do this life.” The
only thing that remained that was really authentic was being a lesbian, which it had taken me to
age 52 to wrap my head around and really own myself.
[0:08:04.3] LC: When you say that — You’re at the top of your game with all of these work. It’s
pouring in. You said the money was going up, but that sensation, that droning voice, was going
up at the same time. I find that so fascinating, because the success that we’re after, you think
that voice would get a little quieter instead of louder, right?
[0:08:28.0] SF: Because it was the wrong success. Laura, let me tell you, I knew I was good at
marketing. I’ve always had a gift for it. My gift from marketing is that I can intuit what people feel
or think, generally speaking. It just happens to be my natural thing that I can do and it helps me
as a writer, it helps me in creating content. It helps me as a speaker, and it certainly is useful in
helping other people figure their stuff out, is niching and branding.
I’m a spiritual woman and I knew that this was not my life’s work. I also knew, although I denied
it, that at some point it was going to end. I just had no idea it was going to come crashing down
so fast. Believe me, I had no idea that my daughter would die.
[0:09:12.5] LC: Yeah, because here you are making what are proactive decisions, right? “I’m
going to change my business. I’m going to change my relationship. Go towards things that feel
more authentic, or aligned,” or whatever the word is that you like to use in your life. Although
that’s really difficult and the relationship isn’t working, now you find yourself in this personal
crisis. How did you, I mean, this was over a three-month period you said?
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[0:09:37.3] SF: Yeah. May was the beginning of the unraveling. I think my business partner and
I started talking about not working together around April and we were both stressed out. Our
events were booked, like, boom, to boom, to boom, but they were starting to decline slightly in
attendance. We kind of took that as a much needed sign to retreat.
We had sold programs that took us into July, or something. The last one had just ended when
Teal died. I just want to explain her death, because I’m sure listeners were like, “Well, what the
heck happened?” Teal was epileptic and she had a moderate case of epilepsy that was wellcontrolled by drugs. One in a thousand epileptics die from something called sudden death in
epilepsy, which is a very poorly understood phenomenon in which people just die and they don’t
know why.
Essentially, that night, I went to dinner with her in a very nice restaurant. We went to hear a
lecture about shamanism and a tribe, the Achuar tribe in Ecuador. It was part of the subject of
the evening. She really wanted to be a healer and she was just starting to embark on a path as
a healer and the next day she was going to begin courses at City College that she thought
would teach her about being a healer. In this talk, the speaker kept referencing the space
between the walking life and the afterlife. Every time they did, she turned around and stared at
me with this very strange expression. She was acting very spacy. She was an hour-late for
dinner. These are not typical behaviors.
What I didn’t realize was that she was having very tiny absence seizures, and it was the
precursor to a very big seizure, maybe, which we’ll never know about because she went home
from the restaurant. I got her a ride home. She went home to her apartment that she shared
with another person. She went in the bathroom and locked the door and collapsed from a
cardiac arrest. She was in there for 15 minutes to 30 minutes without a heartbeat before she
was discovered by her housemate who then had to breakdown the door to save her.
During that period of time, she sustained a lot of brain damage. For the next six days, she was
on a respirator and her brain was so damaged that that was the end of her life. We had to take
her off life support after six days. So that’s how she died.
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[0:12:11.7] LC: Unbelievable. That alone, if everything else in your life is intact, will take a
person to their knees. I know now you work with people who are suffering from trauma. What do
you do at this point? Do you just go into a shell? Do you turn to friends? How do you start —
What are the next few months?
[0:12:33.6] SF: You grieve. You grieve, and you grieve, and you grieve. For me, I’m this front of
the room person. I wanted to be a leader in all things. I couldn’t allow myself to fall apart. That
took a year. So I spent the first year being “fine”, but still being unable to really get out of bed, or
do anything, or run a business, but I was fine. I didn’t a need a brief group. I’m fine. It was just
this very interesting, very broken time.
The night of her collapse, I went into her hospital room and I sat with her and I had this deep
sense that this was the beginning of an entirely different purpose for me and that I was going to
write about this, and that this was the beginning of everything, that my life would really begin as
hers was ending. I knew she would die. I could feel the whole thing. That this experience, this
exchange in the restaurant where she was looking at me so intensely as if to communicate “this
is very important”, that really made an impression on me. I began to really take very seriously, I
made my new purpose becoming a better person. Becoming a person who was really living true
to my values instead of hiding from them and pretending it didn’t matter.
