i actually can't that is absolutely amazing i can't believe we've done a one hundred shows yeah it's incredible we've had some fabulous guests and we've got some fabulous guests today and i don't think people know a lot about public access you know public access is an amazing  thing that resource for you and for the world because we have all these wonderful volunteers that actually volunteered to do this show for us and you know how did i try to do some grief loss hope and healing things on television and it's hard to get people to produce those kind of things and it's not as downbeat as you might think it's upbeat it's how people have gone on to do great things and after they've had a loss absolutely mom we want to talk about not how people have died but how they've live their lives and what happens after someone you love dies you go on to compose your life and transform your life and we have to amazing guests today who have actually done that yeah it's going to be wonderful i'm talking about composing a life and think about your life you do compose it we have a long life things change and the ever thought about what would you be doing if some of the things hadn't happened to you in your life and we've got a couple of guests today that are going to talk about that i want to introduce and i would love to see the two people that we're going to have on today that have gone on to alto today she's an award winning journalist she's hosted t v shows on both the east and west coast she said an emmy from the national academy of television arts and sciences and a golden medallion from the state of california for far more comfortable asking the question i think you've been doing your own show since two thousand and two yes here it's amazing how quickly time is passed and how yes so an and we have another guest sitting next to henrietta and that is alan peterson and he is a friend of ours and i l a lot of the shows with us you might recognize him he's the executive director for the compassion of friends he was a singer songwriter in nashville tennessee and a journalist and a news reporter and in colorado and he covered columbine so he's gone on these kind of transformed his life several times and will talk to us about the death of his daughter and how he went on to find help after that and we said we do partner with the compassionate friends and the compassionate friends has seven hundred chapters in the united states for people who've lost children grandchildren and siblings so they do and i'm i want to say that you were on the board of directors for the compassionate friends for six years i'm currently serving on the national board of directors for the compassionate friends and i love working with alan he's doing really wonderful things for the organization well henrietta i want to start with you and i'll have to say that you're kind of uneasy how i got you on the show because when i was on your show and we we're talking and the tell me what the name of your show is again talking with henry and i love that i love it and i sneakily found out that you had at some loss on your life and i said oh you got to come on my show and you were thinking well i was thinking it's the very least i can do because i ask you to be on my show so it's how do you as someone to be a guest on your show and not be willing to be on theirs well i've been fascinated about your story because i know you started out in new york and in the newspaper and radio business for  television yeah yeah and then you were telling me that your mom died yes i was in new york city i was hosting the show for w n e t t v and which is the public broadcasting station  there and the show went off the air public television shows are funded and it went off the air to be refunded for the summer time and in the meantime i was in line for some other things like national shows and i had just had a conversation with my mother where she was concerned about having some relatives who were sick and ill and she said i'm so worried that th die and you just have to get over it well three days later she was dead she had died in her sleep of a cerebral aneurysm back in and you found her right yes in fact in my last conversation with her if which was this conversation she said she wanted to take a trip and she didn't want to go by play and she died on valentine's day and we were going to go get make overs  d she told me she had changed the lock on her door and i didn't have a key and so i had to have the door taken off i found her that's traumatic yes it was enormously traumatic it was dramatic because you know there's so many unfinished things unfinished business that you would never see this person again you'll never have a chance to talk with them again and  it was interesting i found i had to live with what i had said to her people die and you just have to get over it she told me at the time you don't understand what is there to understood right yeah so what happened with you career was  r well it took me i guess at least eight months to stop crying and i pulled it together i managed to get another job and this was that newsweek broadcasting unit and i was going to be syndicate stories and just as i got the job my husband at the time got a job in california and i couldn't do the job in california and i had a five year old son and it would be to bounce him back and forth and i didn't want to do that yeah i felt that i could always get another job and my son needed both of his parents so you came out to sunny california i came out to sunny california and because i was a television reporter and a freelance writer and that had an agent and also