[0:13:54.5] LC: I know people out there are having the same experience. It’s just, you get
goose bumps when listening to you relay this story, just because in this time of difficulty, there’s
so much clarity and purpose and meaning that’s also coming through. You mentioned you
started hearing her voice right away, talking to you.
[0:14:14.8] SF: Yeah. I want to say, what I always say about this, is I heard so much more from
her in the afterlife than I did when she was in her 20’s and she was walking around San
Francisco, let me tell you that. This has been an interesting thing. I mean, I’ve always been
open to this kind of thing, but even I thought that I was going crazy in the beginning, because I
was really hearing from her. I was experiencing rushes, intense rushes of joy through my body
for the first year whenever I kind of thought about her or connected with her. My whole body
would become kind of electric with her energy and I could really feel her around me.
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One of the first things that she really was telling me was it was okay to just be. She used to say
that when she was alive. She used to say, “Mom, just be.” She was this 20 something, total free
spirit, she was a world traveler. She would work with her little clipboard getting money for
Planned Parenthood on the street, or she’d make lattes and save her money. Then, she would
go, she’d take her money to an airport and she’d look at the list of departures, international, I’m
not kidding.
She would just say, “Okay, C. Take me to Calabria.” She would do that. She’d go over Europe.
She’d go to Ireland and then she’d go into the airport in Dublin and she’d pick a city and she’d
just go. She wound up going all over the place, and she did this alone. She did this alone, and
she hitched-hike all over Europe alone, which I didn’t find out until later.
[0:15:56.9] LC: How are you as this hard-driving businesswoman, eight hours of coaching a
day. mean, I can’t even — I’m a coach. I can’t comprehend that. I’m still stuck on that point.
You’ve got this free —
[0:16:08.5] SF: Let me tell you. You know how it was? I was not in my body. That’s how I was. I
was totally not in my body. It was not safe to be in my body, because I have this inner German
soldier. I’ve been writing a memoir about Teal, it’s almost finished, in about this time since her
death. I really connected while I was writing with my inner German soldier. My inner German
soldier is this hilarious characters who is always saying, “[inaudible 0:16:32.7],” to me. You
know, “Hurry up! Mach schnell! Mach Schnell! Faster! Faster!” Right?
[0:16:39.6] LC: Yeah. I had my phase at my company where there was days I couldn’t find time
to get to the water cooler just to get water, but a client calls for some reason makes me even
shiver more. To anybody out there that’s listening, I love coaching, but that is something to do
that many hours in a day.
I’m just wondering though, while you’re doing all these and you’re working so hard and you’ve
got this daughter who’s so free spirited, what is she saying to you? Is she in her life expressing,
“Mom, why are you doing this?”
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[0:17:09.6] SF: She was on a very specific spiritual path and her whole deal became
acceptance and unconditional love. For instance, I really read her journals after she died and,
first of all, she was channeling all these incredible little phrases. Like, “Give fearlessly, and you
shall never want.”
[0:17:32.9] LC: What?
[0:17:34.0] SF: Yeah, I’m not kidding. She have this sense of purpose that was way out there. It
was way out there. She was looking at what I was doing, like, “Okay. Mom is going on mom’s
path, and mom is going to — Mom will go as far as she can go.”
One of the things I wrote about in the very beginning of the memoir was how she, one day
towards the very end of my time in my little apartment when I was about to move in with this
partner of mine in another city near San Francisco, she said, “Have you ever once looked at the
sunset out these windows?”
Now, I lived on a corner apartment in San Francisco with 180 degree view that included The
Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay Bridge and swept out over the entire Castro Twin Peaks, I
mean, spectacular view. You could even see the ocean in the distance. Had I ever looked at the
sunset? Hell no. Who had time for a sunset, right?
Teal says to me, “Mom, you’re doing it, now.” She said, “I am calling you to check in.” You’re
going to sit down now and watch the sunset. She walked out the door. I put down what I was
doing and I started to watch the sunset, and I couldn’t do it, because the minute I became still
and calm, all of the droning became louder. The sense that I was making a huge mistake
moving in with this woman was very, very big. All of my anxiety, my fear, my trying to cling to this
life that needed to fall away, it all became overwhelming.
Of course, I had to get right back to my boxes and be busy and pack and not watch the sunset.
Then, of course she called, “Well, did you watch it?” Of course, I lied and said, “Oh! Yes, honey.
It was lovely,” because I was flawed. What can I say?
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[0:19:27.9] LC: Everything you’re saying is so powerful and to everybody listening, it’s like, “We
work so hard to check all of these boxes.” Person after person I interview comes on here, and
that’s why I wanted to find people who’d had success to debunk this myth. Because here you
are at the place that people — They think this is the moment. You’re going to find all of the
happiness and that everything will come together.
All I have to do is check, check, check, check, check. Make certain amounts of money. Make six
figures and make 2, 3, 4, 500,000, whatever the number is. Get a view that looks out over a
sunset, and then I will love my sunset. It doesn’t work that way, right? You feel more and more
stressed and life takes on this quality where it’s hard to embrace anything. I think what you’re
saying, this inability to sit still is such a tell sign, right?
[0:20:17.8] SF: Yes. Yes. Yes. I’ll tell you, the big quest for the next two years for me was I can’t
just do nothing. I have to do something. What am I supposed to be doing? I tried to restart. First
of all, I had a business ready to go that I launched a month after her death as if nothing had
happened. I actually sold this little class and I filled it up, and all these people were in it, and I
loved the classes. At the end of it, I just collapsed. It wasn’t even that big a deal, relatively
speaking, but it was all I could do to show up and lead this class.
At the end of it, a friend of mine said, “You have to stop,” and I agreed. I did stop. The whole
time I kept stopping thinking, “But I can’t totally stop. I can sort of stop, but I can’t totally stop.”
One by one, my attempts to keep going failed including a year and a half later. This is almost
two years after her death. No, it was about 20 months after her death. I tried to sell, once again,
one of my old, most successful products, which I could usually just put it out there and, boom,
people would snatch it right up at a very high price. I tried to do that again, and I pulled out an
old sales page and I kind of dusted it off, and I made it a little bit warmer and fuzzier, because,
“Hey, I’m learning something here.”
Immediately, a bunch of people bought it and I went to bed feeling all good about it. When I
woke up in the morning, everybody was demanding a refund because someone had hacked into
the website and totally killed the whole learning area. For the next week, it got hacked into five
more times each time my assistant rebuilt the site. Finally, I took the whole thing down, I gave
everybody their money back and I said, “I surrender. Guide me. Tell me what to do.”
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[0:22:09.5] LC: You’ve given me the goose bumps five times, I just want to say.
[0:22:12.6] SF: It’s a goose-bumpy story, Laura, because the fact to the matter is I had to learn
to surrender. One of the — I kept worrying, “What’s my purpose? What’s my purpose? I’ve got
to have a purpose here.” What I didn’t understand was at that time, my purpose was to do
nothing and to rest. Finally, it became clear that my purpose was to take excellent, excellent
care of myself.
Overtime, I was writing little blog posts and I was doing little bits of things, but generally, I was
just resting, and I rested for three years. What is really remarkable is that the money kept
showing up to take care of me. Everything I needed was provided. I started to live more and
more and more simply, and I started to live like Teal did at the end of her life.
At the end of her life, she was earning $20,000 a year, standing on the corner in Union Square
in San Francisco with a clipboard asking people to donate money to Planned Parenthood.
That’s how she made her living. She lived on — She couched-surf. She ate very, very simply.
She bought her clothes secondhand.
By this point, year two, that’s what I was doing. I didn’t have the clipboard going, because I was
resting. I was just living in a totally different way. I had cut all my expenses. A friend invited me
to come live with her and cook with her, and I loved cooking, so that made me happy. I just had
this blessed, super simple existence that required almost nothing.
[0:23:45.8] LC: How was that droning sound in your head?
[0:23:48.9] SF: Gone. It was gone. What it was replaced with was “just rest”, or as Teal like to
say, “Just be.” Here’s what’s really cool. The way she’s communicated with me, it was about two
and a half years into this, around two years actually. It was a point at which a whole lot of things
began to change for me. I woke up in the morning and I had a vision of the bathroom right next
to the bedroom I was sleeping in at, at my friend’s house, and the door was shut and there was
a very bright light coming out around the edges of the door and I said, “Are you in there?”
knowing she was in there. She said, “Yes.” I said, “Why won’t you let me see you?” She said,
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“Because I don’t want you to get distracted.” “Okay. Do you have a message for me?” She said,
“You are whole and complete and ready to go. It’s safe to begin now.” Okay. I said, “All right.
Show me what to do.” That was all I got. It was just like, “Okay, the on button got pushed and
now you’re just going to wait and see what shows up.”