had an article in the new york times i was working on one for mccall's magazine interest in doing a book on death and dying and had talked to an editor and publisher a book company about writing the book and did some initial interviews in new york and once i moved out here i the editorial director and i had a child unexpectedly had three months off where i had planted in my garden in the backyard all kinds of fruit and went back to work and was sitting at my desk reading about how there are mothers who lose their children in the hospital and they're put in with mothers who give birth to healthy babies and i thought oh how old my husband came in and said she was she sped up and she had a fever and i called the hospital and they told me to i guess give her  i did this and the fever continued and went to the hospital and the doctor said she's not fighting me as i would expect so i'm going to admit you and to make a long story short i was with her that whole time i saw how the doctors worked on her and she had convulsions all along the way it was like reading she died and so one moment it's like having a healthy baby yeah and the next moment not having the child did they know why she died well the doctor told me it was a virus and had it in the bacterial infection they could have done something about it of course thirteen years later i shouldn't say of course but i found out that he had lied but i don't know that you want to get to the store but well well what happened with you then and did you work after that or oh yes i continued with my job and i was very very happy to have a job to go to because i would wake up in the morning my husband would go off to work my get my son ready for school and then i felt i had to get out of the house as quickly as possible and it was nothing like having something else to concentrate on and when the job was over and on weekends it's i was in bed because i was depressed i wasn't interested in in doing anything at all and i would sit in my living room and look out in my backyard at all the things that we did that in the summer time she was born in may in the summertime there were all of these things that were alive and growing and she died in november and that's the wintertime yeah yeah how did you get the rainbow talk about the rainbow a little bit i love that of the experience was that eleven months later did the death of my daughter i had another do gooder and i decided to call her daughter because she was my new beginning and for me that rainbow that i took represented the idea that it's darkest just before the dog exactly and there's always a new day that no matter how dark it gets you never give up because there is always the dog well i hate it i really like what you have to do in east palo alto because it's  really been a difficult area and a very wealthy area in palo alto is palo alto has had its problems and you've produced a newspaper they didn't have a newspaper for years where no they didn't and it's  i should say that food my daughter was born there was just no way on earth i was going to go back to work and have someone take care of my daughter my understandable so i started a business in my home so that i could stay home and take care of my daughter and she by the time she got to two years old i felt that i could at least let go a little bit he felt she was sturdy enough and healthy enough and all the enough to begin to put her in preschool and i moved my business to a commercial area and i kept it until it was time for me to go off to college and it's like what else do i want to do with my life because ordinarily having that business was not something that i would have done and it just so happens interesting i started it when she was born and i let it go when she went off to college and what was what was it that i wanted to do and then it hit me it was an aha experience what is it that i had always done what is it that gave meaning to my life professionally it was journalism  it was being a journalist and so i started working freelance and then an opportunity came up in east palo alto and i was a communications coordinator to start a newsletter and it ended up with me  since ashley died we do kind of a re compose and have a whole new life well you start at nashville thinking you're going to be a singer songwriter right and then went into the yeah the other when she was alive i love  fail and you know i was fighting hard to be in the music business and make it as a songwriter move back to colorado and then after she decide died i decided you know what i'm nobody's really writing songs that i think tell our story so i'm just going to write songs the way i want to write i'm telling the story that i want to tell and it wasn't easy at st you know i think of our lives when we have this type of loss and certainly you both  but we don't feel like painting and i say we don't feel like we even own any paints but over time if you process your loss i feel like little by little sometimes maybe the st colors just black or grey everything seems black and gray but as you process loss and as you keep the love in your life i feel like more colors become part of the palette that you have access to and i think what's so wonderful about what we do with these shows and celebrating this hundreds show how many people we talk to who had a blank canvas or only a gray canvas that they thought would never look beautiful again and have actually painted the most value to the question is there and how did you get to the point where you were seeing your life in color because like you said after a loss often it's black and white it's gray you know i think