Maybe two months after that, a couple of things happen. One is I met the love of my life within a
few weeks of that who I have since married, who is a really extraordinary woman, and I believe
my true soul mate who I came to California to be with, ultimately. That happened, which is just
incredible. That alone is incredible. But the other thing that happened was that I was sitting in
my office and I was feeling very sorry for myself because I didn’t know what my purpose was
and I’m supposed to be ready to go, but what I’m supposed to be doing? I hear Teal say to me,
“Clean out your inbox, mom.”
Now, my inbox was this wire basket that was filled six inches of forgotten papers, and I had
been moving a lot from place to place. Each time I’d moved, I’d haul the un-emptied inbox to
this new location and never looked at it. So I was like, “Come on. Really? Okay.” I cleaned up
my inbox. I put everything away. There’s one document left in the bottom of the inbox, and I’m
sitting there like, “I don’t know that this is all about. I have followed the instructions. Now,
where’s my answer? I turned over the paper in the bottom and it’s a letter Teal had written six
months before her death. In the letter, she talked about being a leader in love and light and that
we were meant to do this work together.
[0:26:14.3] LC: Wow!
[0:26:14.9] SF: Yeah. I don’t know. She was just such an extraordinarily, serene, peaceful, and
loving person, and I was so fortunate to be her mother. Now, we’re on this learning path
together, and I feel her around me all the time. I understand that my job, my purpose, is just to
keep putting out healing podcasts and healing blog posts and to keep on working on being the
best person I can. I’m writing a memoire that will be done in the next few months, and this is my
path.
[0:26:53.4] LC: You speak about your inner dialogue with her so freely and comfortably. Was
there ever a phase where before she passed away, is this something you had believed in?
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Then, afterwards, was there ever time that you doubted this voice as being something to listen
to?
[0:27:10.8] SF: No. Not only have I never doubted it, I’ve never doubted that this was God’s will.
I’ve always felt totally surrendered to the idea of her death. You’re supposed to go through this
angry phase. Now, believe me, I was furious with the person who had dumped me after I
moved in to her apartment. That phase was pretty darn angry, but I never had anger about
Teal’s death. I’ve always felt it was exactly what was supposed to happen. I’ve never had regret.
I’ve never had the feeling of, “Oh! If only she was alive. I could see her get married.”
Because I have such a strong sense of this shared purpose and of this work that we will and we
have done healing people. Now, the work I do is I speak on the subject of self-care for people
who are stressed out, or people who work with trauma. Currently, one of the places I speak is
the organ procurement world, because I’m a donor mom. We donated her organs and several
people were saved including a young woman her age who got her heart.
This is this unique qualification I now have to speak in the organ procurement world about the
experiencing of losing Teal, but also about what I learned about self-care, because I got to
spend two years doing what most people never get to do, which is taking impeccable care of
myself and allowing myself to fully heal and recover from the worst thing you can experience.
[0:28:41.1] LC: Yeah, I mean, to everybody out there that doesn’t give themselves any time. We
show up for everything and everybody and we feel guilty if we do anything for ourselves. I’m
sure before this happened, you can relate to that concept and probably if you were not going to
sit down for a sunset, you probably weren’t doing too much of it.
What’s your advice now having gone through all these to this concept of self-care? I love that
you’re saying that people talk about their purpose all the time in their white-knuckling looking for
that bigger purpose, their life purpose.
[0:29:13.7] SF: I know. Isn’t that ironic?
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[0:29:15.7] LC: Yeah, and you were saying, “I just had this short term purpose of just self-care.”
Especially for women, what is your advice today on this topic?
[0:29:25.3] SF: Well, thank you for that question, because, really, what I noticed, the big thing I
noticed, there’re two things that have happened. I built a regular meditation practice into my day,
so every morning when I wake up, I meditate anywhere from 10 to 25 minutes and say some
prayers and that’s my start to the day. What that has done is chill me the hell out. It’s allowed
me to not care if I don’t get my to-do-list done. Will the world end? No. Did I do as much writing
today as I could have? No. In fact, I didn’t do any, because my body was like, “Not today.”
Is there a gun pointed to my head about when that writing has to be delivered? No.
Occasionally, I get a hard deadline. I just finished a workbook for a workshop I’m leading next
month and I really did have to stick to the deadline, and I did it. Then, I gave myself two days off
to recover. I am not working with super large amounts of stress anymore. It’s just not part of my
life. I don’t need. I don’t want it, and I decided that the world will not end if everything doesn’t get
done on the to-do-list. If you really look at it, that’s true. I learned that when Teal died. My whole
to-do-list went out the window. It ended immediately and everything was okay.