everyone has their own method for for myself i just somebody told me early on that that begins with helping and i hear that and i was like well i just had to take them at their work i did not and i started helping people at the most basic level and just you know doors and you know i always tell people about the music business in nashville i used to just beat on the doors to try to get in and you would come close and then after ashlee died and i started doing music it's like the doors different doors than i imagined but they opened faster than i could get through them so i think grief and loss and glory you say it so well it can be transformation there can be such positive well i think you know i'm sure and i henrietta both of you are able to hear people when you interview people you can hear people the level that other people can't handle some you know it's this kind of back there you know that they'll get through it you're not afraid to hear the stories  i think it's the stories they give meaning to life you know and it's those stories that we've learned and i think meaning is so important to you both meaning and i think you know we need to figure out why we're still here and once we find out our meaning our purpose that how is not as difficult agree so i did discover as i sat there i mentioned sitting in my living room looking out that  you don't go from mountaintop to mountaintop without going down in the valley and so it occurred to me that it's when we're coming down that we're getting the momentum to go back up well like that yes and you can when you come when you're going down it's scary can be scary yes it is yes it is but in order to get back to the top of the mountain you have to come down and you have to come all the way down and it's when we're coming down that we're learning  and sometimes you know the darkest moments are before the dawn that's really so true when you when you don't think you can have anyone well alan in a minute we're going to go over and you're going to things so i wanted you to say something about your singing and your you know what you're going to writing how is the last impacted your writing well it's it's amazing i always tell people that ashley is my co host songwriter i really believe that sometimes i listen to the songs that i've written and cds over the years and i like i don't remember writing him it's you know it's like they just came to me and she helped me write it but it's been a healing because songs for me are like chapters in a book in a sense that i wrote on so many different topics and it seems like once i would write that topic just i would release something and so i wrote about so many different things the one i'm going to sing tonight is you know we're talking about how we can to reinvent our lives but i think you know what there wouldn't be a one hundred show the compassionate friends i mean up the open to hope show and there wouldn't be i would be the executive director of the compassionate friends had i not had lost there wouldn't be this music there wouldn't be s reaching out and so the song that i'm going to do tonight is called i did not walk alone we lose and our loss is so profound but we gain and that's what the song is about we gain friendships w gain deeper purpose some of us and great depth and meaning to our lives and that's what i love about this show every time i get to co host or be a guest on it stats the message we're giving to people show and we're going to have some some friends of ours come up and share it with us and we're going to walk over and take a look at it now and then we're going to have you thing after we've had a little bit of it you know we'll follow you  so here we are with our wonderful take of the one hundred to show it was kind of funny when i went in to pick up the cake i think the people said do you want candles for your cake and i thought oh no i'm not one hundred yet but here are some friends that are readily part of our show today and i wanted to ask you ask you all what have you taken from your life that you want to share with our audience and  alan you're behind wish what if you are taken from your life and learning and doing a one hundred shows what i've taken and what i've really learned is that above all else love is the answer it's the answer to walking through grief and that's the most powerful and healing tool that i love and well really what comes to mind right now is that life is what you make it it has its ups and it has its downs but it's your attitude towards it that makes a difference what your life can be and will be so as you think if and you know we always want to say to everybody here we are no you only love you are all there is my husband that is you know with all of us will if you've lost hope lean on arthur until you find your own so i wanted to ask you early fourteen years ago and over the years i've learned that we can choose what is going to be the defining moment in our life and yes we've experienced profound loss yes our hearts are b but there is always tomorrow and i love your message about john and when we're sitting in that door room you know we were there we're going to remember unless there's a rainstorm you know we're going through the rainstorm  had to me through this cruel twist of fate i don't know where i'd be today without you and i appreciate those times we cried together together and some eagerness of the past is why it's so good to know that even now you're a shoulder when i need to cry there's one thing i've learned when you lose everything there are still some things to gain our friendship means so much to me the in my friend i know you feel