[0:30:45.5] LC: Right. Everybody just dealt with it. I know. We take ourselves so seriously and
we think —
[0:30:49.3] SF: Amen.
[0:30:50.6] LC: Yeah. We think, “If I don’t do the to-do-list, then I won’t get to the place where I
have all the things that I need to have.” But again, all those things that we “need to have” can
become such a burden and not the point of life.
[0:31:03.1] SF: This is so true Laura. I’ll tell you something. I was worried about money,
understandably, as I went through this whole healing process, this three-year healing process,
but amazing things happened. I received a small inheritance suddenly that kind of wasn’t
expected. Then, I was approached by someone who loved my writing who wanted to hire me to
write a series of novels with him. So I took it and I accepted, and that has provided a very big
piece of my income.
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Then, out of the blue, people who knew me from the organ procurement scene asked if I would
be willing to do some speaking. It’s all come to me. I couldn’t have begun to go out and force
this path to happen. I tried, and we saw what happened. So I had to do what Teal kept saying to
do, which was just be. Just be. Just be.
She had this great quote in her journal and it said, “How do I make hard decisions? Turn off
brain, ask body.”
[0:32:08.2] LC: I know. I had this one woman come on and she said, “Everything in my life at
this point is a full body yes. If it’s not a full body yes, it’s a no.”
[0:32:16.0] SF: I love that. The full body yes is a very evocative phrase, and every time I hear it,
it’s like such confirmation of my inner knowing and my inner space and I just adore that.
[0:32:25.9] LC: Do people need to hit their own wall and have their own crisis, or is this
something that we can learn and prevent people from going through?
[0:32:36.4] SF: The ego is part of the psyche that’s set up to protect us from change, because it
assumes the status quo is what we want. It will fight us. If a listener is like, “Yeah, I’m going to
just be.” I can guarantee that they haven’t been just being, but that’s a new way to roll through
life. Their ego will be like, “No. Not you mister, or miss. Get out there. Stop just being. Start
doing.”
[0:33:01.4] LC: We can’t just be because of scarcity. Is that the number one reason in your
mind, or what would you say?
[0:33:06.9] SF: You mean why people don’t just be? I think fear. It’s fear. It’s fear of felling. Fear
of the unknown. Fear of change. Fear of what if I realized I don’t want to be married to my
spouse? Fear of what am I going to freaking do if I throw my life away?
Well, what I can tell you is if you’re guided to throw your life away, follow it. It’s golden advice. I
really do, in truth, feel that my daughter’s death was probably the hardest thing I ever went
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through, but it’s been one of the best things I ever went through. Because it gave me back my
heart, and she would agree. She would be like, “Mom, you so needed this.”
[0:33:44.5] LC: Oh my God! You gave me goose bumps again. I’m not somebody who gets
goose bumps every four minutes.
So Suzanne, I ask everybody who comes in this show, what does then an authentic life mean to
you?
[0:33:56.0] SF: Well, an authentic life is lived with great joy. That’s it. Going for the thing that
brings you joy. As I’m saying that, I’m looking at a picture of me and my dear girl. It’s making me
a little teary. We’re sitting in this bakery with a lemon tart between us, because that was her
favorite thing. She always wanted to go for joy. What was great about Teal was she able to do it
without having to blow a whole lot of money, because there’s joy in the simplest, simplest things.
That’s where the life of purpose comes from. It’s not about, you know, we all know it’s not about
what you have, but it’s what you be. It’s what you be.
[0:34:40.1] LC: Yeah. Is that why your podcast is Before the Afterlife? Is that the concept?
[0:34:44.7] SF: Oh well she named it, because she thought she was being funny. Yeah, it’s
Before the Afterlife because the point is to become the person who can die happy, really happy,
really happy. Before you get to the afterlife, why can’t we be as happy now as we will be on the
other side?
[0:35:09.9] LC: Amen. I don’t know what else to say after that. Suzanne, you’ve been just an
incredibly honest, generous guest in sharing your story in such a vulnerable way.
[0:35:20.8] SF: Thank you.
[0:35:21.2] LC: I just appreciate you showing up in such a beautiful way. If people are looking to
find out more about, your podcast, your writing, where they can they find you?
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[0:35:31.2] SF: My podcast can be found, if you Google Before the Afterlife or if you go to my
website, suzannefalter.com/podcast.
[0:35:44.1] LC: Perfect. I’ll be out there. So you can check out our conversation in reverse.
Again, thank you so much for joining us and chatting with everybody today.
[0:35:52.2] SF: Yeah, a great joy, Laura. Thank you.
[END]
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